Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early to mid-1940s in the United States, which features songs characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody.
Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70.
Harlem stride piano, stride piano, commonly abbreviated to stride, is a jazz piano style that was developed in the large cities of the East Coast of the United States, mainly New York City, during the 1920s and 1930s. The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, major seventh or major tenth Interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass note(s) on the upbeat. Unlike performers of the ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin and of much early jazz, stride players' left hands often leapt greater distances on the keyboard, and they played in a wider range of tempos and with a greater emphasis on improvisation.
Dave Douglas is a prolific trumpeter, composer, and educator from New York City known for the stylistic breadth of his work, the lyricism and wide-ranging curiosity of his music, and for keeping a diverse set of ensembles and projects active simultaneously.
Aziza Mustafa Zadeh is an Azerbaijani singer, pianist, and composer who plays a fusion of jazz and mugam with classical and avant-garde influences.
Candy Dulfer is a Dutch pop, funk alto saxophonist and occasional singer who began playing at the age of six. She founded her band, Funky Stuff, when she was fourteen years old. Her debut album Saxuality (1990) received a Grammy nomination. Dulfer has released eleven studio albums, two live albums, and one compilation album. She has performed and recorded songs with musicians including her father Hans Dulfer, Prince, Dave Stewart, Van Morrison, Angie Stone, and Maceo Parker, and has performed live with Alan Parsons (1995), Pink Floyd (1990), and Tower of Power (2014). She hosted the Dutch television series Candy meets... (2007), in which she interviews fellow musicians. In 2013 she became a judge in the fifth season of the Dutch version of X Factor.
Criss-Cross is Thelonious Monk's critically acclaimed second studio release for Columbia Records. The album consists of previously released Monk compositions that were re-recorded for Columbia by the Thelonious Monk Quartet.
Jazz Advance is the debut album by pianist Cecil Taylor recorded for the Transition label on December 10, 1955. The album features performances by Taylor with Buell Neidlinger, Denis Charles and Steve Lacy.
Thelonious Monk Trio is an album by American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. It was originally released in 1954 as Monk's first proper studio album and has been re-released numerous times, occasionally under the title Monk's Moods and with different track orders.
Greenleaf Music is an independent music company directed by American trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas. In addition to recordings on CD, vinyl, and digital formats, Greenleaf Music houses sheet music and podcasts, as well as supporting tours by its community of artists.
Claire Ritter is an American composer and pianist working in a style that fuses jazz with classical, new music, and occasionally other world music cultures.
Fabian Almazan is a jazz pianist, composer, and film score composer born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida.
Cécile McLorin Salvant is an American jazz vocalist. She was the winner of the first prize in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010, releasing her first album, Cécile, shortly thereafter. Her second album, WomanChild, was released in 2013 on Mack Avenue Records, receiving a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Salvant won four categories in the 2014 Down Beat Critics Poll: Jazz Album of the Year, Female Vocalist, Rising Star–Jazz Artist, and Rising Star–Female Vocalist. Her third album, For One to Love, was released on September 5, 2015, to critical acclaim from the New York Times, The Guardian, and Los Angeles Times. It won her the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2016.
One Foot in the Gutter is the debut album led by jazz drummer Dave Bailey which was originally released on the Epic label in 1960.
Circuitous is an album by jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, which was recorded in 2012 and released on Driff, an artist-run label co-founded by Karayorgis and Jorrit Dijkstra. He leads a new band with four Chicago-based musicians: saxophonists Dave Rempis and Keefe Jackson, bassist Nate McBride and drummer Frank Rosaly. Karayorgis explains that Tony Williams' seminal album Spring inspired the instrumentation for this project, a quintet with two tenors as the main horns.
Jazzmeia Horn is an American jazz singer and songwriter of African ancestry. She won the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition in 2015. She sings jazz standards, and her repertoire includes songs and music from other genres such as Stevie Wonder. She has been compared to jazz vocalist such as Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan, and Nancy Wilson. At age 23, Jazzmeia "Jazz" Horn had earned a reputation in New York City as a dynamic music artist.
Brazen Heart is a studio album by American trumpeter Dave Douglas which was released in October 2015 on Douglas' own Greenleaf Music label. The album bears a dedication to Douglas’s older brother, Damon, who died in June 2015 after a long fight with cancer.
Music We Are is an album by Jack DeJohnette recorded in 2008 and released on his Golden Beams label.
Jesse van Ruller is a Dutch jazz guitarist and composer. He won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Guitar Competition in 1995 and has recorded several albums as a leader and more as a sideman.
