Ryoma Takenaga

Big Ears Festival 2025

by Mark Sullivan
April 8, 2025

Big Ears Festival Knoxville, TN March 27-30, 2025 This year's festival again featured several spotlighted events (but none of them required special ticketing, as was tried last year). “Across the Horizon" was a series of concerts combining Americana and ambient music, curated by Bob Holmes and the band SUSS. “Age ...

A New Beat

By Ulysses Owens, Jr.

Label: Cellar Music Group
Released: 2024
Track listing: Sticks; Better Days; London Towne; Until I See You Again; Soulful; Heart Full Of Rhythm; Bird Lives; Helen's Song.

Ulysses Owens, Jr. and Generation Y: A New Beat

by Jack Bowers
March 19, 2024

The rhythms presented on award-winning drummer Ulysses Owens Jr.'s latest album are not exactly A New Beat, as they have been heard in various configurations for at least eighty years or more, but they do provide a plausible indication of the path that Art Blakey's legendary Jazz Messengers would presumably have followed had Blakey lived into ...

Introducing Pianist Tyler Bullock

by Sanford Josephson
February 9, 2024

Tyler Bullock began taking classical piano lessons in his hometown of Nashville when he was four years old. Eight years later, he discovered jazz through an organization called the Nashville Jazz Workshop. “It's kind of similar to Jazz House Kids," he said. “They have classes and summer camps. It was a summer camp I went to, ...

Wells Fargo Jazz For Teens

by Sanford Josephson
May 2, 2022

Clay Hudson grew up in a family “surrounded by music, and it rubbed off on me." Henry Spencer remembers that in the second grade at St. Luke's School in the West Village, “every student took drum lessons. I was the only one who stuck with it." Hudson and Spencer, both drummers, are two of ...