The New York Observer » Devin Leonard

The 10 Best Jazz Albums of 2009

It can be frustrating to be a jazz lover. Even in New York, you run into culturally sophisticated people who would be embarrassed to admit their unfamiliarity with the latest Brooklyn indie rock band (as of this moment, that would be the Dirty Projectors, of course), but are perfectly comfortable confessing their ignorance about an Read More

John Hollenbeck Only Looks Like a Jazz Musician

It’s hard to pin down the drummer-composer John Hollenbeck stylistically. You can frequently find him playing gigs as a sideman at clubs like the Village Vanguard and the Jazz Standard. This would suggest rather strongly that Mr. Hollenbeck is a jazz musician.

But is he?

“Uh, I can play jazz,” Mr. Hollenbeck Read More

The Maria Schneider Reality Show

The Maria Schneider Orchestra’s Thanksgiving week residency at the Jazz Standard, which starts on Nov. 24, has become one of those things: an Annual Event. Before the club opens each night, a long line will snake along the wall on the sidewalk, speaking as reverently about the headliner of the evening as a crush of Read More

The Jazz Mambo King in Exile

On the first night of the World Series, there were only six people in Puppets Jazz Bar in Park Slope. Three of them, including a reporter, had come to see the pianist Arturo O’Farrill. The rest worked there.

But Mr. O’Farrill, a cherubic 48-year-old pianist-composer who was dressed casually in a black turtleneck, black slacks Read More

An Old Bebopper Comes Home

DELAWARE WATER GAP, Pa.—The saxophonist Phil Woods returned from the Jersey shore last year to discover a crime had been committed at his home. Someone had stolen the fresh-cut firewood a handyman had stacked out front after trimming the trees.

“If I was 20 years younger, I would seriously consider moving back to France,” he Read More

Oh! Bassist Linda Breaks Into New York Jazz Boy’s Club

The bassist Linda Oh has an unusual background for a jazz musician. She was born in Malaysia to parents of Chinese descent. She and her two older sisters grew up in Perth, Australia. Their mother and father worked hard and encouraged their girls to do the same.

Ms. Oh’s parents were overjoyed when her sisters Read More

Invisible Man

The pianist James P. Johnson was born in 1894. He played his first gig when he was 8 years old at a bordello in his Jersey City neighborhood. The patroness sat him down at the keyboard and told him to keep his eyes to himself. She paid him 25 cents.

So begins the tale the Read More

Sideman, Front and Center

The jazz bassist Joe Martin wishes he could forget some of the gigs he has played. There was the boozy party on Long Island where the wealthy host ended up in a drunken screaming match with his young companion. There were the nights Mr. Martin spent backing up an electric violinist in New Jersey, who Read More

Jazz in the Age of the iPod

Alto saxophonist–composer David Binney was in the back of a van on the way to a gig in Italy two years ago when he had an epiphany listening to his iPod. He dutifully recorded the moment on the Internet.

“I realize that so many of the records I love are from the Seventies,” Mr. Binney Read More

Double Play

One of the Strickland brothers opened the door to the Fort Greene flat that he shares with his twin brother to usher a reporter in. It was E. J., right? Nope, it was Marcus. He chuckled at the mistake. It must happen all the time. “They ought to put name tags on us,” he said.

Donny McCaslin Declares His Independence

Donny McCaslin is a roof-raising tenor saxophonist. He uses the same effects that such tenor players have employed since the Swing Era: the rude honks at the bottom of his horn, the menacing middle register growls and the ecstatic squeals at the peak. If Illinois Jacquet, Lionel Hampton’s famously exuberant tenor star, were still alive, Read More

Blanchard Blows Up

The jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who has morphed into one of Hollywood’s busiest film composers, was tired and a bit distracted when The Observer met up with him early one afternoon recently at the Affinia Shelburne Hotel, where he’d been staying.

He was providing the “musical voice” of Louis the Alligator in Disney’s jazz-laden Read More

Luciana Souza Goes ‘Pop!’

In 2006, Brazilian-born jazz singer Luciana Souza moved to Los Angeles from New York City and left a void that hasn’t been filled.

During her eight years here, she became the singer for a new generation of firebrands eager to push the boundaries of the form in basement clubs like Small’s in the Village. They Read More

The History of Jazz, by Darcy James Argue

Leading his interviewer up to his second-floor apartment on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, Darcy James Argue, the leader of the Secret Society, a postmodern, 18-piece, big-band jazz outfit, apologized for the mess. He'd just received a new shipment of Secret Society T-shirts.

"They are all over my apartment," he said. Mr. Argue's flat is actually Read More

Mark Turner Escapes the Shadow of John Coltrane

Last fall, Mark Turner, the most influential jazz tenor saxophonist since John Coltrane, nearly sliced off two of his fingers while cutting firewood at his home in Flatbush. It seemed as if fate couldn’t have been crueler to Mr. Turner. He has long been celebrated by the jazz cognoscenti as a unique talent. But he Read More