Jazz Sunday

WCBE was a fan of American sports and civil rights hero, Jackie Robinson,  before being one was "cool."

Back in early winter 2007, WCBE music history reporter Jack Marchbanks researched, wrote and produced a retrospective on Jackie Robinson to note the 60th anniversary (April 15, 2007) of Robinson breaking the "color barrier" in major league baseball.

On this Piano Jazz from 2008, bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding brings her neo-soul style to a set of standards with the aid of pianist Leo Genovese. Spalding is one of the most talked about artists in jazz today.

Composer and pianist Jason Moran ushers in his era as Artistic Advisor for Jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with this performance, captured by JazzSet in honor of Black History Month.

Recorded February 7, 2013.

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Thirty years after presenting its first concerts in San Francisco, the organization SFJAZZ has built a permanent home and performance venue. The SFJAZZ Center, conceived as the first stand-alone building for jazz in the U.S., opens with a star-studded concert on Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013 at 11p.m. WWOZ, WBGO and NPR Music will team up for a live radio and online video broadcast of the concert.

This is how we sum up 2012: beats, harmonies, struggles, breakdowns, recoveries, party starters, raw-voiced rallying cries, song suites, storytellers, pop experimenters, never-more-devastating septuagenarian poet-crooners, never-more-devastating 285-year-old oratorios, epic statements, perfect miniatures, instant classics, hard-won achievements and explosions of joy. The albums we loved in 2012 — presented here in alphabetical order — spanned genres and borders, and each one got its hooks into us. We hope you find something here that does the same for you.

The multicultural group The Soul Jazz Orchestra will perform their blend of soul, jazz, latin and carribean sounds during the Global Village!  Tune in for the live session and a chance to win tickets for the show that night at Woodland's Tavern! 

The new quartet album by alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and pianist Laurent Coq is called Rayuela, which means "hopscotch." It's named for Julio Cortázar's novel, the fragmented tale of a wandering bohemian and his social circles in Parisian exile, as well as back home in Buenos Aires.

The word "uneven" gets tossed around in critical parlance to signify artists whose fingers stray from the quality-control button — to suggest that they don't know their own genius when they hear it.

Music now has some what alienated listeners due to what has seemed to me like random popularity spikes in genres of music. In my age group, I tend to hear a lot of Indie Rock, Hip-Hop, and Electronic music.