David Weiss put together a stellar septet call the Cookers. The group derives its name from the Freddie Hubbard album titled “The Night of the Cookers: Live at Club La Marcha”. The group features Billy Harper, tenor saxophone  Eddie Henderson, trunpet, David Weiss, trunpet, Craig Handy, alto sax, George Cables, piano, Cecil McBee, bass, and Billy Hart on drums. Take a look at their website at  http://jazzlegacyproductions.com/cookers_pages/thecookers.html for more info and to hear clips from their latest album Warriors.

Anat Cohen is a jazz clarinetist and saxaphonist. She and her two brothers have been producing great jazz since  1999. Her latest album is Claroscuro. From her web site www.anatchon.com:

Anat Cohen – celebrated the world over for her expressive virtuosity on clarinet and saxophone, not to mention the sheer joie de vivre in her charismatic stage presence – presents the latest record of her evolution with Claroscuro, her sixth album as a bandleader. Claroscuro takes its title from the Spanish word describing the play of light and shade (chiaroscuro in Italian).

A video about her album is at

htto://anatcohen.com

Kenny Burell, jazz guitar player, has been a professor at UCLA Department of Music and Ethnomusicology. As a recognized expert in the work of Duke Ellington his course on Ellingtonia was first taught in 1978 and is one of the first college courses on jazz. Musically Kenny has been playing since 1956 and is recorded on hundreds of albums. His has been recognized as an NEA Jazz Master. His most recent albun released in 2010 is a collection of jazz standards. Listen to him chat with Chris Cortez about his current projects and music.

Taylor Eigsti

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