The truth is like clarinet. Most of us love the sound of it. Every now and then we meet someone who can play it and it’s a wonderful experience. To be fully reverberating with the lyric beauty of a clarinet played by a virtuoso is to be assured that there is something great yet unknowable […]

Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Joni Mitchell: three brilliant singer-songwriters, each original, compelling, and unflinching in pursuing her vision for music and for a life in music. The next set of concerts in the Asper Jazz Performances celebrates the music of these three gifted women. Fittingly, it is headlined by three current heavy hitters: pianist […]

Byron Stripling is impressive—that’s all there is to it. Not only is he an extremely versatile trumpet player who has played with all the biggest names in the jazz scene in the last fifty years, he is also entertaining enough to be chosen to play Louis Armstrong on Broadway and make a cameo appearance in […]

Eleven years ago, I held the very first issue of dig! magazine in my hands. It was the result of a lot of grit, a couple of writing parties in my living room, a leap of faith from a designer, and some good business advice from Randall Kinley. A lot of people circled around to […]

Glenn Radley was eleven when first saw drums being played at The Music Cellar’s annual spring concert, and he fell in love on the spot. Now a graduate of the Jazz Studies program at the University of Manitoba, he is busy with several different musical projects. Sunny Roseland is a traditional jazz project spearheaded by […]

A couple of things to know about the blues. First of all, it consists of notes that don’t normally exist on the piano. So if you find a lot of your notes lining up with piano notes, you’re probably not really playing the blues. Number two, the rhythms are overtly sexual—because sex was not forbidden […]

David Goodman, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary who worked in the Chicago stockyards, died in an accident when his son, Benny, was just sixteen. The trauma of losing his hardworking father only hardened Goodman’s resolve to make a success of himself, and today is he universally regarded as the epitome of clarinet players. As a […]

Phil Woods was my first hero. I heard a recording of his when I was 16, and had that magic moment where I realized, “Now that’s why I’m playing this instrument!” I followed him around NYC to hear him and ask for lessons. But he told me he wasn’t teaching. So I pestered him over several […]

I’m going to tell you about a band that I dig so much, that I’m driving seven hours to Minneapolis to hear them play for the second time—in the middle of the week in October, no less. If you ask around the Desautels Faculty of Music these days, you’ll find a good number of us […]

If you were in the audience when Israeli bassist Omer Avital and his quintet performed in October, you’ll know what I mean when I say there was magic in that room. They delivered a blazing concert of original music, dizzying in its range and pyrotechnical skill. But they shared something else too, something long-lasting and […]