Widely admired as a gifted and innovative player, jazz guitarist Jim Hall had a career that spanned more than five decades. In a session recorded in 2003, the NEA Jazz Master teamed up with host Marian McPartland and bassist Gary Mazzaroppi for “Blue Monk,” and performed solo in “All the Things You Are.”

Hall was born in 1930 in Cleveland, Ohio. He got his first guitar at age 9, and was gigging professionally by the time he was a teenager. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles, where he studied with classical guitarist Vincente Gomez.

Hall began playing with Chico Hamilton’s quintet shortly after arriving on the West Coast, but it was his three-year stint with the Jimmy Giuffre Three, beginning in 1956, that shaped his lifelong preference for working in duos and trios. From the 1950s through the mid-’60s, he worked with Ben Webster, Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins, Art Farmer, Paul Desmond, Gary Burton, Bob Brookmeyer and Bill Evans.

In 1965, Hall retired from music to fight a personal battle against alcoholism. He returned to professional work shortly thereafter, working in the house band on The Merv Griffin Show. By 1966, he had quit the show and was again working as a full-time jazz musician.

Hall’s creative output over the intervening years continued to emphasize improvisation in duos and trios, as well as challenging arrangements for larger ensembles. He went on to play with Ron Carter, Terry Clarke, George Shearing, Pat Metheny and Itzhak Perlman. His playing influenced generations of players, including John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline and Julian Lage. In 2004, he was awarded an NEA Jazz Masters fellowship.

Hall died in his sleep in New York on Dec. 10, 2013. He was 83.

By Grant Jackson
Originally published on NPR.org

Just before 11 o’clock on a crisp Monday night in Hollywood, 82-year-old Kenny Burrell put his Gibson guitar in its velvet-lined case and said goodnight to several members of the Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited. He had just finished an intermission-free, two-hour-plus set with the large ensemble, as he has done once a month since the summer. Waiting patiently among the suits and smiles was a 21-year-old guitarist eager to meet his idol. When the room finally cleared, Burrell was amiable and inquisitive, talking to the young fan about music and Michigan, where he grew

Thirty-five years after entering music education, Burrell has never been more involved with young people interested in jazz. He is passionate and a little concerned about preserving the legacy of the musical genre he helped define. So he’s doing everything he can to ensure that his students have the opportunity to share what he calls “America’s gift to the world.”

Fifteen years ago, I was one of those kids waiting outside the green room. I later became one of his students at UCLA, where he told firsthand accounts of interacting with Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie while also driving small ensembles with a steely strum.

“There are thousands of fine jazz musicians who have no jobs to look forward to,” Burrell says a few days after the concert in his UCLA office. “There is nothing waiting for people who graduate from jazz programs like these schools. There is nothing waiting for them like an L.A. Philharmonic or the New York Philharmonic. No nothing. There are no jobs, and to me that’s a shame.”

From 10 Weeks To Tens Of Millions

Burrell is a rare musician for his generation. While in his early 20s, he acquired a bachelor’s degree in music theory and composition.

“When I was at Wayne State University in the ’50s, it was a problem studying jazz, even talking about it in some cases,” he says. “So I decided if I had a chance, I would teach jazz.”

While waiting for that teaching opportunity, he made himself an essential character in the history textbooks. Burrell made his recording debut in 1951 with Dizzy Gillespie, and has since recorded more than 100 albums under his own name. He also lends his soulful tone to a handful of career-defining Jimmy Smith records, as well as notable LPs by Paul Chambers and Coleman Hawkins. His energy and tone today sound just as assured and unmistakable as they did when he started.

Burrell first became involved in jazz education in 1978, when he taught a 10-week overview of Duke Ellington for UCLA’s Center for African American Studies. When he was first offered the position, Burrell says he wasn’t quite sure how to approach a subject as broad as jazz.

“I had to figure out in my mind what would be the most effective thing I could teach for one quarter,” he says. “Both logically and spiritually, the name Ellington rose to the top, because much of the history of jazz was in his hands.”

In 1996, his success with the Ellingtonia course and an expanding academic interest in the art form encouraged UCLA to offer a jazz studies degree. Burrell was the logical choice to head the program; he enlisted fellow storied musicians like bandleader Gerald Wilson, saxophonist Harold Land and drummer Billy Higgins to help teach ensembles and history classes.

“Kenny started the jazz studies program while I was there, so there were a lot of exciting things happening at that time,” trombonist and former student Alan Ferber says. “He always had such a joyful spirit and an elegance with the way he carried himself around campus.

Nearly 20 years later, the program has expanded considerably, thanks to the music-industry heavyweights who live in the surrounding hills. Trumpeter Herb Alpert donated $30 million to UCLA’s varied music programs, music executive Mo Ostin donated $10 million to help build a much-needed expansion of the music building, and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz moved in last year, bringing musicians like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter to the linoleum hallways.

Of the more than 28,000 undergraduate students at the school, only 35 are jazz majors. But the list of alumni includes not only Ferber, but also saxophonist Kamasi Washington, trombonist Isaac Smith and vocalist Gretchen Parlato.

“[Burrell] is inspiring, warm, very passionate about keeping the jazz tradition alive and well,” Parlato says. “I remember, sometime leading up to graduation, he sat me down in a talk of encouragement and preparation. He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘You’ve got it.’ That meant the world to me.”

A Big Band In Every City

Clearly, not every graduate can be a headliner, and Burrell says he owes all of his students more than just a handshake and a diploma. That led to the Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited, Burrell’s unofficial post-graduate opportunity for his students as well as the broader Los Angeles jazz scene. It’s a swinging large ensemble dedicated to classic jazz repertoire and the writing and arranging of band members.

The Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited is not a part of the UCLA jazz studies curriculum, but it does include UCLA staff (trumpeter Bobby Rodriguez, saxophonists Charles Owens and Justo Almario) and graduates (saxophonist Hitomi Oba, trombonist Nick DiPinna) who get plenty of opportunities to solo and earn a regular paycheck.

“What I’m doing there is an orchestra born out of need, out of necessity,” Burrell says. “One of the things that prompted me to start this organization is what we were just talking about — better, proper and more accurate recognition of the importance of this music by the community, by the powers that be, by the culture guardians.”

Burrell says he hopes to expand his concept of resident jazz orchestras to cities across the U.S., hopefully underwritten by cultural organizations and corporations in much the same way symphony orchestras survive. The potential is rich, but it hasn’t proven particularly easy to enact. Nonetheless, at a time when most people are enjoying retirement, Burrell lends his celebrity, his time and his guitar to make his dream happen.

“This is not Kenny Burrell’s big band,” he says. “This is for Los Angeles. That’s what this is about. I welcome all the help I can get. I just want to see it happen. It’s good not only for the musicians and the people, but the history of the music. If we don’t do something, it’s going to slowly disintegrate.”

By Sean J. O’Connell
Originally published on NPR.org

Inspired by A.A. Milne’s 1924 book of poetry, When We Were Very Young, Cornelius presents a composition commissioned by Chamber Music America. It features Bill Evans-like voicings and Ellingtonian ideas.

While growing up in San Antonio, Patrick Cornelius listened to JazzSet on KRTU. Off the air, he taped the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band playing Lalo Schifrin’s Gillespiana in the 1990s and more. Cornelius went on to complete degrees and diplomas from Berklee College of Music, the Manhattan School of Music and The Juilliard School.

In 2012, Cornelius won a New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble grant from Chamber Music America, and this episode of JazzSet features the composition for which he applied for support, titled While We’re Still Young.

WBGO’s The Checkout: Live is at Berklee College of Music’s Café 939 in Boston for the premiere performance, broadcast and webcast. Onstage, four horns — trumpet, two saxes including Cornelius’, trombone — are in front of guitar, piano, bass and drums. Among the players are Berklee grads, as they contemplate how far they’ve come since they were still young.

When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne is the inspiration. Writing in England in the 1920s, Milne introduced Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin and more sweet characters. Cornelius’ grandmother read the verses to his mother, his mother read them to Cornelius, and now he reads Milne to his daughter and her baby brother James.

“From the moment I started reading [the verses] to Isabella, my daughter, ideas for melodies came into my head,” Cornelius told The Checkout’s Josh Jackson. “I want to write tunes that are almost singable, but have a high level of craft. I want melodic simplicity to mesh with complexity,” Patrick recently told a hometown journalist on mysanantonio.com. Cornelius lists Gil Evans, Benny Golson, Duke Pearson, Duke Ellington, French turn-of-the-century composers Debussy, Satie and Ravel, and contemporaries such as Alan Ferber among his many influences.

Before the first four movements, Patrick reads a Milne verse. The words launch the melodies. “Jonathan Jo” has Evans-like voicings, and I hear Ellingtonian choices in “The Invaders.” “Vespers” is the lullaby. But While We’re Still Young isn’t really for children, Cornelius says. It’s for parents who read to their children, or whose parents read to them.

Originally published on NPR.org

The pianist builds R&B with old-school values: singers who don’t need software, live improvising, hand-built beats. They’re jazz aesthetics, essentially — readily evident when members of his Grammy-winning Experiment band jam with singer Marsha Ambrosius.

The third song in this Tiny Desk Concert, explains the jocose pianist Robert Glasper, first appeared on one of his trio’s albums of acoustic, instrumental jazz. It was called “F.T.B.” then, though it later acquired words and a singer and was retitled “Gonna Be Alright” on the record which won the 2013 Grammy for Best R&B Album. That in itself provides a sense of the worlds to which Glasper has access; depending on your point of view, he either freely traverses or explodes those boundaries.

Glasper has released two albums of what you might call neo-soul, or maybe organic R&B, featuring a core band (The Robert Glasper Experiment) and guest stars like Erykah Badu, Lupe Fiasco and Norah Jones. Black Radio and last year’s sequel, Black Radio 2, aren’t heard much on “urban” radio, but the point is that they ought to be. Glasper builds his songs with old-school values: singers and MCs who don’t need software to carry a melody, improvising within a band, hand-building beats and vamps with live instruments.

That’s what you see at the Tiny Desk. “Trust” features Marsha Ambrosius, formerly of the duo Floetry, and it’s a good example of the Black Radio concept in raw, unpasteurized form. The middle tune is an ad hoc improvisation, and a good example of how Glasper and his Experiment have so dialed in their communication that they can plant seeds of noise and harvest blooms of music. By the time “F.T.B” (a.k.a. “Gonna Be Alright”) rolls around, the mood is familiar and at ease. It’s the sound of a band whose members speak many musical languages, but decide to converse in one that feels like its native tongue.

By Patrick Jarenwattananon
Originally published on NPR.org</em>