Bob Belden is an old friend and our lives have intersected constantly over the past 33 years. We’ve worked together on many Blue Note recording projects and definitive Miles Davis box sets for Columbia. Bob’s a man of many talents and Jeff Dayton-Johnson’s extensive interview with Belden makes for magnificent reading on All About Jazz.

-Michael Cuscuna

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A story some of us dare to only dream about: investment banker leaves the heady world of high yield bonds and derivatives, to make new music records with Vijay Iyer, Henry Threadgill and Rudresh Mahanthappa. We’re the richer for his decision. Find out what he did, and why.

-Nick Moy

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29 year old Norwegian trombonist Kristoffer Kompen has been enchanting listeners with his brilliant solo efforts in only a short period of time. It’s a wonderful harbinger of things to come when we have players of this age embrace and execute pre-Bop and modern jazz. At the Whitley Bay Classic Jazz Party last October, Kris shows why he considers Jack Teagarden a major influence capturing the essence and some pet licks of Tea in his own playing.

-Scott Wenzel

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The Jazz Museum in Harlem is celebrating Black History Month by focusing on four great women in jazz: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Wiiliams, Abbey Lincoln and Cassandra Wilson. Check out this detailed calendar of events for the month of February. These concerts look anything but commonplace.

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Marcus Gilmore is burnishing his own well-deserved reputation with Vijay Iyer, Chick Corea and Nicholas Payton, with no help needed from his venerated grandfather, Roy Haynes. Consider this a way to find out more about an important young drummer on today’s scene, in his own right.

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David Brent Johnson celebrates the magnificent music of Randy Weston on Indiana Public Radio. I first met Randy as a fan in the mid ‘60s while running around Manhattan trying to collect all of his albums (most of which were already out of print). We became friends and I learned to love the man as much as his artistry. He is gracious, warm, spiritual, down-to-earth and brilliant.

-Michael Cuscuna

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Fusion is a musical category no one has been able to define because it contains so many diverse artists. Basically, in 1969, it was coined to mean a fusion of jazz and rock. By 1970, it came to mean anything that was successful and pure jazz audiences hated. The audio examples on this NPR piece glimpse the diversity of what was going on in the ‘70s. Fusion continues and has exploded its boundaries well beyond the music created 30 years ago.

-Michael Cuscuna

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I remember having to write a short paper on a Bach fugue in college and coming to the realization that a lot of his music sounded more transcribed than composed. He was the original bebopper for my money. Doug Ramsey compares John Lewis’s “Django” to the adagio movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with interesting results. For good measure, he also posts the 1937 jazz version of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto by Django, Stephane Grappelli and Eddie South.

-Michael Cuscuna

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Back in the day when Clear Channel didn’t exist, FM radio didn’t have playlists and the popular format was “freeform underground,” those of us who were disc jockeys were among the happiest, most overpaid people in the country. The most fun was creating musical sets building off of keys, tempos and topics. Mick Morrison’s excellent 5-song set of winter blues on NPR’s blog supreme takes me back to those days

-Michael Cuscuna

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