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Jack Bruce, Vernon Reid, John Medeski & Cindy Blackman Santana's Spectrum Road to Drop Debut, Play Bonnaroo in June

A new supergroup is heading to Bonnaroo.

The festival will see the summer performance debut of Spectrum Road, a new quartet featuring Jack Bruce (Cream), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), John Medeski (Medeski, Martin and Wood) and Cindy Blackman Santana (Lenny Kravitz, Santana).

According to Reid, the group's been in the works for quite some time.

"To be able to play and record in this band alongside three of the most creative and stellar musicians in the world is a longtime dream come true," he said in a release. "The idea for Spectrum Road first came about in 2001 and it was the ongoing belief in the kind of record we knew we could make together that made it come to fruition."

The band's self-titled debut will land on June 5 on Palmetto Records, just before their June 9 Bonnaroo set. The festival appearance will serve as the launch of a U.S. summer tour.

Spectrum Road was formed in homage to jazz drummer Tony Williams, whose track "Spectrum Road" serves as the group's namesake. Bruce played with the musician in the Tony Williams Lifetime trio in the early '70s, recording several albums of jazz fusion.

see article here

With the soul of a folk singer and the facility of a jazz instrumentalist, McGarry puts her own spin on an evergreen, ever-swinging tradition.

“Kate McGarry's sense of musical authenticity is beautifully blended with her always-original musical vision." —The Los Angeles Times

Kate McGarry, one of her generation's most individual and influential singers, has earned acclaim for blending her love of folk and pop music with jazz fluency and improvisation. As the Nashville Scene said, the sweet-toned, Grammy Award-nominated vocalist “embraces jazz's freedom yet points the genre toward a future that's as fresh and thrilling as its past." With Girl Talk—her fifth Palmetto Records album, to be released April 10—McGarry pays homage to her role models among the great women of the jazz vocal tradition, from Betty Carter to Sheila Jordan to Carmen McRae. Accompanied by an intimately swinging jazz combo, McGarry puts her own inimitable spin on such classic songs as “We Kiss in a Shadow," “The Man I Love," the winking title track and, as a dream duet with Kurt Elling, the Brazilian “O Cantador." McGarry, although inspired by tradition, makes the album's songs feel utterly contemporary, not only through her distinctly 21st-century musical personality but through the personal emotions and sexual politics at play....read more...

Great interview with Matt Wilson here

Bruce Handy says:

Can I totally switch gears and talk about jazz? The drummer Matt Wilson released a new album this week, An Attitude for Gratitude, and I’ll be surprised—happily—if I hear a better jazz record this year. Wilson and his quartet (Terrell Stafford on trumpet, Gary Versace on piano, and Martin Wind on bass) perform with unusual wit, a playfulness that never turns cloying or precludes drama and beauty. This record is dedicated in part to Wilson’s original bassist, Dennis Irwin, who died in 2008, and some of the music is steeped in grief—a melancholy “Happy Days Are Here Again,” for instance, and a mournful “There’s No You”—but other tracks, like most of Wilson’s music, pulse with sheer shared joy of making music....read more...

AllAboutJazz.com

Drummer Matt Wilson may be the supreme human confluence of technique, swing, spirit, humor and musicality. Over the past 20 years, Wilson has proven to be one of a select few that can balance an inside/outside aesthetic, often within a single piece of music. He has helped shape the music of Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Either/Orchestra, Lee Konitz, Denny Zeitlin and many others, but his own body of recorded work highlights his unique personality and musical perspective better than any sideman date in his discography.

Wilson has built a strong body of work with both of his quartets—his namesake group and Arts And Crafts—during his fifteen year association with the Palmetto label. An Attitude for Gratitude stands as a fine addition to that list. While half of the personnel has changed since the advent of this group (bassist Martin Wind taking over for the late Dennis Irwin and keyboardist Gary Versace picking up where Larry Goldings left off), the overall, "open-to-anything" vision of the band remains intact. ...read more...