Boston Globe, October 4, 2010

NEW YORK – Viewers of last weekend’s season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” who blinked at the wrong moment as the camera panned across the set might not have spotted the newest member in the house band. But there he was, a slender figure at the keyboard, dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail: Roxbury’s Tuffus Zimbabwe, now filling one of TV’s hottest seats.

Until a few weeks ago, Zimbabwe, 28, had been hustling to make ends meet by accompanying church choirs, teaching after-school programs, and playing miscellaneous gigs across a swath of the Tri-State area from Newark, to Jamaica, Queens. But now, as a member of one of TV’s most prominent bands, the Berklee College of Music graduate suddenly has a measure of security most musicians his age would envy. Steady work. A union job. Benefits. And the prestige of playing in the footsteps of greats such as Michael Brecker and David Sanborn.

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Boston Globe, September 27, 2010

If there is a recurring motif in the unusual path from Korea to Boston of pianist Mina Cho it is revelation.

It was a pair of musical revelations that exposed the young woman, who as a child in Korea had the ambition to become a world-famous classical pianist, first to the emotional force of gospel, and then to the beauty and improvisational potential of South American folk music.

And revelation in the religious sense has accompanied Cho, a committed Christian, along the parallel tracks of religious and secular music, and into unexpected roles, for instance as the pianist in several Boston black and immigrant churches.

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Boston Globe, July 27, 2007

It’s easy for great musicians to slip out of their art’s official history. In jazz, where so many artists have lived volatile and difficult lives, perhaps as many fine players and innovators are forgotten as are celebrated in the music’s canon. From time to time, the memory of one such figure is rescued in extremis. Of late the Makanda Project, led by Boston pianist and arranger John Kordalewski, has been celebrating Makanda Ken McIntyre, a composer and multi-reed player who died six years ago in relative obscurity.

But just as important an aim of the project is to bring McIntyre’s work – and by extension, the spirit and practice of high-quality jazz – back to Boston’s historic African-American community. McIntyre, who was born in 1931, grew up on Wellington Street in the South End when that neighborhood and Lower Roxbury made up the heart of black Boston. He played around Boston during the heyday of the local jazz scene in the 1950s, before moving to New York and eventually spending the bulk of his career as an educator and pioneer of jazz studies, notably at SUNY at Old Westbury on Long Island.

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Boston Globe, September 30, 2005

The commemoration of John Coltrane is never a casual matter. The saxophone titan, who died in 1967, left not only a body of work unequaled in creativity and technique but a legacy of constant spiritual exploration. The 1965 album “A Love Supreme” is the best known but far from only manifestation of this quest.

So when musicians honor Coltrane, technical skills are not enough. Coltrane’s peaceful nature and striving toward the divine must also enter the room.

It’s a tall order. But Boston’s John Coltrane Memorial Concert which features piano master McCoy Tyner, the surviving member of Coltrane’s classic quartet has proved up to the task for 28 years and counting. The concert is tomorrow at Northeastern University’s Blackman Theatre.

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