Bill Henderson, now 81, started back in the 50s with then little known Ramsey Lewis Trio in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1956 and made his first hit singing Senor Blues for Horace Silver. He has worked with all the big names in the jazz scene and in the late 60′s moved to LA to take up an acting career. Recently he has got back into jazz and released a live album in 2007. From his bio on his web site:

Bill Henderson just gets better with time. The release of Beautiful Memory: Bill Henderson Live at the Vic, recorded in Santa Monica, California, on March 22, 2007, three days following his 81^st birthday, marks the venerable jazz vocalist’s golden anniversary as a recording artist. His pliant baritone voice remains as soulful and richly resonant as it was when he made his debut on vinyl singing “Senor Blues” with Horace Silver and on his own early albums for the Vee-Jay and Verve labels, yet four decades in Hollywood as a character actor in countless motion pictures and television sit-coms and dramas have helped to give even greater depth to his clearly enunciated readings of lyrics.

“Henderson’s phrasing is virtually his own copyright,” Leonard Feather observed. “He tends to space certain words as if the syllables were separated by commas, even semicolons; yet everything winds up as a perfectly constructed sentence.”

Brooklyn based pianist Aaron Parks recently released his debut album Invisible Cinema on Blue Note records. From his web site bio he describes his music and his new album:

Somebody once asked me to find two words that describe the music I make, and the words I picked were ‘spontaneous’ and ‘cinematic,’” says Aaron Parks. Having clarified the essence of his art, the pianist kept those two words closely in mind while conceiving and recording Invisible Cinema, his extraordinary debut for the Blue Note label. In its virtuosity and harmonic complexity, Invisible Cinema speaks to Parks’s immersion in jazz on the highest level, even as it references a wider world of contemporary music-making.

“The title has a lot of different meanings,” notes the 24-year-old Seattle native, who is currently based in Brooklyn. “For one thing, Invisible Cinema is what music is, in a sense. You can’t see it. But there’s all this drama between the musicians, all these stories that can be told. Also, I was thinking about actual cinema, and this album has a story line that I wouldn’t spell out to anybody, because I want to leave it open to interpretation. But for me there’s a narration in the sequence and song titles and everything.”

Check out what he has to say on I’m Talkin’ Jazz on KCSM radio.

NYC jazz trombonist and vocalist Natalie Cressman is an up and coming star that recently played at the San Jose Jazz Fest. Natalie grew up in San Francisco and is an alumnus of the Monterey Jazz Festival’s and many other high school jazz bands. She is currently studying at the Manhattan School of Music. She plays with her own group Secret Garden and recently completed a Kick Starter round of funding to produce her first CD. Take a look at her You Tube channel at:
Natalie Cressman on You Tube

Bay Area jazz vocalist Clairdee will be in the studio at KCSM. Clairdee moved to the Bay Area in 1986 and performs mostly in the Bay Area. Her third album Music Moves was recorded at Yoshi’s in Oakland. From her web site bio:

An esteemed lyrical interpreter, Clairdee’s shows with her quartet mix jazz, blues, pop and soul, as she glides effortlessly between the Great American Songbook, contemporary, and original songs. “My goal is to continue creating, finding and telling new stories that bring us all closer together,” says the veteran singer. “That’s what music is all about.”

Randy Weston is a noted pianist and composer currently residing in New York. He got started in the 1950′s with many of the jazz greats and counts Thelonius Monk as his greatest piano influence. During the 60s he moved to Morocco  and toured through Africa learning about the local music. Currently he performs with his group African Rhythms and is on tour in Europe.

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Hristo Vitchev is a Bay Area jazz guitarist that joins us from Sofia, Bulgaria. He plays locally with his group SEVA which is a quartet composed of pianist Weber Iago, Dan Robbins on bass and drummer Mike Shannon. His latest CD on Far Out Sounds is Heartmony. Jazziz reviewed it in their July 2012 and you can read it at http://www.hristovitchev.com/jazzizsummer2012.pdf

From his group SEVA’s web site:

Hristo Vitchev is a modern jazz guitarist and composer from Sofia, Bulgaria.Now residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hristo leads his modern jazz quartet which features the Latin Grammy-nominated pianist Weber Iago, drummer extraordinaire Joe De Rose, and virtuoso bassist Dan Robbins. Hristo has toured nationally and internationally with a wide variety of formations and has also performed guitar clinics in Europe and Japan. He has written more than 270 original compositions, many articles on jazz improvisation, and a book on choral theory and construction entitled Between the Voicings: A New Approach to Chord Building for Guitarists. The Hristo Vitchev Quartet’s 2009 debut album, Song for Messambria (First Orbit Sounds Music) quickly received outstanding reviews by the international jazz community and was selected as one of the six best jazz albums of 2009 by E-JAZZ NEWS.

He will be in town for the San Jose Jazz Fest on Aug 11 playing with Christian Tamburr.

To hear his music check out:

http://www.myspace.com/hristovitchev

Rhoda Scott is a world class singer and Hammond B3 organist. Originally from New Jersey she played the organ in her dad’s church. She then graduated to the the NY jazz scene playing at Count Basie’s lounge in Harlem. From there she continued her studies in Paris and eventually settled there in 1968. She still tours all over Europe and makes it back to the US. She has over 50 albums to her name. Her latest album was recorded with the Bay Area’s Kim Nalley at the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society in Half Moon Bay.

You can find out more about her in an interview by Marc Myers on his JazzWax site at http://www.jazzwax.com/2011/10/interview-rhoda-scott.html .

This weekend at the Tivo stage at the San Jose Rep theatre will be hosted by Greg Bridges on Sat and Ron Pelletier on Sun. The indoor theatre is a great respite from the heat and sun outside.

Greg’s lineup on Sat will be:

• Lula Washington Dance Theatre with Marcus L Miller & Freedom Jazz Movement
• Tony Monaco Group
• Rene Marie “Experiment in Truth” quartet
• Tia Fuller quartet with a post performance interview with Greg

Then Greg dashes over to the main stage to introduce the Jazz Crusaders.

On Sunday Ron will have:

• Yoshiaki Miyanoue Tokyo quartet
• An Afternoon with Sara Gazarek
• Joyce Randolph
• Jeff Hamilton Trio also with a post performance interview with Ron

Ron will then introduce Terrence Blanchard on the main stage.

Come see Greg and Ron at the Tivo stage in the San Jose Rep.

Like many people Dianne Reeves first caught my attention in the film Good Night and Good Luck about Edward Murrow. I was watching the film on a plane and it was interesting. However when Dianne did her first club scene it “who is she?” and “wow is she great”.  After the second club scene I was paying close attention. In the credits I saw that it was Dianne Reeves. I had heard her on KCSM and knew about her. About that point it seems her career took off with multiple Grammy awards and lots of popular concerts. I remember seeing her two years ago at Monterey Jazz Festival where she was the artist in residence that year. She performed with Russell Malone, guitar and Romero Lubambo, guitar. It was just the three of them on a Sunday afternoon and it was great.

San Jose Jazz Summer Fest has a feature story about Dianne at
http://jazzfest.sanjosejazz.org/2012/dianne-reeves

You can read about her early career and how she met up with Clark Terry. Later on she performed regularly with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis. Recently she has performed twice at the White House.

At the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest she will be performing on the main stage at 4pm. She will again have Romero Lubambo on guitar. This should be a fantastic performance on 12 Aug Sun 4pm If you can’t make it go find some of her albums, find a quiet spot, sit back and listen.

Sonny Buxton will be chatting with the saxaphonist John Handy. John Handy has been playing in the Bay Area since 1948. He is also a well know music educator and teaches at SF State since the 1960s.

From his website bio:

John Handy — A Star Performer
John Handy has performed in the world’s great concert halls including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Berlin Philharmonic Auditorium, San Francisco Opera House, Davies Hall; the major performance venues including Tanglewood, Saratoga (NY), and Wolf Trap; and the pre-eminent jazz festivals including the Monterey Jazz Festival, Newport Jazz Festival, Playboy Jazz Festival, Chicago Jazz Festival, Pacific Coast Jazz Festival; and international jazz festivals at Montreaux (Switzerland), Antibe (France), Berlin (Germany), Cannes (France), Yubari (Japan), Miyasaki (Japan), among others.

His album and CD covers read like a who’s who of record labels – Columbia, ABC Impulse, Warner Brothers, Milestone, Roulette, Boulevard, Quartet (Harbor), MPS Records and many others. His most recent recordings are “John Handy Live at Yoshi’s” and “John Handy’s Musical Dreamland” (available only on Boulevard Records, Stuttgart, Germany), “Centerpiece”, and “Excursion in Blue”. Some of his earlier works have been reissued on CD – “John Handy: Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival”, “The Second John Handy Album”, “New View”, and “Projections”., He recorded with Sonny Stitt, and recorded nine albums with Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop.

In the early days he lived  in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. You can hear him talk about those days in the KQED documentary about the Fillmore at http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/people/handy.html . This is real interesting if you don’t know the story of the Fillmore district in SF and the what happened with SF redevelopment.

To hear his music check out his website at http://www.johnhandy.com/ and click on the media tab at the top.