Lua Hadar

Lua Hadar is a vocalist, actress, comedienne and cabaret artist who heads the ensemble TWIST, based in the Bay Area. Hers is "jazz without borders," spiced with elements of Latin, pop, funk, and international cabaret. Maxwell Chandler interviewed Lua for Jazz Police. 

Maxwell Chandler: You come from a musical family, your father being a saxophonist. What was the music you heard growing up and how did it influence you? 

Lua Hadar:  My father played both classical music and what at the time was popular music, the Great American Songbook. He played in bandstands, he played casually, and he played at Roseland Dance Hall in New York. He also played symphonic music. Around the house he really only played symphonic music and some opera. We heard classical music at home but when I sang with him at the piano we would sing popular songs. I had a great deal of classical influence as a foundation.  

Every summer I would see my father play in these big hotels like Brown’s and Grossinger’s. It was the “Borscht Belt”, that’s what they called the Catskills. Once or twice a summer we would get to dress up and go see him perform and see the stage show. I would see him in these bands and I would see all the singers and the comedians. Afterwards the Latin bands would play, I would see people start to come onto the dance floor and I would love the Latin rhythms. I think all of that had a great influence on me.   

The Karriem Riggins Virtuoso Experience©John Whiting

We caught Riggins and his group—the great Mulgrew Miller on acoustic piano and Fender-Rhodes, Warren Wolf on vibes, Joe Sanders on bass, and DJ Dummy on turntables—at the Dakota on Sunday, June 28. We weren’t sure what to expect. A fusion of jazz and hip-hop, à la G.U.R.U. or Branford Marsalis’s Buckshot LeFonque or Madlib’s work for Blue Note? Something entirely different? Where would Miller fit in?  

Mark Hollingsworth

On his current CD, Chasing The Sun, smooth jazz artist and producer Mark Hollingsworth blew it in a big way. The popular saxophonist and flautist could have gone in a more traditional direction with his music to ensure the album’s success, but he defied conventional wisdom and blew it.  We are of course referring to the fact that Hollingworth simply used a lot of wind to play four different saxophone voices (soprano, tenor, alto, and baritone), a vast array of flutes, clarinets and penny whistles for his daring and imaginative arrangements.  

“I set out to create an album that might be difficult to categorize. If we had referred to it as eclectic, people would not have known what that meant. I am not sure quite what I want to call it. When I started to conceive this album, I felt like the direction of smooth jazz in recent years had been getting narrower and narrower, as it became more exclusive rather than inclusive. The guys that I work with can do all this and more. I wanted to go outside the box to say that there are a lot more possibilities out there. I wanted to make this album as fun as we could make it, and take advantage of the things that we can do, to see if people liked it,” says Hollingsworth in commenting on the vision that he had as he set out to create the upbeat, tracks with the lively grooves that we hear on his CD. 

Geoffrey Keezer©Brad Buckman

“A refreshingly open-eared sensibility in the modern manner, and he has more than enough virtuosity and sheer musical wit and intelligence to weave all of his apparently disparate strands of influence into an original and compelling whole.” –Time Magazine

Interest in global music is neither new in jazz nor new to American pianist Geoffrey Keezer. Jazz from its inception melded cross-continental influences, predominately the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean with the forms and instrumentation of European cultures, and the pervasive influence of other world traditions has been evident throughout the genre’s evolution. And Keezer, one of the most respected performers and composers on the scene today, has already consummated projects based on the folk roots of Hawaii (Falling Up, MaxJazz 2003, with slack-key guitarist Keola Beamer) and Okinawa’s Ryukyu Islands (Yasukatsu Oshima with Geoffrey Keezer, JVC Victor 2007). It’s perfectly logical in the development of both jazz and Keezer, then, that new interest has surged in Afro-Peruvian music. For Geoffrey Keezer, the attraction has pushed him to his newest project on ArtistShare, Áurea.

Carolyn Leonhart©Manuel Apaz

Jazz vocalist and composer Carolyn Leonhart has always been surrounded by gifted artists. Her father Jay Leonhart is a highly respected acoustic double bass player; her mother was a talented singer who left a promising professional career to focus on raising her family; and her husband Wayne Escoffery, besides being a very talented tenor saxophonist, is considered to be one of jazz music’s most insightful composers and arrangers. In addition, a few months ago Leonhart came off of an extensive tour with Steely Dan, whom she first joined straight out of high school. In some ways all of those experiences have, as one would expect, contributed to who the singer is today. However, Leonhart has served notice with her new CD, If Dreams Come True, that she is establishing a significant legacy of her own.

Randy Brecker©Merri Cyr

I walked into the green room at the Triple Door in Seattle, Washington last November, and there he was, with his trademark hat on his head, his Sean Connery-like beard, dressed in blue jeans, and sitting on a chair in the center of the room. In some ways it was a little like being ushered into a room with royalty. Grammy Award winner Randy Brecker seemed a little bit wary of the journalist who was about to pepper him with questions that he probably presumed he had heard hundreds or perhaps thousands of times before and could answer in his sleep. Brecker is a jazz icon, and for the first time in a long time, I was feeling just a bit intimidated about doing an interview. I took a little bit of comfort knowing that if he was mean to me, I was also here to review his performance, as one of the musicians in Brian Bromberg’s Downright Upright All Star Band. The comfort didn’t last long and the nervousness soon returned. What was I going to do, be the only person on the planet to ever diss the legendary trumpeter Randy Brecker?