Latest news with #BlueNoteRecords
The Citizen
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Nduduzo Makhathini on spiritual understandings anchoring his music and remaining modest
Makhathini was recently awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis, the German Jazz Prize, in the Live Act of the Year International category. Makhathini was recently awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis, the German Jazz Prize, in the Live Act of the Year International category. Picture: Supplied (Robert Winter) South African artist Nduduzo Makhathini is one of the world's most recognised pianists, composers and live performers. His live performances are capable of taking you on both a spiritual and artistic journey. He is calm, soft-spoken and quite unassuming. Like Rihanna, he is appreciated at home and beyond the borders of his home country. But like an unknown session musician, he has the humility to remain in the background while simultaneously contributing to some renowned bodies of work, without making a fuss about it. Makhathini was recently awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis, the German Jazz Prize, in the Live Act of the Year International category. The awards shine the spotlight on the diversity and creativity of the German and international jazz scene. ALSO READ: SA Gen Z's love for new-age Maskandi and Americans' craze over Amazayoni music Modest Makhathini However, in his acquisition of these accolades, Makhathini has remained modest, saying Ubuntu informs this. 'I feel very strongly that when we get these rewards, they are responding to moments that have really past for us artistically,' says the 42-year-old. '…they give me a sense of humility and acceptance that all things we are doing now can only be seen or acknowledged much later and some of it when we're not in this world and that just gives me so much humility.' Makhathini is the first South African artist to be signed to revered international Blue Note Records. Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds, his debut album under Blue Note Records, was named one of the best Jazz Albums of 2020 by The New York Times. He has won the South African Music Awards (Sama), a Metro FM award, and a slew of other accolades. The award-winning musician is a former Head of the Music Department at Fort Hare University and left the role in 2023 to join the University of KwaZulu-Natal as an educator and researcher. ALSO READ: DJ Doowap takes SA street culture to Germany and France Makhathini's musicality He says all of his work is anchored in spiritual understandings. 'It's just really a way of making sense of the intangibility of sound and music and the fact that it is something that we feel [or] sense but do not really see or can even touch. That for me is enough to suggest that music has a transcendental quality.' This transcendental quality, he says, is what people are sensing all around the world. 'So I feel very honoured to receive an award for something that resides within the realms of the intangible, which makes a confirmation that it is really something that is felt and people gather around it all around the world,' he shared. Makhathini has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including both young and established artists, such as the late Zim Ngqawana, Thandiswa Mazwai, and the younger Tumi Mogorosi. 'I've been blessed to collaborate with some of the best musicians from around the world,' says Makhathini. He mentions names like Wynton Marsalis and Billy Harper. Collaboration is fundamental to jazz music, and most acts are comprised of a band, which necessitates collective effort. 'Collaboration is very fundamental in jazz, this music in itself originated as communal music and communal because it was a musical of displacement, a music of homelessness and music of protest during catastrophic moments where people were commodified as slaves,' shares Makhathini. ALSO READ: Siphephelo Ndlovu on his hiatus from music, getting into the family business of TV, as he returns to stage Live at Untitled On Friday, he will share the stage with South African trumpeter Ndabo Zulu and the Soweto Central Chorus. He says the show is part of a project he's been working on, where he challenges himself as an artist to break new sonic barriers. 'I challenged myself by stepping into unfamiliar territory by way of configuration, by way of sound, by way of repertoire,' he says. 'So this is one of those, and I'm really excited to keep going with this idea of an ongoing rehearsal because it liberates the ways we think about being in the world, forgiveness, continuity, space and time concepts and expanded notions of being in the world.' NOW READ: 'Bucket list checked': Zakes Bantwini graduates from Harvard
ABC News
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
'Reach' Jacky Terrasson
For decades, France has been a jazz haven. Paris in-particular has been a home to many iconic players - from guitarist Django Reinhardt to pianist Michel Petrucciani, and the city was also a refuge for countless American musicians in the '50s and '60s. Another leader on today's jazz scene in France is pianist Jacky Terrasson. The son of a French father and an American mother, Terrasson grew up with both European classical music and American bebop ringing in his ears. In the early '90s, he burst onto the international stage after moving to the States, winning the Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition and signing on with Blue Note Records. Since then, Terrasson has gone onto back names like Dee Dee Bridgewater and Cassandra Wilson, and his own output as a leader on the piano is equally impressive. A stand-out session in his extensive catalogue has to be the album 'Reach'. Recorded in 1995, this trio date featured Jacky behind the piano, accompanied by the brilliant German/Nigerian bassist Ugonna Okegwo and the expressive drummer Leon Parker. On this record, the three musicians show just how much history they have assimilated, with a trio sound that reflects the spirit and interplay of groups led by greats like Bill Evans and Chick Corea.
Boston Globe
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
After wandering, a trumpeter hones his sound at home
'I'm always going to be a little bit jagged around the edges,' he said of his music. 'You're going to hear my struggles, but you're also going to hear my celebrations and my successes. This is a homegrown thing, and it's going to stay that.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Last week, Blue Note Records released 'For the Love of It All,' an album that he and his Baltimore-based band, Upendo (Swahili that translates roughly to 'love'), honed not in the studio, but in front of audiences, primarily in his hometown. At club performances over the past half-decade, fans would find ways to request songs that had never been recorded and weren't yet titled. 'People would remember the songs and be like, 'Yo, when are you going to do …' — and just sing it because they know the melody,' Woody recalled. Advertisement Multidisciplinary artist and fellow-Baltimore native Nia June helped title some of the tracks that appear on his album. After 'telling her about the story line and what the songs meant to me,' he explained, she worked to synthesize the ideas as titles. June, a filmmaker, poet, and writer who has worked with Woody extensively since 2020, described the common thread of artists in the city: They are 'brave, real and radically vulnerable.' She added: 'The people here possess an unnatural resiliency — an unashamed, relentless will to survive. And with style.' Picking up the trumpet in elementary school, Woody remembers that he would always get butterflies before playing. 'It was an attraction or a positive nervousness because I wanted to do it so much,' he said. But some of that enchantment was tempered by frustration, first at Baltimore School of Arts, where he said that outside of the high school's jazz combo, budding musicians were relegated to studying 'all this different European music, Gregorian chant,' but not Black music. At 14, when he wasn't selected for the combo, Woody responded by forming Just Us Jazz with then-classmate Troy Long. Long would eventually become Upendo's keyboardist and Woody's key collaborator. 'We tried to play around the city,' Woody said. 'Of course, it was kind of unguided. We just were so young and we just had so much energy and we all were fiery. You could see the energy coming off of our bodies.' Advertisement A jam session held in the back of a pizzeria in the Mount Vernon neighborhood brought an encounter with Theljon Allen, a touring trumpeter based in Baltimore who would sometimes join in with the young band. 'We would shed and we would just play free,' Woody said. Woody made a name for himself, earning a scholarship to a summer performance intensive at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he met drummer and composer Terri Lyne Carrington, and befriended contemporaries such as pianist Julius Rodriguez, trombonist Jeffery Miller, and saxophonist Yesseh Furaha-Ali. After high school, he studied under Ambrose Akinmusire at the Brubeck Institute, in Stockton, where Woody roomed with saxophonist Isaiah Collier and was exposed to an ear training system taught by vibraphonist Stefon Harris. 'That really changed the way I think about harmony,' he said. The distance opened up new sounds and approaches outside of what he had experienced at home. 'As soon as I was 18,' he said with a bright flash of appreciation in his voice, 'I got to go farther than light,' a whole new world of possibility thousands of miles away from Baltimore. Yet he was still homesick. When Harris was appointed director of Jazz Arts at the Manhattan School of Music the next year, in 2018, Woody transferred there. In New York, the community of musicians held more allure than working toward a degree: Woody was focused in music classes and, in particular, enamored of studying under trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater. Woody remembered, 'He told me so many stories about life and about being Black and playing this music.' But he rarely made it down the street to Columbia University for his academic classes. By the spring of 2018, he had lost his scholarship and was on his way back to Baltimore. Advertisement 'But this is where my real story begins,' he said. 'When I dropped out of college and I moved back, it was crazy. I got scammed. I was broke.' But he also began to truly cultivate his artistic practice and voice. The trumpeter and composer Brandon Woody in Baltimore in April 2025. Woody refined his songs in shows around his hometown Baltimore and channeled the city's lessons on his debut album, "For the Love of It All." KYLE MYLES/NYT Even as Woody was asserting his own musical direction in jam sessions and shows around Baltimore, he was pulled for stretches out of his creative cocoon. In 2019, he joined Solange on a leg of her tour in support of her album 'When I Get Home.' During the pandemic, when in-person performances halted, he modeled for Saucony and Calvin Klein. The clothing brand's campaign was featured on a billboard in his neighborhood. Finding his role in idiosyncratic band configurations such as the Solange tour or with BadBadNotGood has been a lesson in 'self-preservation,' he said. Working to balance 'doing what's needed while simultaneously being my unfiltered self, even through other people's music.' On 'For the Love of It All,' Woody does not need to strike such compromise. 'The real heart and grit of the city, the struggles that you come through, that all gets put in the music without really even being cognizant of it,' Long said. 'But then when you are older and you reflect on those experiences, you realize you've been carrying that with you the whole time.' This article originally appeared in
TimesLIVE
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
Paras Dlamini's debut album offers a fresh take on South African jazz
Internationally acclaimed jazz artist Paras 'Sibalukhulu' Dlamini is set to release his highly anticipated debut album Ingoma Busuku – Song of Night. In March, Dlamini released the single Indimbane Yezizwe, a powerful track that made waves on the global jazz scene and advocated for unity and self-empowerment across the African continent. Speaking to TshisaLIVE, he said Ingoma Busuku is an album that blends southern African idioms with innovative jazz sensibilities, creating a captivating musical journey. 'This project was born out of a creative synergy that took shape during Linda Sikhakhane's SA/Swiss Celebration Group Tour in early 2023. I first caught attention for my feature on Sikhakhane's previous album Isambulo, where I contributed to the track uNongoma. This collaboration led to the creation of Ingoma Busuku, an album that reflects my rich cultural heritage and my innovative approach to jazz,' he said. Produced by Blue Note Records artist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini, Ingoma Busuku is a spiritually charged album that promises to make listeners dance, meditate and reflect. Dlamini is accompanied by the eloquent company of saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane, alongside the SA/Swiss Celebration Group featuring Swiss pianist Lucca Fries and drummer Jonas Ruther, with French bassist Géraud Portal. 'My voice, rooted from my native Zulu language, shines through in the album's grooves, which is complemented by his multidimensional musical influences. Whether through soulful ballads or rhythmic explorations, I offer a fresh take on South African jazz that speaks to both local and international audiences.'
Khaleej Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Celebrate International Jazz Day with Blue Note at Dubai Opera
This April, step into the rich legacy of one of the most iconic names in music history, Blue Note Records, as MAC Global and Dubai Opera present Blue Note Jazz to mark the 85th anniversary of the label's founding. The event will take audiences on an unforgettable journey through Blue Note's storied past, featuring a remarkable lineup of international jazz artists, all led by the acclaimed bandleader Peter Long. Founded in 1939, Blue Note Records has been a defining force in jazz, shaping the genre's evolution over decades. This celebration will spotlight the label's incredible influence, with a performance that reinterprets timeless Blue Note tracks. Under the direction of Peter Long, best known as the musical director of the renowned Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, an ensemble of world-class musicians will bring new life to the iconic sounds of jazz legends. The lineup includes Peter Long (Malta) on alto saxophone, Freddie Hendrix (USA) on trumpet, Abraham Burton (USA) on tenor saxophone, Danny Grissett (USA) on piano, Thomas Bramerie (France) on bass, Sebastian De Krom (Netherlands) on drums, and Sara Oschlag (Denmark) on vocals. Each artist brings their own unique voice and cultural influence to this powerful musical celebration. From John Coltrane's emotive improvisations to Miles Davis's smooth, sophisticated style, the performance will showcase the lasting influence of these jazz icons. The ensemble will breathe fresh energy into Blue Note classics, capturing the essence of the label's timeless sound while honouring its legacy. Whether you are a dedicated jazz aficionado or discovering the genre for the first time, this is a rare opportunity to experience the magic of Blue Note, live at Dubai Opera. Presented by MAC Global in collaboration with Dubai Opera, this event promises an unforgettable celebration of the world's most influential jazz label.
