Kevin Whitehead
Kevin Whitehead is the jazz critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Currently he reviews for The Audio Beat and Point of Departure.
Whitehead's articles on jazz and improvised music have appeared in such publications as Point of Departure, the Chicago Sun-Times, Village Voice, Down Beat, and the Dutch daily de Volkskrant.
He is the author of Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film (2020), Why Jazz: A Concise Guide (2010), New Dutch Swing (1998), and (with photographer Ton Mijs) Instant Composers Pool Orchestra: You Have to See It (2011).
His essays have appeared in numerous anthologies including Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006, Discover Jazz and Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro-Black and Other Solar Myths.
Whitehead has taught at Towson University, the University of Kansas and Goucher College. He lives near Baltimore.
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Carney rounds up diverse musicians in a sextet that cuts across generations, stylistic preferences and social circles. Their interpersonal chemistry flows on a new album.
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Blakey led his band for almost 40 years, making many classic records with top musicians. Just Coolin', a newly unearthed 1959 recorded studio session, showcases his stylistic precision.
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The Bay Area trumpet player broke out in jazz over a decade ago. A new album by his quartet, on the tender spot of every calloused moment, shows just how pretty Akinmusire can play.
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Taylor brings hi-hat funk to his new trio's album. It's a slightly odd line-up, with no bass instrument — which opens up possibilities for different ways to kick the rhythm along.
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Many jazz fans hate biopic films, but critic Kevin Whitehead likes noticing which true elements get in — or get left out — as messy lives are squeezed into stock-story formulas.
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Over 90-some years of movies about jazz, many films have spun a familiar lick, sometimes falling back on stock standards when inspiration fails, and sometimes knowingly quoting from older works.
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Lucian Ban, John Surman and Mat Maneri bring a fresh treatment — and musical chemistry — to the bare-bones folk transcriptions of the 20th-century Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.
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The Dayna Stephens trio's improvised grace in a compact setting — where players are interdependent, but no one steps on any toes — sets a good example for life during the pandemic.
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Konitz, who died April 15, had one of the longest careers in jazz. He was an intuitive soloist, with a mercurial tone, a quick mind and lifelong commitment to improvisation.
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Mezzacappa's new sextet was inspired by stories from the late Italian writer. Cosmicomicsis alive with slippery music, light-touch humor and sounds that curve through time and space.