Percussionist Airto Moreira with Chris Cortez

Vocalist Sarah McKenzie with Jesse "Chuy" Varela

Vocalist Dr. John with Dick Conte

Bassist Jeff Denson with Alisa Clancy

Artemis
It's a jazz super-group: Renee Rosnes, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ingrid Jensen, Melissa Aldana, Anat Cohen, Noriko Ueda, Allison Miller. Jazz Night in America captured their performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and caught up with them to talk about the significance of their all-female band.

Clarksdale Blues
The blues have traveled far and wide over the last century -exerting a vast cultural influence worldwide, yielding myriad offshoots, and generating fortunes for some of the biggest musical acts of our time. But it's also still the product of local conditions, and bound by hardscrabble local concerns.

On this episode of Jazz Night in America, we'll go to Clarksdale, Miss., to get a temperature reading at ground level, where struggling musicians are finally beginning to reap the benefits of a recent wave of blues tourism.

We'll speak to some of the key players responsible for this, including Roger Stolle, founder of The Juke Joint Blues Festival; Bill Luckett, Clarksdale's mayor, and the co-owner (with actor Morgan Freeman) of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale; and, of course some of the incredible talent keeping the blues alive, like Terry "Harmonica" Bean, Anthony "Big A" Sherrod, and 18-year-old blues prodigy Christone "Kingfish" Ingram.

Electric Miles
Jazz Night in America grapples with one of the most passionately debated artists in American music -Miles Davis- when he turned the jazz world upside down. We explore Electric Miles -from Bitches Brew to Tutu- how his rock-influenced sound galvanized massive audiences, annoyed the critics, and created a controversy that outlived his lifetime. On the 50th Anniversary of Miles going electric, a period once shunned by the jazz community, is now celebrated onstage at Jazz at Lincoln Center with one of Miles’s last collaborators, the electric bassist Marcus Miller.

The Bad Plus
It isn't typically news when a jazz group makes a change in personnel. But The Bad Plus isn't a typical jazz group, and its announcement in 2017 landed like a bombshell. In short: Ethan Iverson, the band's pianist, would be leaving to pursue his own projects. Orrin Evans, an esteemed peer, would be stepping in. For a group that has always stood for musical collectivism -and never accepted any substitutions- this was a shakeup of existential proportions.

Jazz Night in America kept up with The Bad Plus as it made this momentous transition: at Orrin Evans' home in Philadelphia, where he raced to get up to speed; in a Brooklyn studio, during sessions for its album Never Stop II; and at Jazz at the Bistro in St. Louis, Mo., where Evans made his public debut with the band.

In this show we'll hear music from that explosive set, and reflections from Evans as well as the remaining founders of The Bad Plus, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King. All three members of the band, as it now stands, open up about the challenges of preserving a group identity while reinventing the dimensions of the group. "I'm not adjusting to a new Bad Plus; I'm just adjusting," is how King puts it. "This is The Bad Plus now." Join us in making their acquaintance.