The Jazz Riff
By The Curious + Creative Network
Categories: Music, Music Commentary
The Riff is a jazz briefing from Curious & Creative. New episodes four times a week — Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. The news, the new albums, the history, and what's actually happening in the Los Angeles jazz scene this week — from the big rooms to the tiny ones you only hear about on Instagram. Up First, but for jazz: tight, inside, and straight to the music. Love you madly.
32 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- Los Angeles: From Central Avenue to Sunset
Los Angeles built its own jazz — twice. In the 1920s, segregation pushed Black musicians onto Central Avenue, and the "Harlem of the West" answered with the Dunbar Hotel, Club Alabam and a generation that included Mingus and Dexter Gordon. Last August, the Blue Note opened on Sunset Boulevard…
- The Sweep: Six Cities, November 2–8
The Sweep is back — six cities, one week, for the week of November 2–8. New York opens with Elena Pinderhughes at the Blue Note and Cyrille Aimée at Birdland; Chicago answers with a ten-dollar Green Mill Monday and Monty Alexander opening his Jazz Showcase residency.London runs seven nights…
- The Week Ahead: November 2-8
The Week Ahead, November 2–8: the full rundown — news, new wax, and what's actually happening in Los Angeles, from the big rooms to the tiny ones. Friday is debut day twice over: brothers Zohar & Adam release Osmosis on Mack Avenue with Christian McBride guesting, and Mathis Picard's large…
- Illinois Jacquet: The Solo They All Had to Play Note for Note
Today is Illinois Jacquet's 104th birthday — born October 31, 1922, in Broussard, Louisiana. At 19, on the first recording session of his career, he played an 80-second solo on Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" that invented R&B saxophone — and every tenor who took his chair after him had to play it…
- London: The City That Found Its Own Accent
Today is Ronnie Scott's 67th birthday — the Soho basement opened October 30, 1959, on a borrowed £1,000. Five weeks ago Blue Note opened its first UK club in Covent Garden. London spent a century being told its jazz was an imitation; this is the story of how it found its own accent.From the two…
- Immanuel Wilkins: The Genius at the Vanguard
One month ago, at 29, Immanuel Wilkins became the youngest of the 20 MacArthur Fellows for 2026 — the "genius grant," $800,000, no strings attached. This spring his quartet did something just as bold in jazz terms: a first live album in three volumes, recorded at the Village Vanguard.From Upper…
- Clifford Brown: The Trumpeter Who Sang
He had four years of records and became the trumpeter every trumpeter after him had to answer to. Clifford Brown — born October 30, 1930, in Wilmington, dead at 25 on the Pennsylvania Turnpike — played with a warm, singing tone and a grace that never rushed, no matter how fast the tempo ran.From…
- Paris: The City That Set Jazz Free
Paris took jazz seriously before America did — a classical conductor called Sidney Bechet a genius in 1919 — and then the city answered back: Django Reinhardt and the Quintette du Hot Club de France invented a European jazz of their own, two working fingers and all.From La Revue Nègre and…
- The Sweep: Six Cities, Halloween Week
The Sweep is back — six cities, one week, and the week ends on Halloween. New York opens with Mike LeDonne's 70th-birthday big band at Jazz at Lincoln Center and closes with Robert Glasper's Halloween run at the Blue Note; Chicago answers with ten-dollar Green Mill Mondays and a Coltrane tribute…
- The Week Ahead: October 26 – November 1
The Week Ahead, October 26 – November 1: the full rundown — news, new wax, and what's actually happening in Los Angeles, from the big rooms to the tiny ones. Christian McBride hands the keys to his young band Ursa Major on Points of Light, produced by Terrace Martin and out Friday on Mack Avenue…
- The Sweep: The Week of the Big Band
The Sweep is back: six cities, one week, and this time the big bands are carrying it. A fourteen-piece Mingus band holds Ronnie Scott's all week, the Count Basie Orchestra sets up in Tokyo, and Chicago answers with an octet and Dee Alexander, while two festivals play their final nights.Robert…
- #21 The Week Ahead: October 19-25
The Week Ahead, October 19–25: the full rundown — news, new wax, and what's actually happening in Los Angeles, from the big rooms to the tiny ones. Samara Joy's Boston Pops announcement, a Verve live album on the way, and Immanuel Wilkins's MacArthur Fellowship lead the news.In LA: Talib Kweli and…
- #20 Lakecia Benjamin: Alto Fire
Lakecia Benjamin broke her jaw in a September 2021 car crash, taught herself to play again with her mouth barely open, and came back with Phoenix — the defining record of her career. A Washington Heights kid who did the sideman years with Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, and the Roots is now the…
- #19 Sun Ra: The Man from Saturn
He said he was from Saturn, changed his name in 1952, ran his Arkestra like a monastery in a Philadelphia rowhouse at 5626 Morton Street, and pressed his own records on El Saturn because no label moved at his speed. Sun Ra did not wait for permission from this planet.Space Is the Place on record…
- #18 Jazz Is Dead: Adrian Younge's Time Machine
Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad do not sample the legends — they bring them into Linear Labs in Highland Park, record all-analog to tape on vintage gear, and make new albums with them as co-composers. Jazz Is Dead is a time machine that only travels forward.The catalog runs JID001 to JID027…
- #17 Tokyo: The City That Listens Hardest
Every jazz city has a sound; Tokyo has a way of hearing. The city built whole rooms around listening — jazz kissa where the owner played a full side loud and you kept quiet — turned scarce imported records into an education, and pressed vinyl so carefully collectors pay extra for the paper band…
- #16 Kamasi Washington: The Orchestrator
Kamasi Washington thinks in orchestras. In spring 2015 he wrote string arrangements for Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, then released The Epic — three discs, a ten-piece band, a 32-piece orchestra, a twenty-person choir — and re-scaled what a jazz album can be.Inglewood, Leimert Park, the…
- #15 Stones Throw at 30: Jazz in Hip-Hop's Bloodstream
Thirty years ago Peanut Butter Wolf started Stones Throw to release the music of Charizma, his friend killed in 1993. What grew out of that grief became underground music's most important indie label — and the thing flowing through it, from the first Madlib records on, is jazz.Madlib's Yesterday's…
- #14 The Listening Bar: Jazz's Quietest Boom
The hottest room in jazz has no stage. The draw is a turntable, serious speakers, a chair facing them, and a house rule from postwar Tokyo's jazz kissa: you do not talk over the record. That ritual is now the template for hi-fi listening bars worldwide — listening became a night out again.From…
- #13 Nubya Garcia: London's Horn
A tight spotlight: Nubya Garcia, the tenor saxophonist carrying London's jazz wave — post-bop in one hand, the Caribbean in the other, with dub, calypso, and club music all native to her sound. A youth programme in Camden produced the horn that explains the last ten years of London jazz.Her debut…
- #12 Strange Fruit: The Song They Tried to Bury
Café Society, 1939: the room goes dark, one spotlight, and Billie Holiday sings "Strange Fruit." It began as evidence — Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the Marion, Indiana lynching — became Abel Meeropol's poem, and then the most dangerous three minutes in American music.Her own label would not…
- #11 Chicago: The Sound of the Great Migration, Still Moving
Chicago's founding myth is a train schedule. The Illinois Central ran from the Mississippi Delta straight to the South Side, and riding it came hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners — with New Orleans music in their hands. Chicago is where that music first got recorded properly, and where it…
- #10 BADBADNOTGOOD: The Bridge Band
In 2011, three jazz students in Toronto posted a shaky video playing Odd Future songs as a jazz trio — and hip-hop's loudest crew shared it with the world. BADBADNOTGOOD became the bridge band: the group a generation walked across from rap to jazz without noticing the water underneath.From backing…
- #9 Makaya McCraven: The Beat Scientist
Makaya McCraven records his band live, then takes the tapes home and builds new music out of them — sampling his own players like a hip-hop producer. In the Moment, Universal Beings, and In These Times are the proof: the beat scientist rewired what a jazz drummer does.He is the sound of Chicago's…
- #8 Monk: The Night New York Took His License to Play
In the summer of 1951, Thelonious Monk lost the little police-issued cabaret card every New York musician needed to work a room that served drinks — and with it, six years of playing his own city. He spent the exile composing some of the greatest music in the American canon.The Baroness Pannonica…
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