E. Doctor Smith's Blog

After contributing six decades of musical direction and genius, Randy Weston remains one of the world's foremost pianists and composers today, a true innovator and visionary. Encompassing the vast rhythmic heritage of Africa, his global creations musically continue to inform and inspire. "Weston has the biggest sound of any jazz pianist since Ellington and Monk, as well as the richest most inventive beat," states jazz critic Stanley Crouch, "but his art is more than projection and time; it's the result of a studious and inspired intelligence... An intelligence that is creating a fresh synthesis of African elements with jazz technique". In partnership with the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Jazz Heritage Center will present a weekend focused on the life and music of jazz legend Randy Weston. The Jazz Heritage Center will be showing two films about Randy Weston's life and will be featuring him in conversation with legendary jazz radio per...

Perhaps the most incredible drummer of our time is the world renown Billy Cobham. With a career spanning 4 decades, Cobham has performed with pianists Horace Silver and George Duke, legendary trumpeter Miles Davis, tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, vibraphonist Milt Holland and jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, to name but a few. Cobham has also performed with the Grateful Dead and their tribute group, "Jazz is Dead", with the famed Peter Gabriel, Level 42 and many, many more. An inductee into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame, Cobham is best known primarily for his jazz-rock drumming. Cobham’s latest release, “Palindrome” on the Multimedia Concepts label, is a return to those roots. Percussionist, writer and educator Reid J. Kennedy reviewed Palindrome last January for the Jazz Police. It so closely echoed my own view of this album, that it bears quoting here. Kennedy writes, “The album opens with an updated arrangement of Cobham’s “Moon Germs,” origin...