Music

Veteran jazz bassist Dave Holland is back with one of his boldest sessions in years. Fans of his straight ahead jazz recordings may be startled to hear the relentless intensity of Prism, but it shouldn't be surprising given Holland's roots in the electric jazz explosion of the late 1960s.

Veteran radio personality Gordon Spencer will present Friday's Jazz in the Afternoon on KIOS starting October 18. Spencer has been hosting jazz radio broadcasts continuously since 1976.

From childhood on Gordon Spencer’s life has been full of music. He was in the audience during Philadelphia Orchestra Children’s Concerts, his father up there on stage playing viola. At home little Gordon delighted in recordings of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, Debussy. And was baby-sat while his father played Mozart and Haydn string quartets with friends.

This weekend KIOS will present NPR Music's web-only stream of the Newport Jazz Festival. On August 3rd and 4th from 10:00AM to 6:30PM central time many of today's top performers will hit the jazz festival stage, including the Wayne Shorter Quartet with special guest Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Esperanza Spalding, Marcus Miller, Robert Glasper, Dizzy Gillespie Big Band with Paquito D'Rivera.
For the complete lineup you may visit
http://www.kios.org/live-event/newport-jazz-festival

Vocalist Gretchen Parlato will perform in Omaha at the 1200 Club at the Holland on May 11th. This is the first Omaha concert for the rising vocal star, whose 2011 effort "The Lost And Found" was the #1 Jazz CD of the year as awarded by this program. Click on the link to listen to an interview with Gretchen Parlato.(Recording Engineer: Mike Hansen.)

For more information about Parlato's concert in Omaha you may visit omahaperformingarts.org

Here is the review of the record from our archives:

2-HOUR Jimi Hendrix Special:
"The Jimi You Never Knew"
Sunday May 5th at 7:00PM

The new release from bassist and bandleader McBride is a straight-ahead affair with an acoustic group consisting of Steve Wilson on alto sax, Warren Wolf on vibes , Peter Martin on six of the eight tracks on piano with Christian Sands on the others. Carl Allen handles the drum duties on most of the session and Ulysses Owens Jr. filling in on two tracks.

For Jazz Appreciation Month, KIOS presents the SFJazz Center Opening Night Concert on Wednesday April 17th at 8:00PM. San Francisco has been a jazz hot spot for decades and now the city is home to the first stand-alone building built specifically for jazz. It's the new 700 seat SFJazz Center.

The music of Miles Davis was changing dramatically in the late 1960s. Most fans of the legendary trumpeter know that in 1969 he recorded Bitches Brew, the hugely successful dawn of jazz-rock that was one of the best selling jazz records ever released. Lesser known is the working unit that Miles took with him on the road was one of the most artistically daring and visionary bands that Miles ever led. Recordings of that outfit have recently surfaced and have been released on a multi-disc set, Live In Europe 1969, The Complete Bootleg Sessions Vol. 2.

Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II, known as Donald Byrd, passed away February 4, 2013 at the age of eighty. Byrd was a superb trumpet player whose music spanned a period of some five deacdes. After playing with Lionel Hampton before finishing high school and service in the United States Air Force, Byrd completed his bachelor's degree in music at Wayne State University in 1954 and moved to New York in 1955 to get his master's at the Manhattan School of Music.