Living Jazz, Fridays at Noon – NEA Jazz Master Maria Schneider

Living Jazz, Fridays at Noon.

The focus of this week’s “Living Jazz” show will be contemporary big band music. We’ll check out such acclaimed composers and arrangers as NEA Jazz Master Maria Schneider (who came on “Living Jazz” earlier this year), and pianist Jim McNeely, composer-in-resident with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. But we’ll also listen to less-well-known up-and-comers such as Russell Gunn, whose  Royal Krunk Jazz Arkestra has a hip-hop-inflected take on big band music, as well as Kathryn Windfeld, Jihye Lee and Miho Hazama (originally from, respectively, Denmark, South Korea and Japan). All told, we’ll hear from  more than a dozen of the most innovative big bands around.

The show is Part II of a four-hour survey of big band music that was put together by me, Ryan Keberle, a top jazz trombonist, composer and educator (and Catskills resident), and Ryan’s father Dan Keberle, a jazz trumpeter and emeritus professor of jazz studies at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Our show on classic big bands aired on Aug. 12. Ryan, by the way, plays in the Maria Schneider Orchestra, as well as Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, which is also on our list.

“Living Jazz” airs Fridays from noon to 2 p.m. on WJFF, 90.5 F.M., and streams online at wjffradio.org

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Website: https://wjffradio.org