Boston Globe, August 9, 2012

NEW YORK — The trumpeter Christian Scott terms “stretch music” the big, open-minded sound that he seeks, for his own band and for jazz in general.

On his brand-new album, “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” Scott stretches more than just rhythmic and harmonic conventions. The album itself is a sprawling double CD, 23 tracks long. Even Scott’s name has grown longer: the New Orleans native is now Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, a “completion,” as he puts it, that honors his ultimate African ancestry.

At 29 and with eight albums as a leader, Scott, who plays Scullers Friday, has not been shy with compositions and ideas. “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” though, presents as a uniquely personal statement — and not just by its length, title, or cover art, which features Scott in the regalia of a Black Indian, the New Orleans ritual tradition in which he grew up.

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Boston Globe, August 25, 2009

The youngest scion of jazz nobility, Jason Marsalis has forged a career that’s more eclectic than those of his celebrated brothers Wynton and Branford. Besides his longtime gig as the drummer in Marcus Roberts’s trio, Jason is a founder of the Latin jazz group Los Hombres Calientes. Now 32, Marsalis has a new album, “Music Update,” his first album in nine years, and his third as a leader In that time he’s picked up a new instrument, the vibraphone, and he wields the mallets on eight of the 13 tracks. The balance are overdubbed drum solos that range from marching-band flair to sexy shimmering and even a disco beat. We caught up with him on the phone from his home in New Orleans.

Q. Why get involved in a whole new instrument, the vibraphone?

A. Well, that’s just another side of percussion. It’s interesting: Originally, the vibes was my father’s idea back when I was in high school. I said OK, and after a while I started to get ideas about what I wanted to play on the vibes, even though I didn’t know how to play it yet.

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Boston Globe, July 18, 2008

It’s been almost three years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, but for the Hot 8 Brass Band, the hurt didn’t end with the storm. When the band – one of the most popular in New Orleans, behind a revitalized sound that connects traditional brass with funk and hip-hop – takes the stage in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Calderwood Courtyard on Wednesday, the timbre of its horns and the rumble of its drums will bear witness to fresh struggle and pain.

Like other New Orleans musicians, members of the Hot 8 scattered to other cities, only to return to a hometown mired in political squabbles and seemingly forgotten by the rest of the country, the rebuilding of their working-class neighborhoods painfully slow.

The fitful restart of tourism limited earning opportunities. The cost of living soared. The city sought a huge increase in permit fees for second-line parades – the marches, hosted by New Orleans’ legendary “social and pleasure clubs,” that animate the city on weekend afternoons and give its brass bands arguably their raison d’etre.

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Boston Globe, August 24, 2007

Days before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, the righteous anger animates Terence Blanchard just as it did in the storm’s wake. The distinguished New Orleanian trumpeter, who remembers being evacuated by rowboat from the Ninth Ward as a child during 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, came home after Katrina to find his mother’s neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain leveled. Images of Blanchard escorting his mother to her first sight of the void that was her house, and his own candor negotiating the outrage and sadness, are emotional highlights of Spike Lee’s HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke.”

Now Blanchard continues the catharsis and consciousness-raising with a majestic album, “A Tale of God’s Will,” just out on Blue Note. With a full orchestra backing Blanchard’s quintet, the disc is a funeral suite laced with worship, perseverance, and transcendence; both drawing on and deviating from classic New Orleans jazz, it’s one of the richest artistic responses to Katrina yet released. It’s also the primary material for Blanchard’s current quintet tour, which visits Regattabar tonight.

Those who follow Blanchard’s work will not be surprised by the album’s cinematic texture: The finely paced exposition and the lush but tempered orchestration reflect Blanchard’s long experience writing scores for Lee’s films. The songs ease poignantly from wide-angle evocations of city, earth, water, to the close-up intimacy of lives facing crisis and recovery. The pervasive melancholy that Blanchard’s horn signals as it sinews through the arrangements is never treacly or overwrought, but simply a matter of fact.

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Boston Globe, October 15, 2006

Six of the seven musicians lost their homes to the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. A year after the storm, only two of the seven have been able to move back to New Orleans. Yet compared to many other New Orleans musicians, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band are the fortunate ones.

They have work.

The band is the touring outfit of Preservation Hall, a 45-year-old New Orleans institution devoted to nurturing and promoting the city’s musical tradition. The hall, a tiny, unpretentious venue in the French Quarter, only reopened in May. But the band has been touring all along, bringing to its regular circuit of prestige theaters not just the music of New Orleans, but testimonial to the Crescent City’s perseverance and hurt.

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