Provocative and fanciful, they bring Ellington and Strayhorn closer to us.

Rick Stone picks more obvious standards elsewhere on his forthcoming release, Fractals. You May Also Like: The Stone Foxes, “Cold Like a Killer” from Twelve Spells (2015): One Track Mind Neil Young, “Wolf Moon” from The Monsanto Years (2015): One Track Mind

Early on, you never heard much piano from Duke Ellington, a grievous thing. It was only in the twilight of his career that this American jazz master regularly consented to taping some shows where his impish wit at the instrument could be heard front and center. You May Also Like:Read More

Delfeayo Marsalis doesn’t just rediscover Duke Ellington. He reanimates Ellington as a living breathing thing, a collaborative voice.

To take the old-school harmonic brilliance of Duke Ellington into the realm of John Coltane — soon to establish himself as the picture of avant garde, stimulatingly free, out there in such a way as to legitimately draw comparisons with the spiritual — was, you imagine, a challenge of equalRead More

Just because I haven’t written a whole lot about John Coltrane up to this point doesn’t mean I don’t seriously revere the man’s music. But what is there left to be said about Coltrane that hasn’t already been said with much more eloquent words than I can muster? There are,Read More

by Nick DeRiso While it doesn’t have the cohesiveness of 1992’s “Portraits of Ellington,” this makes its own kind of statement. The playlist is an evocative pairing of older, traditional big-band selections by composers like Billy Strayhorn, with more modern tunes from Miles, Monk and Coltrane. In that way, theRead More