AppleMusicJazz Playlist With Alan Silva A.R.T.DA MyStreamS

Next to Hugh Masekela, nobody has done more to spread the sound of South African jazz than pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim, a sound poet who forged an amalgam of post-bop, gospel and township jive. Born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934, the mixed-race musician was considered a person of colour according to South Africa’s restrictive apartheid system. He began playing piano aged six, steeped in the music his mother performed in church. In 1959 Brand’s hybrid approach blossomed in the Jazz Epistles, a short-lived all-Black group that featured the nation’s best jazz artists, including Masekela. While the group avoided political statements, it nevertheless disbanded in March 1960 as apartheid forces stepped up their repression after the Sharpeville Massacre. In 1962 Brand fled the country, initially settling in Switzerland; while there, he was introduced to Duke Ellington, who produced an influential trio recording by the pianist. Brand moved to New York in 1965, where h...

For generations, Sonny Rollins not only set the standard on tenor saxophone—he elevated jazz as a whole, embodying what many regard as the essence of a great improviser. Schooled on the job by Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk in the ’40s, the NYC-born Rollins landed a key gig with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet in 1955. But even in the midst of huge success, he strove to play better—to be truer to his creative intentions. Possessed of a monastic self-discipline, Rollins took sabbaticals for practice and introspection, most famously from 1959 to 1961, when he could be seen woodshedding on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. He strove for a more joyously melodic approach and a big sound while showing daunting facility with the harmonic demands of bebop and post-bebop. He reconciled influences from calypso to free jazz to pop, and he could transform the simplest showtune into a thing of enduring beauty. And a half-century of yoga practice also opened doors in his work to a more a...

+ James "Blood" Ulmer was a free jazz exception: an outside guitarist who forged a style based largely on the traditions of African-American vernacular music. Ulmer was an adherent of saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman's vaguely defined Harmolodic theory, which subverts jazz's harmonic component in favor of freely improvised, non-tonal, or quasi-modal counterpoint. Ulmer played with a stuttering, vocalic attack; his lines were often texturally and chordally based, inflected with the accent of a soul-jazz tenor saxophonist. That's not to say his sound was untouched by the rock tradition -- the influence of Jimi Hendrix on Ulmer was strong -- but it was mixed with blues, funk, and free jazz elements. The resultant music was an expressive, hard-edged, loudly amplified hybrid that is, at its best, on a level with the finest of the Harmolodic school. His career spanned many decades and he remained active into the 2010s. Ulmer died on June 3, 2026, at the age of 8...

Sometimes it only takes a single sublime statement to define an artist's sound. For composer-saxophonist Oliver Nelson, that would be The Blues and the Abstract Truth, an innovative 1961 release that mixed funk and sophistication in equal proportion. Born in 1932, the academically trained Nelson played for Count Basie and Duke Ellington, worked as house arranger at the Apollo Theater and recorded dozens of albums as a bandleader. In 1967 he moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote for Hollywood before his death in 1975.