Vaneese Thomas – Take Me To The River – 2015 Hudson River Park’s Blues BBQ – NYC

I played with this great band a few weeks ago. It was a fun blues festival down in TriBeCa in Manhattan. The band was great, Vaneese was great, the food was great and the hang afterward was cool too. I ran into so many people I’ve played with over the years in Broadway pits in…

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The Drummer Who Invented Jazz’s Basic Beat

Kenny Clarke performs at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1968. He spent the second half of his career in Europe. JazzSign/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis It doesn’t take an expert to identify this sound as a jazz rhythm: Musicians call it “spang-a-lang,” for obvious phonetic reasons, and it’s so synonymous with jazz, it no longer occurs…

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