Happy Labor Day to everyone reading, and to the many hustlers, movers and shakers that keep all the plates spinning for the D.C. jazz scene. We’re forever grateful for the mountains you move. Hopefully those who went enjoyed the DC Jazz Festival over the past few days. While, as Mike West noted in his recent CapitalBop story, the festival is not the expansive, whole-city celebration and tour of the local scene that it was pre-pandemic, I’d like to still believe it sets a high-water mark for our community. 

Two more festivals are coming this month, as two of D.C.’s immediate neighbors – Rosslyn and Silver Spring – hold their annual all-day free jazz festivals this Saturday, Sep. 7. While Silver Spring’s is tailored to a more traditionalist’s definition of “jazz” and features a large cast of local players (see below), the Rosslyn Jazz Festival in recent years has become more a showcase of #BAM, writ large, and its Latin and Caribbean DNA. To wit, this year’s festival features D.C. vocalist Cecily, Gullah group Ranky Tanky, New Orleans funkateers the Rumble, and Puerto Rican bomba band El Labertino del Coco. 

Further sonic adventures can be found across the District in a couple other forms this month. First, the creative trio of pianist Amy K. Bormet, saxophonist Brian Settles and drummer Keith Butler Jr. step onto their largest stage to date this Friday, Sep. 6, with a headlining gig at the Kennedy Center’s River Pavilion. Then, for those – like me – who first heard the term “bebop” next to the word “cowboy,” the Bebop Bounty Big Band, a collective of large jazz ensemble veterans, is presenting a multimedia tribute to the jazz soundtrack of the lauded Japanese anime series “Cowboy Bebop” at the Lincoln Theater on Sep. 18.

CapitalBop is doing our part with the sonic adventures in the city this month, presenting pianist Matthew Shipp, a vanguard of New York’s downtown scene, at NYU’s campus in downtown D.C., on Sep. 27. For all non-CapitalBop show needs, consult the full D.C. jazz calendar. 

KEN VANDERMARK / PAAL NILSSEN-LOVE DUO

Monday, Sep. 2, 7 p.m.
Rhizome DC (tickets)
[view on calendar]

Saxophonist and multi-reed player Ken Vandermark, a MacArthur “genius” grantee, has been a major force in the Chicago creative music scene for decades. He is a true master improviser and sonic explorer. Listen to his group Marker for the reeling feel of rock and a noise music-like crush; listen to his duets with drummer Paul Lytton and hear the two play off each other’s intensity as they joyfully manipulate chaos into new forms.

Norwegian Paal Nilssen-Love is a drummer who’s always in service of the performance. While he is an unrelenting force on the kit when he gets going, hitting cymbals, snare, and toms like machine-gun fire, he also knows when softness or even silence is what is called for. A longtime member of prominent groups like Ballister, The Thing, and Atomic, he teams up here with Vandermark for a tour de force duo of creative music.

SILVER SPRING JAZZ FESTIVAL

Saturday, Sep. 7, 3 p.m.
Silver Spring Veterans Plaza (free and open to the public)
[view on calendar]

The Silver Spring Jazz Festival offers an annual showcase of established and emerging musicians from the D.C. and Baltimore jazz scenes to perform alongside top jazz talent for one day every late summer.

This year’s festival features some perennial favorites for the event like saxophonist Paul Carr and his Jazz Collective as well as smooth jazz keyboardist Marcus Johnson’s go-go jazz fusion project Crank and Flo. But the day also features local favorites like the grooving Ethio-jazz Feedel Band, jazzy hip-hop collective DuPont Brass, classic crooner Eric Byrd and bass clarinet luminary Todd Marcus. Headlining is the iconic Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, who carries the torch for a more traditional sound in Afro-Cuban jazz. His touch on the piano is often light, even as a soloist, ceding space as a bandleader to let the rumba, salsa grooves carry most of the music.

BRANDON WOODY

Sunday, Sep. 8, 5 p.m.
Sycamore & Oak (tickets)
[view on calendar]

Trumpeter Brandon Woody favors a brash tone that comes alive especially in moments of great intensity. In his group Upendo, that ferocious trumpet playing pairs with the meditative, electronic grooves set down by the band. His sound is rooted in the kind of modern genre-blurring electrified R&B, soul-jazz familiar to artists like Marquis Hill, with a good bit of Miles Davis’ sharp, buoyant style of soloing thrown in the mix. He’s grown from a young gun on the scene to a leading player on the D.C. landscape.

He helps kick off a new jazz series at Sycamore & Oak in Ward 8, co-sponsored by The Howard Theater.

MELISSA ALDANA 

Friday, Sep. 20, 7 and 9:30 p.m.
Blues Alley (tickets)
[view on calendar]

Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana inherits a number of different but related saxophone legacies: She’s equally influenced by, say, Mark Turner and Sonny Rollins. Aldana is a physical player that leans her whole body into the music, sometimes achieving the honking, brassy tone of Rollins; elsewhere she has a more streamlined, even-toned approach. The first female instrumentalist to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition (since renamed for Herbie Hancock), her latest albums have explored themes of self-acceptance, pandemic life and great explorations into harmony. She plays with a solid group, including Pablo Menares on bass and D.C.’s own Kush Abadey on drums, the latter two of whom also played on her latest albums 12 Stars and Echoes of the Inner Prophet.

HERBIE HANCOCK

Friday, Sep. 27, 8 p.m.
Warner Theater (tickets)
[view on calendar]

Herbie Hancock has helped to shape many of jazz’s machinations in the past 50 years. By his early 20s, Hancock was recording definitive hard-bop albums for Blue Note Records; soon after, he was a sideman in Miles Davis’ second great quintet, which exploded the rhythmic and harmonic barriers of mainstream jazz. By the 1970s, Hancock was on the forefront of jazz-funk fusion, and he created one of the most successful albums that the genre would ever know: Head Hunters. The list of his achievements runs on and on. The best way to experience the Grammy-decorated legend is to sit in the audience and let his music speak, live and in the flesh.

Some listings based on text written by Giovanni Russonello. 

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