Jazz

(Runtime 4:33)The Emerald of Siam is the night spot for live music in the Tri-Cities.It’s a Thai place: Dark black walls, low ceiling, Thai-basil…

The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival (LHJF) is a jewel among the rolling Palouse hills. Held for 56 years at the University of Idaho in Moscow, this festival has gathered on stage such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and the man of note, Lionel Hampton, who has the U of I School of Music named in his honor. This festival is a grand event that brings together jazz greats and students to create something unique.

A scheme to entertain a 4-year-old youngster in Spokane by playing a jazz album nearly three decades ago produced a cascade of aftereffects that culminated on stage in Olympia, Washington, this month with crescendos of horns and multiple standing ovations. During the debut of a 16-piece, all-Indigenous big band, the performers on stage hearkened even further back in history to celebrate the little-known, but long line of Native jazz musicians and big bands.

Simmons died last week at the age of 87. The cause of death remains unknown, but his life is cause for considerable celebration. Although jazz has established a place in academic and cultural institutions, it was and largely still is an outsider's music, and Simmons was an outsider's outsider.

When Duke Ellington famously coined the phrase "beyond category," he was talking about freedom — of choice, of expression, of belonging. He meant following your heart and your instincts into an artistic territory without borders. And that's the place where violinist Regina Carter makes her home.

Andra Day’s performance in the film earned the singer the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama. She is the second Black performer to ever win the award, following Whoopi Goldberg’s win in the category in 1985 for “The Color Purple.”

All the lights in the house would go dark. The wait staff would turn still. The audience, often largely white, would either wait, in discomfort, or leave, knowing what was to come. On stage, a single spotlight illuminated the jazz artist’s face. And then Holiday, the glamorous jazz singer, would end her set with “Strange Fruit,” a song of protest against lynchings. There would be no encore.

In 1968, Chick Corea entered our lives with two albums under his name: Tones for Joan's Bones and Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. And on Feb. 9, the pianist, composer and bandleader departed from this realm after a fast-moving cancer.

Candles and books rest on a trunk at the bottom right corner of the wide shot. There, too, are special photographs of alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins with family in his childhood home in Philadelphia. "One of the brightest things about this pandemic was going home to spend time with my mother, father and grandmother after being on the road for a while," Wilkins told NPR recently.

The keyboardist, composer and bandleader Chick Corea — one of the most revered figures in contemporary jazz, but whose work spanned fusion to classical — died on Feb. 9 at age 79.