At their best, jazz festivals gather a roster of international talent for a weekend of musicmaking, creating a crucible for collaborations between musicians who don’t normally play together. In this spirit, the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech hosted mainstays from California’s Monterey Jazz Festival Saturday night. As a touring group, they last stopped in Atlanta two years ago (at Symphony Hall) with a sextet featuring pianist Benny Green and saxophonist James Moody. It was a celebration of... read full article

Within the very first minute of Tuesday night’s show in the Carpenter Theater at CenterStage, Kurt Elling was scatting and, like a flash, they were off. Wasting no time, like an exposition that just had to be told, the band’s featured members were introduced via short blasts of solo statements. Vocalist Elling, violinist Regina Carter, pianist Kenny Barron, and guitarist Russell Malone, joined by Barron’s bandmates bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Johnathan Blake, each with their very own opening statements,... read full article

Monterey Jazz Festival is the west coast younger sister of the Newport Jazz Festival. Both were founded a few years apart from one another in the 1950s. Great music has taken place at both festivals over the years. Monterey’s festival, however, has prospered (Eric Burdon’s "Down in Monterey" immortalized it), while Newport’s festival foundered after a riot at Festival Field in Rhode Island that tore its heart out (it moved to New York and eventually returned to Newport years later).... read full article

Grammy-nominated Jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and his quartet had just mesmerized a swollen crowd of 767 at the College of DuPage’s McAninch Art Center. In the lobby now, with his four year-old daughter coloring at a table merchandising his CDs, he signs autographs and visits with several hundred admirers. The youngest of four, Elling grew up in Rockford and then Hyde Park, where his church musician father stoked a fire that led him, his wife and daughter to the mecca... read full article

Celebrity jazz concerts are often dreary affairs—museums of dusty music where real jazz goes to die. Think of beige nights at Lincoln Center, the players wearing stiff suits, anxious to showcase their cool virtuosity while neglecting to tell a story with their music. By comparison, Thursday’s performance of the Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour at the Berklee Perfomance Center, one of 36 nationwide concerts that will take place from February 5 to May 1, was a pleasant surprise. The show,... read full article

Is it possible for jazz to be too tasteful, too classy, too . . . perfect? If it is, then it was. A group calling itself Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour played politely for more than two hours to a near-capacity audience Thursday night at Berklee Performance Center in a show presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston. It was a high-class affair, with the musicians wearing suits (and one dress), introducing tunes properly, and soloing in the right order.... read full article

If followers of music lore were expecting the hot-blooded spirit of jazz festival legends such as Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie to wash over the Berklee Performance Center stage during Thursday’s Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour all-star concert, they had set their sights too high. While the heavyweights gathered are legitimate stars -- violinist Regina Carter, pianist Kenny Barron, guitarist Russell Malone and singer (and recent Grammy winner) Kurt Elling -- none of them are prone to tear-the-roof-off pyrotechnics. That’s... read full article