Source: The Jazz Session.

Tranceportation Vol. 1 (RareNoiseRecords, 2019) is the first of two new albums from guitarist David Torn and Swiss quartet Sonar. In this interview, Torn talks about how he went unexpectedly from producer to band member; his recording partnership with D. James Goodwin; the nature of playing with tritone tunings; and a lot more.

Source: CBC Radio.

In the early 2000s, jazz pianist Kris Davis moved from Calgary to New York to challenge herself musically and attempt to make it in a super competitive field. It was a huge risk, but the gamble seems to have paid off. Her latest album, Diatom Ribbons, made it to the top of the New York Times list of best jazz albums of the year, and NPR named it one of the best 25 albums of 2019 in any genre. She joined q’s Tom Power on the line from New York, fresh off a performance at the city’s Winter Jazz Fest, to talk about her music.

Source: The Austin Chronicle.

The list of artists with whom he’s collaborated, onstage and in the studio, is truly mind-boggling: Illinois Jacquet, Coleman Hawkins, Kenny Clarke, Mary Lou Williams, Philly Joe Jones, Nellie Lutcher, Milford Graves, Kenny Dorham, Walter Dickerson, Freddie Hubbard, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Babatunde Olatunji, David Murray, Peter Brötzmann, Marc Ribot, Joe Lovano, Ben Monder, Wadada Leo Smith, Mal Waldron, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, David S. Ware, Billy Bang, Dave Douglas, Sun Ra, and more.

That’s not to mention an 11-year association with free jazz piano giant Cecil Taylor, two decades’ membership in Trio 3 with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman, and his work as a teacher at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. Given his experience, it’s no surprise that the skinsman brings a world-class group of musicians with him for a rare Texas gig: bassist Ben Street, pianist David Virelles, and guitarist Bill Frisell, a variation on the band that recorded Cyrille’s 2016 ECM album The Declaration of Musical Independence.

Source: The New Yorker.

Few musicians have said more than the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of a school-cafeteria cook and a city employee, Sanders moved to New York in 1962, at the height of jazz’s postwar avant-garde—also known as “free jazz” or “the new thing”—which was spawned by the late-fifties experiments of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the pianist Cecil Taylor. Sanders’s début album, recorded in 1964 for the ESP label, garnered little attention, but his playing caught the ear of John Coltrane. Coltrane invited Sanders to join his band in 1965. The following year, Impulse!, the label that had been exhaustively documenting Coltrane’s evolution, gave Sanders another chance to record as a leader. The result was the surging and expansive “Tauhid,” an album that positioned Sanders as both Coltrane’s foremost disciple and an artist with ideas of his own.