State Champ Radio Jazz
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The 2024 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival will feature headlining sets from The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Chris Stapleton, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Killers and Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals.
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The eight-day fest that takes place across 14 stages over two weekends — April 25-28 and May 2-5 — at the Fair Grounds Race Course, draws nearly half a million music lovers to a sprawling event that includes some of the biggest names in rock, pop, hip-hop, country, funk and jazz, including the usual compliment of homegrown legends.
Among the other acts slated to perform this year are: Hozier, Jon Batiste, Queen Latifah, Vampire Weekend, Greta Van Fleet, Heart, Widespread Panic, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Bonnie Raitt, Earth, Wind & Fire, Celebrating Jimmy Buffett with the Coral Reefer Band, Fantasia, The Revivalists, The Beach Boys, Big Freedia, Kem, Juvenile with Mannie Fresh, Irma Thomas, Joe Bonamassa, Steel Pulse, Cyril Neville, George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Jeffrey Osborne and Rhiannon Giddens, and hundreds more.
This year’s Jazz Fest will also celebrate the music and culture of Colombia at the Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion, with 17 bands and a variety of artists sharing the unique sights and sounds from the South American nation, including Colombian salsa, cumbia, champeta, vallenato, chirimia, and currulao. There will also be daily parades honoring Colombia’s vibrant carnival spirit, with attendees getting opportunities to meet Indigenous and Afro-Colombian artisans, purchase their crafts and taste traditional Colombian food and drinks, according to a statement announcing the lineup.
Weekend and VIP packages are available here now, with single day tickets slated to go on sale in February; all tickets are subject to additional service fees and handling charges and an account with AXS is required for purchase. This year’s Jazz Fest will also offer a 4-day GA+ weekend pass for the first time, with access to an exclusive GA+ lounge with private restrooms, a full-service bar and shade. There will be a limited supply of 4-day second weekend passes including admission to the May 2 Rolling Stones set, the group’s only announced 2024 North American festival gig.
Stapleton, Killers, .Paak, Batiste and Vampire Weekend are the top line acts for the first weekend (April 25-28), with the Stones, Foo Fighters, Young, Hozier and Queen Latifah topping the list for the second weekend (May 2-5). Click here for the full day-by-day lineup.
Check out the 2024 lineup poster below.
“Is Laufey jazz?”
This was a recent topic among the armchair musicologists of Reddit’s r/Jazz thread, who spend much of their time debating the genre. It’s also the title of a 33-minute deep dive by YouTuber and musician Adam Neely where he dissects the 24-year-old cellist, singer and songwriter’s harmonic and chordal choices on a granular, theoretical level in an attempt to answer the question too.
Trying to neatly categorize whether Laufey (pronounced LAY’-vay) makes music that is jazz or something else misses the point of what she is doing. Laufey is building a modern and surprisingly lucrative musical world out of old-school building blocks — ii-V-I jazz chords, classical music motifs, bebop ad-libs — plus more than a pinch of Taylor Swift-ian storytelling.
But it’s Laufey’s wider aesthetic world — “Laufey Land,” as she calls it — that a remarkable number of Gen Z fans are flocking to. While traditional jazz can feel esoteric, Laufey makes it accessible by inviting followers into Laufey Land on social media — a place where her best days involve sipping lattes, reading Joan Didion and wearing the latest styles from Sandy Liang, and where listening to Chet Baker and playing the cello are the absolute coolest, hippest things to do. “It’s all kind of illustrative of my life and my music,” she says, and she shares both online generously.
Laufey Land (which has also become the name of her official fan HQ Instagram account) has also captured the imagination of the music business: sources say she sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war last year among record labels that have rarely seen so much commercial potential in a jazz-adjacent act, though she remains independent for now. Perhaps that’s because her music renders a wistful, romantic portrait of young adulthood that can feel fantastical yet still within reach. And even if you’re not quite familiar with her own lofty influences — Chopin, Liszt, Baker, Fitzgerald, Holiday — Laufey invites you to sit with her, listen along and get lost in a magical place where, sure, the music is jazz-y, but is also so much more than that.
Raised between Iceland and the Washington, D.C., area, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir grew up surrounded by classical musicians. Her Chinese mother is a violinist, and her grandparents were violin and piano professors; it was her Icelandic father who introduced her to jazz. “There was just so much music in the house growing up,” she recalls today. “It was a sonic blend of those two.”
Laufey and her identical twin sister, Junia — who now acts as Laufey’s creative director and is a frequent guest star in her TikToks — started playing young. Eventually Junia landed on violin and Laufey on cello (though she also plays piano and guitar). Until college, she saw herself more as a performer and practitioner of music than as a writer of it. But at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she found many of her new friends were penning their own songs.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Though Laufey says she always listened to pop music as well — she especially loved the storybook tales of early Swift songs — she felt that “oftentimes the lyrics and the storytelling resonated, but the sound [of pop music] wasn’t completely there. I didn’t feel like it was something I could make, and I wanted to make something that sounded more like me.” A self-described “sheltered orchestra kid,” she also didn’t yet have much life experience to expound upon lyrically.
Like so many artists before her, Laufey says she was finally propelled into songwriting when she had her heart broken. Borrowing chords closely related to the Great American Songbook that she had spent so much time studying already, she created “Street by Street,” which eventually became her first single. She was 20 years old. “The way I wanted to write was to find this middle ground between the very old and the very new,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you can do this. You can write something new in the style of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin — something older.’ ”
When COVID-19 hit and forced everyone into lockdown, school ended, and to stay in vocal shape, Laufey began posting her takes on jazz standards online, her smooth alto accompanied by either cello arrangements or acoustic guitar. “The day I got back from school and started isolating, I told myself, ‘OK, I’m just going to write and post as many videos online of me singing jazz standards as I can,’ ” she recalls. “I’ll just see where it takes me.” An early video of her singing “It Could Happen to You” “hit some sort of algorithm,” as she puts it, and quickly, her following grew, attracting interest from a number of record labels, though she opted to sign to AWAL instead.
Today — one EP, two studio albums and one live album with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra later — Laufey is quite possibly the most popular artist making jazz or jazz-adjacent music, according to metrics like Spotify monthly listeners (24 million) and Instagram and TikTok followers (2.2 million and 3.6 million, respectively). Her breakout single, the bossa nova-inspired “From the Start,” is a massive hit, with 313.1 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate. And she’s now a Grammy nominee: Her second album, Bewitched, released in September 2023, is up for best traditional pop vocal album, an eclectic category this year where she’s the one new talent alongside veterans Bruce Springsteen and Liz Callaway and the late Stephen Sondheim. “It feels very, very validating, especially in the category I’m in,” Laufey says.
Tony Luong
The debate about what genre signifiers define Laufey may still matter at the Grammys (and on the Billboard charts, which categorize her as “jazz”), but there is far less need to label music than there once was, benefiting artists like Laufey who bridge disparate sonic worlds. “I think people’s desire to categorize things into genres was so rooted in radio, where they were trying to fit into a certain format to succeed,” says Max Gredinger, Laufey’s manager and a partner at Foundations Artist Management. “I think that is kind of ingrained in us, but now that terrestrial radio has certainly diminished in impact, I think people are still wrapping their heads around this new world.”
Around the time Laufey started to build her audience, TikTok’s reign over music discovery had just taken hold. It’s a place where personality and catchiness count but genre is of no consequence — the perfect platform for an artist like Laufey where she could define her jazz-inflected pop as not just a sound but as an aesthetic, a feeling, a lifestyle both timeless and very much of the moment.
Gredinger calls Laufey and her sister “the 2024 version of what you think of as a marketing executive. I would bet on them to do that job best a trillion times over.” Beyond music and slice-of-life videos, Laufey invites her fans into her process in other ways. She has posted sheet music versions of her songs before releasing them, asking her musician fans (of which there are many) to try to learn the song without hearing any reference and post the results, which she’ll then repost in the lead-up to release day.
She also hosts a book club, with selections — from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History to Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted — that feel akin to her music and her personal style, somewhere between darkly academic and coquettishly feminine. On the release day for Bewitched, she hosted A Very Laufey Day, a sort-of scavenger hunt around Los Angeles, involving everything she likes to do in a day. It included special Laufey Lattes, a display of her book club selections at a local shop and a merchandise pop-up at the Melrose Trading Post; at the end, she treated participants to a secret performance in West Hollywood’s Pan Pacific Park.
“It was like a normal Saturday for me,” Laufey says with a laugh. “I would’ve done all those things either way. I drove around West Hollywood and saw girls in white shirts, jeans and ballet flats carrying lattes and I would roll down the window and say hey and surprise them.” Her fans range from ultra-online teens to nerdy music majors to nostalgic grandparents, but her core base is Gen Z, many of whom do not listen to jazz or classical otherwise.
When she was younger, Laufey says, she never anticipated the mainstream popularity she has now. “If anything, I thought I would go the conservatory route, practice cello and try to get into the best orchestra I could, like my mother did,” she says. “I was so focused on being realistic that I almost didn’t allow myself to dream so big.”
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She remembers one of her first shows after pandemic lockdowns eased up, at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall, where she heard there was a line of fans outside waiting to be let in. “I was really confused,” she says. “I grew up going to symphony concerts primarily, and nobody lines up like that, you just walk in. I was like, ‘Oh, no. Let them in! What is happening?’” It was the first time she realized that her fans weren’t just a number on her screen: They would show up for her in real life, learn all the words to her songs and were shockingly young.
Norah Jones, a hero of Laufey’s and one of the few modern artists to, like her, bridge the jazz-pop divide, says she sees “a lot of similarities” between herself and Laufey. “We both come from a background steeped in jazz and have formed our own paths from there,” Jones says. “[But] because social media and streaming have changed the music industry so much, her journey is also so different from mine.” (The two recently collaborated on a set of holiday songs, Christmas With You.)
Unlike Jones, who has a long-standing relationship with Blue Note Records/Capitol Records, Laufey has opted to stay independent — a clear sign of the times. Industry sources say she recently sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war among major labels, but she finally decided to keep her business among herself, Gredinger and AWAL (which handles label services and distribution) instead.
“With the kind of music I make,” she says, “I make very individualistic choices. I’m very confident in my music. I know what I want, and my current team at AWAL has let me make those creative decisions. I’ve had a great time being independent, so I haven’t felt like I’ve been lacking anything. Making independent decisions is my main focus.”
In the future, Laufey Land’s borders are likely to only expand further. She envisions her sweeping love songs soundtracking musicals and films someday, like Harry Connick Jr., Jon Batiste and Sara Bareilles have done. The ultimate dream? A James Bond theme. “I’ll just keep on repeating that I want that, so it manifests itself maybe,” she says, smiling.
Batiste, who also knows what it’s like to move between jazz and pop music spaces, thinks she’s on the right track. “Laufey approaches all of these many facets [of a music career] with a great deal of prowess, deftness of craft and insight into how to connect with her community,” he says. “That will only continue to attract more curious listeners.”
“I think there are a lot of barriers to entry to listening to jazz… [It] can be very daunting,” Laufey says. “I’m lucky I was born into that world, but I’m aware of how scary it can seem. It seems like something that’s reserved for maybe older or more educated audiences. I think that’s so sad, because both jazz and classical music were genres that were the popular music of one time. It was for everyone. That’s one of the reasons I want to fuse jazz and classical into my own music: I want to make a more accessible space.”
Tony Luong
She points to artists like DOMi & JD BECK and Samara Joy, young jazz talents she admires who are actively evolving the genre today. “Jazz hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s actually, I think, gone into music more,” Laufey says, pointing to its influence on hip-hop, R&B and pop. “The amount of times I hear a pop song really hitting the charts and everyone’s like, ‘It’s so good’ — in my head, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s because of this jazz harmony that really draws you in.’”
Her own sound borrows primarily from that of the jazz greats of the 1940s and ’50s — one reason, perhaps, why her songs connect so well. As tracks featuring sizable samples or interpolations of older hits continue to rise on the Billboard charts, experts posit that the pandemic led to an increasing interest in songs that feel nostalgic.
Though Laufey’s work sounds quite different from, say, “First Class” by Jack Harlow, the same primal desire for familiarity and comfort is at the root of its appeal. “I think a lot of the sounds that she pulls from, every person has some connection to,” Gredinger says. “You would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t have some memory or relationship with jazz or classical. It’s a foundational experience most everyone has had, combined with modern, honest songwriting.”
And it’s the combination of those elements that create the foundation of Laufey’s own brave new world. One where true love is possible, every day is romanticized, major sevenths are essential — and all kinds of listeners are welcome.
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Source: Paul Natkin / Getty / Les McCann
The music world lost a giant before 2023 came to a close with the passing of soulful Jazz great Les McCann.
The Hollywood Reporter shared the sad news that Les McCann passed away at 88 in the Los Angeles area. McCann’s music is no stranger to the Hip-Hop community, as some of his songs were used as samples of the late Notorious B.I.G., legendary producer/rapper Dr. Dre, Mobb Deep, and more.
Per The Hollywood Reporter:
The musician, who released more than 60 albums over the course of his career, had been admitted to a hospital from the nursing care facility he’d lived in for the past four years and was diagnosed with pneumonia, his manager Alan Abrahams told The Hollywood Reporter.
In a prolific career, he was arguably best known for his 1969 Montreaux Jazz Festival performance of the protest song “Compared to What.”
Hip-Hop Songs That Sampled McCann’s Work
For those who don’t fancy the credits for their favorite albums, McCann’s song “Go On and Cry” was sampled in the original version of “The Next Episode,” which was supposed to be featured on Snoop Dogg’s classic album Doggystyle before it landed on Dr. Dre’s 2001.
Biggie’s “Ten Crack Commandments” off his double-disc Life After Death is heavily sampled from McCann’s “Vallarta.”
Mobb Deep went into the McCann duffy when they used his song “Benjamin” to craft their track “Right Back At You” off their a1995 album The Infamous.
Other artists who sampled McCann include stoner hip-hop pioneer Massive Attack, Cypress Hill, Slick Rick, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Naughty By Nature.
McCann was born in 1935 in Lexington, Kentucky, and was a self-taught pianist before picking up the sousaphone in high school and serving in the U.S. Navy at 17.
In a 2017 interview with the Oxford American, McCann said he wanted to “go to the Navy School of Music,” only to learn they did not have the sousaphone to play.
He would go on to win a talent contest in the Navy that landed him an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. After being discharged, he formed a band in Los Angeles, landing his first contract with Pacific Jazz in 1960 after Miles Davis heard him play in a nightclub.
McCann also signed with Atlantic Records after Roberta Flack discovered him.
After suffering a stroke in the 90s while on stage in Germany, he used a wheelchair, but that didn’t keep him from performing.
McCann’s life is the true definition of a life well lived.
May he rest in paradise.
—
Photo: Paul Natkin / Getty
From Barbie: The Album to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, soundtracks tied to blockbuster films have dominated much of the year. As 2023 draws to a close, Quincy Jones, Scott Sanders and Larry Jackson hope their new expanded soundtrack, released last Friday (Dec. 15) for the forthcoming Color Purple movie musical (which hits theaters Dec. 25), marks a new era for R&B soundtracks and continues the healing Alice Walker sparked with her paramount novel 41 years ago.
Walker’s story has undergone countless iterations over the past four decades: an Oscar-nominated Steven Spielberg-helmed film in 1985, a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2005, a Grammy-winning Broadway revival in 2015, and now a new movie musical directed by Grammy nominee Blitz Bazawule. Led by Fantasia, Danielle Brooks, Taraji P. Henson, Colman Domingo and Halle Bailey, the new film offers a fresh perspective on the timeless narrative, as evidenced by its accompanying star-studded, globe-traversing Inspired By soundtrack. The new set is comprised of 21 new songs inspired by the film, in addition to 16 tracks taken from the Broadway musical. The genre-spanning set is heavily rooted in R&B — a conscious decision given the way R&B has been counted out by major labels over the past decade.
According to Sanders, who produced the 2005 Broadway musical and serves as executive producer on both the 2023 film and its soundtrack (released through Warner Bros. Pictures/WaterTower Music/gamma), Warner Bros. was always planning to do a soundtrack. “We knew it would be an opportune moment for them to add another dimension to The Color Purple brand extension,” he remarks.
And that’s precisely what the new soundtrack is. As cinematic universes continue to dominate mainstream media, The Color Purple has been crafting its own interconnected web of stories for 40 years — and the new soundtrack became a holy site for reunions and healing among the producers, artists, and cast.
The idea of a proper Inspired By soundtrack started to take form during an April lunch between Sanders and Jackson after the gamma. CEO had seen the film and felt its impact on early audiences. “Whatever veneer of impenetrable stoicism I had at that time, [the film] pierced it,” Jackson reflects. “To me, the great Black films are the ones [where] people are talking back to the screen, they’re applauding, there’s conversations going on, and whooping and hollering. It’s an interactive spirit, and this film has that.”
For Jackson, it was Fantasia’s performance that most moved him. The Billboard Hot 100-topping R&B star leads the film as Celie Harris-Johnson, a role for which she has already earned a Golden Globe nomination. Almost 20 years ago, Fantasia captivated America’s hearts and won the fourth season of American Idol. Shortly after her victory, she headed to the studio to record her debut LP, a Grammy-nominated effort on which Jackson would serve as A&R. That album featured singles such as “Truth Is” and the Missy Elliott-assisted “Free Yourself,” a collaboration that now has a three-way connection to The Color Purple universe.
“That was a lot for me at that time of my life — [Fantasia and I] were basically the same age and really related to what needed to be achieved,” Jackson reflects. “I was saying to Missy Elliott last night, she really helped me craft the sound for Fantasia’s first album.”
On the soundtrack, Elliott appears on two remixes: the Shenseea-featuring “Hell No,” a song from the original musical, and “Keep It Movin’,” a new addition to the musical co-written by Bailey. Like most of the artists involved in the soundtrack, Jackson says that the “Work It” rapper decided to join the project after a private screening of the film. It’s the same way he landed Alicia Keys, who co-wrote and co-produced the soundtrack’s lead single (“Lifeline”), Johntá Austin, whose “When I Can’t Do Better” marks his first collaboration with Mary J. Blige since their iconic “Be Without You,” and The-Dream. Fresh off a Grammy win for his work on Beyoncé’s Renaissance, The-Dream could be headed down to the Oscars thanks to “Superpower,” a new song he penned for the Color Purple end credits.
Often, end-credit songs are performed by artists who don’t appear in the film — but in the case of The Color Purple, everyone was in early agreement that Fantasia was the only correct choice to belt the closing ballad. For one, both the song and the movie are Fantasia’s formal re-entry into the public eye as a performer, but her specific voice and story were the best vehicle for The-Dream’s lyrics. “This is older Celie singing to her younger self — it is a quintessential ‘it gets better’ song,” Sanders gushes. “It’s so f—king moving. I can’t stop listening to it. I cry when I listen to Fantasia’s rendition.” For “Superpower,” Jackson told The-Dream, “I just want a spiritual, a song that will move on far past our time. Something that will be sung in high school graduations.”
Although the SAG-AFTRA strike almost prevented Fantasia from recording the song, the timing worked out and she was able to cut her vocal in time. Given that Fantasia played Celie on Broadway for eight months during the Broadway show’s original run, her rendition of the end-credits song is the kind of full-circle moment that most artists dream of. “Superpower” is a rousing song – one in which she deftly displays the expanse of vocal range and control – and a potential comeback vehicle for not just Fantasia, but the R&B soundtrack in general. In crafting The Color Purple (Music From and Inspired By), Sanders, Jackson and film director Blitz Bazawule drew inspiration from iconic R&B film soundtracks of decades past, including Sparkle, The Bodyguard, Boomerang and Waiting to Exhale.
“It had always been on my bucket list to do a soundtrack that felt like the great soundtracks of the 1970s, or the ones in the ‘90s,” Jackson says. “I’ve been involved in a few of them, but Clive [Davis] was always the one who was leading it. It never was something that I was driving with my own personal taste and sensibility, and this was an opportunity for that.”
The Color Purple soundtrack bookmarks a year that began with troubling layoffs for one of the most storied labels in Black music history. In the middle of Black History Month (Feb. 16), Billboard reported that Motown was set to be reintegrated under Capitol Music Group – hence the layoffs – making for a less-than-preferable outcome after the company attempted a run as a standalone label back in 2021. Despite a precarious start to the year, R&B artists have once again forged a spot at the forefront of the mainstream, thanks to acts such as SZA, Victoria Monét, Usher, Coco Jones and more. It’s a level of momentum, Sanders and Jackson hope to continue with their generation-bridging Color Purple tracklist.
In addition to the cast, The Color Purple soundtrack features contributions from Jennifer Hudson, Keyshia Cole, Mary J. Blige, Mary Mary, H.E.R., Ludmilla, Megan Thee Stallion and more. Like Fantasia, Jennifer Hudson’s track marks another full-circle moment for The Color Purple universe. Hudson took home the 2017 Grammy Award for best musical theater album thanks to the Broadway revival, and, of course, she was a contestant on the same season of American Idol as Fantasia. In another connection, Hudson herself also starred in a blockbuster Black movie musical that hit theaters on Christmas Day: 2006’s Dreamgirls, for which she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
Although Walker’s novel specifically highlights the stories of Black American women in the American South during the early 20th century, the new Color Purple soundtrack both globalizes those narratives and translates them to contemporary times. Megan Thee Stallion’s remix of “Hell No” — a selection from the original musical – carries a special weight given the way she has refused to let misogynoir drown out her voice over the past few years. Jamaican cross-genre star Shenseea appears on a different “Hell No” remix, and her inclusion on the tracklist – alongside Brazilian singer-songwriter Ludmilla – highlights how The Color Purple’s narrative resonates with Black women around the world.
“Every day was meeting to reaffirm why I’m doing this, to remind myself the importance of this work,” explains director Blitz Bazawule. “It’s daunting. You’re talking about a legacy that you don’t approach if you don’t have anything real to contribute.” Bazawule aimed to contribute new perspectives of childhood and Celie’s inner dialogue in his version of The Color Purple. In translating a Broadway play to the silver screen, Bazawule was pushed to think about which characters and moments in the plot needed songs. “Keep It Movin’,” co-written by Bailey and Grammy-winning songwriting duo Nova Wav, was one of those songs. “Nettie’s character, as I saw it, needed to impart to Celie some level of confidence that will stay with her sister before they reconnect at the very end,” Bazawule says. “[The song] shows a young girl’s innocence which will very soon be snatched away quite violently. I need that moment to be memorable and really reflect the love the sisters have for each other.”
Bailey, who starred as the titular Little Mermaid earlier this year, is, of course, one-half of the Grammy-nominated sister duo Chloe x Halle. The “Angel” singer drew from her relationship with her sister for “Keep It Movin’,” a dynamic that exemplifies the symbiotic healing nature of The Color Purple soundtrack. As artists completed their contributions to the project, they experienced moments of healing themselves. According to Bazawule, those moments occurred throughout filming, spurred by the omnipresence of faith and gospel music on set. Gospel music is a clear throughline between the original music, the Inspired By soundtrack, and the way the musical’s songs were reworked for the film.
“Gospel is the foundation. When you think about how our version of The Color Purple functions, which is the oscillation between joy and pain and turning our pain into power, it’s the definition of gospel,” remarks Bazawule. “You don’t have anything without gospel, so, for us, it was central to how we advanced everything. I also was very clear that I’d have to split my musical journey into 3 three parts: gospel, blues and jazz.” To bring a more cinematic, gospel-infused feel to the original Broadway music, Bazawule tagged in Billboard chart-topping gospel star Ricky Dillard; He also recruited Keb’ Mo’ to bring in the blues, and Christian McBride for jazz. He even made sure his DP (Dan Lausten) and production designer (Paul D. Austerberry) got an authentic Black church experience. With both Fantasia and Domingo regularly leading the cast and crew in prayer, The Color Purple transformed into “spiritual work that shows up in the amount of healing that a lot of us went through making this film,” says Bazawule.
“You cannot work on The Color Purple without understanding what anointing looks like,” Bazawule asserts. “When those singers open their mouths, that’s church talking. That was very clear and it stayed critical up until the end.”
Just days before The Color Purple is set to open in theatres, a Hollywood Reporter piece exploring the hesitancy of studios to promote movie musicals as musicals started to make the rounds online. Black movie musicals are few and far between, especially when holiday films and biopics are removed, and The Color Purple is hoping to dispel the notion that audiences aren’t interested in seeing musicals on the big screen.
“I hope [The Color Purple] opens the door to many more and I hope directors and studios take more chances with Black movie musicals,” muses Bazawule. “Again, when it comes to music, we are unmatched, so you just have to find the narratives. I hope and pray our movie will move the needle.”
The inaugural Jazz Music Awards may have set an awards show record for the longest gap between taping and finally being televised. The show was held on Oct. 22, 2022, at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta. It will finally be televised on Monday, Jan. 1 — more than 14 months later.
It will stream on demand that day on PBS Passport. It will also air on Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB)’s nine stations – WGTV-TV (Atlanta/Athens), WNGH-TV (Chatsworth), WMUM-TV (Macon), WJSP-TV (Columbus), WACS-TV (Dawson), WABW-TV (Albany), WVAN-TV (Savannah), WXGA-TV (Waycross) and WCES-TV (Augusta) – that day at 7 p.m. ET.
It has taken so long to get the inaugural Jazz Music Awards on TV that the producers blew right past the planned date of the second Jazz Music Awards, which they had indicated would be held on Saturday, Oct. 21, 2023.
“We are grateful to partner with Georgia Public Broadcasting,” Wendy F. Williams, the founder and executive producer of the Jazz Music Awards and the general manager of 91.9 WCLK, an NPR-affiliated station, said in a statement. “GPB is an excellent home for the Jazz Music Awards, and we look forward to building a national platform with PBS and its 150 affiliates. GPB presented us with a great opportunity to broadcast and stream our program around the world.”
“GPB is excited to partner with WCLK [an NPR member station] to broadcast and stream the Jazz Music Awards,” said GPB CEO Bert Wesley Huffman. “Through the years, we’ve found ways to collaborate that deepen the value of public media to our respective listening audiences, and The Jazz Awards offer a perfect opportunity to strengthen the partnership between GPB and WCLK while providing a wonderful platform for this treasured art form.”
The Jazz Music Awards is a two-hour awards show celebrating all forms of jazz — traditional, contemporary, vocal, instrumental, and experimental. The show was co-hosted by Dee Dee Bridgewater, a 1975 Tony winner for The Wiz and a two-time Grammy winner, and Delroy Lindo, a 1988 Tony nominee for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
Under the musical direction of four-time Grammy Award winner Terri Lyne Carrington, the show featured performances by Dianne Reeves, Kenny Garrett, Orrin Evans, Ledisi, Somi, Lizz Wright, Braxton Cook, Brandee Younger, Jazzmeia Horn, The Baylor Project, Lindsey Webster, and Bridgewater. There were also musical tributes to the late Ramsey Lewis, Pharoah Sanders, Joey DeFrancesco and Jaimie Branch.
Carrington’s band consisted of keyboardist Ray Angry, trumpeter Milena Casado, alto saxophonist Braxton Cook, pianist Orrin Evans, Saturday Night Live bassist, James Genus, drummer and percussionist Nikki Glaspie, percussionist Gerson Lazo-Quiroga, electronics, DJ/percussionist Kassa Overall, tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland, guitarist Mark Whitfield, and drummer Carrington.
The awards ceremony recognized winners in eight competitive categories. We reported on the winners at the time. You can read who won here or watch the stream and be surprised.
The lifetime achievement award was presented to the late Wayne Shorter. The legend award was presented to the family of the late McCoy Tyner. The three recipients of the awards of distinction were Pulitzer Prize-winner Henry Threadgill for the jazz composer award; avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire for the jazz innovator award; and former U.S. Jazz Ambassador Dr. Lenora Helm Hammonds for the jazz educator award. Additionally, jazz professor James H. Patterson of Clark Atlanta University received the jazz impact award.
The Jazz Music Awards is a nonprofit division of Jazz 91.9 WCLK, located on the campus of Clark Atlanta University, the HBCU (Historically Black College and University) which is the owner and licensee of WCLK.
Mars Williams, illustrious saxophone player who played a significant role in bands like The Psychedelic Furs and The Waitresses, died on Monday (Nov. 20). He was 68 years old. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The Chicago Tribune revealed the news, noting that the Chicago area native died […]
Good news first: after decades in the musical wilderness, OutKast‘s André 3000 is releasing his first solo album, New Blue Sun, this Friday (Nov. 17). The eagerly anticipated collection from the reclusive rapper — whose last full album was the 2003 OutKast double LP, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below — however, features “no bars” according to the 48-year-old MC who, aside from the occasional feature, has been mostly off the rap radar for nearly 20 years.
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In an interview with NPR’s Rodney Carmichael, André confessed that his obsession with the main instrument on the instrumental jazz album, the flute, has long caused some concern among his friends in Atlanta. “I laugh at it because my homies in Atlanta, we’ll talk and they’ll be like, ‘Man, you know n—as think you crazy to f–k around with this flute,” he said, confessing to being “in on the joke” about his curious musical tendencies.
The album, described as a “stunning 87-minute mind-bender, minimalist and experimental, tribal and transcendent,” will likely confuse many fans of such iconic hits as André’s “Hey Ya!” and Grammy-winning OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” “Roses,” So Fresh, So Clean” and “Player’s Ball,” which were cooked up with 3000’s former rap partner, Big Boi.
In a statement about the album, André assured frustrated fans wishing to hear his one-of-a-kind vocals that, sorry, there is no Prince-like vault of unheard music waiting to be released. “There’s this misconception that I just won’t do it,” André said of releasing a rap record. “I think people feel like I’m sitting around on rap albums, or sitting around and I’m just not putting them out in that way. And no it’s not like that… In my mind, I really would like to make a rap album. So maybe that happens one day, but I got to find a way to say what I want to say in an interesting way that’s appealing to me at this age.”
New Blue Sun, then, features none of André’s intricate, river-flowing rhymes, or as NPR put it, “no bars, no beats, no sub-bass.” In fact, 3000 doesn’t sing on the record at all, but he does tear it up on his trusty flutes. In fact, he plays a number of flutes as well as digital wind instruments, and instead of his signature motor-mouthed poetry the album’s first track kind of apologizes for the lack of language with the me culpa title, “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.”
The origin story of the album begins with André bumping into experimental jazz great Carlos Niño at the hip L.A. grocery store Erewhon, followed by the rapper showing up at Niño’s place with is flute and jamming in the basement. The jam sessions introduced 3000 to the group of performers who appear on the album, including keyboardist Surya Botofasina and guitarist Nate Mercereau, as well as musicians Deantoni Parks, Diego Gaeta, Matthewdavid, V.C.R, Diego Gaeta, Jesse Peterson, and Mia Doi Todd.
Not planning to make an album, they started the sessions a year ago, with all the songs improvised in real time, and though it is not what fans expected after all this time, the project is described as an album that “exposes his unrefined soul — and the delicate nature of his creative process — in ways the Gemini wordsmith’s fine-tuned verses tend to conceal.”
“Even in our height of what people know of what I’ve done before, I was always like a slow writer. I’m not a freestyler. I don’t be freestyling. I just wasn’t blessed with that,” André said. “Even during the earlier times, Big Boi, he just kind of got down, like, he’s so fast and efficient with what he does. And it’ll take me a minute to throw them down. So I’ve always kind of been analyzing it or figuring out how I wanted to approach it.”
For some reason at this time writing those kind of verses are just harder for André and there’s just nothing he’s written that he feels comfortable sharing. “That’s why New Blue Sun was something that I realized, whoa, I really want people to hear it,” said 3000, who estimates that he owns 30-40 flutes. “I really want to share it. That’s my only gauge. I have to like it as a person, as an artist myself, because if I don’t like it I can’t expect nobody else to like it.”
If you’ve been paying attention over the past decade, you probably spotted André in random Instagram videos wandering through the world with his trusty flue, which turned into a kind of Where’s Waldo? game for his fans. “I didn’t like that because they just kept getting little nicks of me, just kind of messing around, you know,” he said of the surreptitious videos. “So I just felt like I’d really like to play but it was really for me. I would just walk for hours and I’m a walker. I love to walk. So I would just walk and play for hours. I did that for years and it got to a point where, okay, I want to share. And so going into New Blue Sun, it was kind of like trying to figure out, well, how do I share it?”
He did, however, run the new tracks by some of his younger contemporaries, with Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean getting an early listen to the album, with Tyler opining about one song, “It sounds like you’re chasing a butterfly through a garden and I figured it out. It helped me to figure out how to do this,” in reference to the Odd Future founder’s collection of travel suitcases he could not figure out how to properly display on a wall in his home until hearing André’s new music.
And to be clear, André didn’t know this was where his life would take him, either. So if his fans look sideways at the album — whose song titles include references to everything from the Dalai Lama, John Wayne Gace, Beyoncé and that time 3000 turned into a panther in Hawaii while on an ayahusaca trip — he gets it.
“If I was on the outside, I would feel the same way. So, for me, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said of the album that will have a “no bars” warning on the packaging, which inspired the former MC to go long on the song titles in order to give “as much information” as possible to the instrumentals. “But that’s the cool and scary thing about it. And I think as an artist, you kind of got to put yourself out there to be prepared to respond. I’m a responding person. That’s what I am. I’m responding to what’s given to me. It’s responding to my contemporaries. It’s responding to what I love. It’s responding to what I don’t like. It’s responding to all of that.”
Check out the New Blue Sun tracklist below:
“I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Rap” Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time”
“The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina . Do You Agree?”
“That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild”
“BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears A 3000™ Button Down Embroidered”
“Ninety Three ‘Til Infinity And Beyoncé”
“Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, And John Wayne Gacy”
“Ants To You, Gods To Who ?”
“Dreams Once Buried Beneath The Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens”
At the height of the pandemic, singer-songwriter Laufey spent her free time outside of classes at the Berklee College of Music taking hours-long meetings with industry executives. With only two self-released singles out at the time, the modern jazz artist was already fielding emails from managers, labels and publishers interested in signing her — but for Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay), the conversations were about understanding the inner workings of the music business.
“I had a second education talking to so many people,” she says. “I would take meetings on my own and say, ‘I’m not signing anything, but tell me everything you know about the music industry.’”
Three years later, Laufey has taken that information and built a team to help bring her pop-infused style of jazz to the top of her genre. In September, her second album, Bewitched, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts, fueled by the success of catchy bossa nova-inspired lead single “From The Start.” Her prior releases have subsequently soared up the rankings, prominently stamping the 24-year-old’s name across charts otherwise filled with legacy acts including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Miles Davis. Thanks to her confident and dreamy voice and social media savvy, she’s now crossing into the mainstream as one of the biggest jazz stars of the streaming era. And following a year in which fellow jazz artist Samara Joy won best new artist, appetite for the genre seems at its hungriest in decades.
Long before she dedicated herself to learning the industry, Laufey understood life as a musician. Her maternal grandparents were both professors of music in China, and her mother is a classical violinist. (She has appeared on a few of her daughter’s songs, such as the titular track from 2022 debut album, Everything I Know About Love). Born in Reykjavík, Laufey began playing piano at four years old, picked up cello at eight, and started singing jazz a few years after that, all while moving between Iceland and Washington, D.C., and spending her summers at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. “My mom could tell that I had a natural inclination for music,” Laufey says.
While studying as a cello student at Berklee, Laufey knew she wanted to mix her jazz and classical background with her own contemporary voice. As she grew into her own at school in Boston, she gained confidence and began writing her own songs. She recorded her first track, “Street By Street,” on the last day before campus shut down due to COVID-19 restrictions. A few weeks later, she uploaded it on DistroKid. “It got some attention,” she remembers. “I started growing a social media following online and it all snowballed from there.”
Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
She continued to hone her songwriting skills amid her virtual college experience, challenging herself to pick up her guitar, create catchy hooks and pen “cheeky” lyrics every time a Zoom class ended (“Listening to you harp on ’bout some new soulmate/ ‘She’s so perfect,’ blah, blah, blah,” she sings on “From The Start”). She began posting videos of her singing jazz standards by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and more on Instagram and TikTok. The clips quickly became a refuge for people seeking levity during the pandemic. “I was freaking out,” she acknowledges. “I was like, ‘OK. I have a duty to fulfill.’ It was such good practice for me.”
Later in 2020, her social media success led to inquiries from top music executives. Following months of meetings, she signed a global recording deal with AWAL and added a manager in Max Gredinger from Foundations Artist Management. “I saw her building this insane online audience on her own and thought, ‘We could build on that,’” says Gredinger. He acknowledges that there wasn’t much precedent for breaking jazz artists into the mainstream today — but if anything, he notes, they used it to their advantage.
“I hear a lot of artists talk about other artists like, ‘What’s the blueprint?’ Laufey doesn’t really do that. Of course, there are artists that are massively inspiring to her. Norah Jones, Adele, Chet Baker, all the jazz greats [and] a lot of classical composers. But she always knew that what she was doing was one of one and something that hadn’t been done before.”
Max Gredinger and Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
Without a definitive outline to follow, Laufey primarily focused on further developing her social media presence, specifically on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to teasing music and responding to fans’ comments and DMs, she livestreamed weekly sessions of her performing lullabies. “If you gave me all the money in the world, I don’t think I could come up with a better social strategy than Laufey,” Gredinger says.
Following the August 2022 release Everything I Know About Love, she toured 250-to-500 capacity rooms in the U.S. — a crucial component to Laufey’s development, stresses Gredinger, and a way for her to build buzz amid her growing fan base. By the middle of 2023, she was ready to start the rollout of her follow-up album, beginning with her biggest hit to date, “From The Start.” After writing the entirety of the song in half an hour, she released the charmingly upbeat song last May, and it immediately took off on TikTok, though she initially brushed aside the numbers.
“Sometimes you put a song on TikTok and it does well because it’s visually stimulating or it has a hooky lyric, but it won’t go past that,” Laufey says. However, once it eclipsed a million streams in a 24-hour period and tripled her previous record, she knew that she had something special.
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Laufey continued to grow momentum with new singles throughout the summer — and expanded her team as well, signing a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music in August. The following month, Bewitched arrived through AWAL and has since spent eight weeks atop both Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums. Following its first tracking week, “From The Start” also hit No. 1 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart. Through Nov. 2, the song has 3.5 million official on-demand streams, according to Luminate.
Amid her current 30-date sold-out North American tour, Laufey earned her first chart entry on Hot Alternative Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs with her seductive beabadoobee team-up, “A Night To Remember.” On Friday (Nov. 10), she’ll drop two holiday tracks: Her rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and an original titled “Better Than Snow,” both with jazz-pop icon Norah Jones. And as she continues to carve her own path and expand her audience across genres, Laufey is more confident in her future than ever before.
“When I started out, people were always asking me, ‘Who do you want to be like?’” Laufey reflects. “I had no idea what to say. I still have no clue what to say. The difference is, now I don’t need to. I’m just going to keep making the music I want and hope that it reaches as many ears as possible.”
Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
A version of this story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Carla Bley, leader of the free jazz movement, pianist and composer, has died following complications from brain cancer, according to The New York Times. She was 87 years old. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The Oakland, Calif., native and five-time Grammy nominee was born Karen Borg, […]
Rising jazz artist Laufey scores her first entry on the Billboard 200 albums chart with her sophomore release Bewitched, debuting at No. 23 on the Sept. 23-dated list. Further, the set launches atop both the Traditional Jazz Albums and overall Jazz Albums charts – marking the first No. 1 on both rankings for the 24-year-old Icelandic singer-songwriter […]
