I’m thrilled that a this Saturday (5/4/24) I’ll get to perform with Mike McGinnis at Resonant Motion’s Jazz Up Close series, our second time playing together (the first coming in 2006, I think) and the first chance I’ll get to play his own evocative music. I’ve been a fan of his work as a composer…

Most years I take some time in the spring semester at Wesleyan and work with my ensemble students on how to learn/inhabit a ballad deeply enough that it can be interpreted rubato. Rubato, for the non-musicians, is “free time,” which in practice could mean anything from the complete absence of a steady pulse to the…

To say Abbey Lincoln was one of the great singers in modern jazz would be literally true and at once not quite capturing her unique place. I know that when I teach jazz history, for example, it is at once important to include her and difficult to know how to frame her contributions. It is…