Jon Batiste makes some of TV's best music, night in and night out. As bandleader of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the multi-instrumentalist comes up with perfect tunes to introduce guests, to complement Colbert's jokes, and to keep the audience hyped up. (Many of the songs fitting that last category are Batiste originals, performed by him and his band, Stay Human.) But Batiste's career stretches far beyond late-night TV. He started out making music at a very young age in his hometown of Kenner, Louisiana, and since then, he's recorded a whole album in and around the New York subway system, performed all over the world, and appeared semi-regularly on HBO's series Treme. His newest album, Hollywood Africans (out Thursday, September 28), is a combination of Batiste originals and terrific covers of iconic songs that he's put his own spin on, including "What a Wonderful World," Charlie Chaplin's "Smile," and the music from the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog. I was thrilled to have Batiste join me this week on the latest episode of my podcast, I Think You're Interesting, and about halfway through our conversation, I realized something: For as much as I've covered late-night TV over the years, I have no idea what goes into a late-night musical director's job. So I asked Batiste, and it sounds like a lot of work. READ THE Q&A

Despite being one of the first and oldest forms of popular music, opera sometimes struggles to connect with 21st century audiences. However, Anthony Roth Costanzo is breaking down the genre's stodgy stereotype and making opera more accessible - taking his distinctive sound to the masses, from a sixth-grade classroom in the Bronx to NPR's own Tiny Desk. "I'm trying to turn that around, transform it and say, listen, this is something that can connect to all different kinds of people," Costanzo tells All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro. "I feel like the emotional sweep of opera is what we need to give us some perspective on our lives, on this time we're living in, on all of that. We need that kind of catharsis." READ & LISTEN TO npr: all things considered SEGMENT p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060; min-height: 14.0px}

npr - all things considered segment

Following his critically acclaimed recording of piano works by Philip Glass, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has released his second album, a collection of both well-known and rarely performed works by Johann Sebastian Bach. Renowned for his innovative music projects, Ólafsson offers listeners a very personal vision of Bach's intricate keyboard music, artfully weaving Bach's original works together with transcriptions by Busoni, Kempff, Ziloti, Rachmaninoff, and Ólafsson himself. Víkingur Ólafsson - Music of Bach is WFMT: Chicago 'Featured New Release'

John Scofield has a distinctive sound and an unceasing sense of adventure; he's bringing his current project, Combo '66, to Dazzle for two nights, Oct. 6 and 7. Sometimes Scofield dabbles in rock and fusion, but the lineup of Combo '66 seems more straight-ahead: Drummer Bill Stewart, keyboardist Gerald Clayton and bassist Vicente Archer are accomplished jazz guys through and through. The Grammy Award-winning jazz guitarist, band leader and composer is set to release his new album by the same name on Verve Records. Combo 66 which marks his 66th birthday combines jazz with genre-defying elements, allowing Scofield to find new modes of expression. READ THE FULL Denver Post ARTICLE

Tony Bennett has extended his Official Chart record as the oldest male artist to enter the Official Albums Chart Top 40. Aged 92, Tony's latest collection, a collaborative album with Diana Krall titled Love Is Here To Stay, debuts at Number 33 on this week's chart. Tony is also the oldest man to land a UK Top 10 album; aged 88 in 2014, his album Cheek to Cheek with Lady Gaga reached Number 10. However, Tony is not the oldest artist to have ever charted within the Top 40. That would be Vera Lynn, who at the age of 100 reached Number 3 with her album 100 in March 2017. Back in 2009 aged 92 she became the oldest living performer to score a chart-topping record. SEE THE music-news.com PAGE p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060; min-height: 14.0px}

From Studio to Screen is an original mini-documentary that charts the process a musician goes through to compose for film. FACT gets insights from Max Richter, Anna Meredith, Lustmord and Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury about their beginnings, their high points and their relationship with the intimidating global film industry. Max Richter is the mind behind the scores for a range of projects including Waltz With Bashir, Black Mirror and My Brilliant Friend, the upcoming series based on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. The influential composer, who recently released a 15th anniversary edition of his album The Blue Notebooks, visited The Store at 180 The Strand to break down the collaborative efforts of working in film. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060; min-height: 14.0px} READ THE FULL FACT ARTICLE & WATCH THE VIDEO

Close your eyes when Madeleine Peyroux sings and you can forget when and where you are. It could be a smoky French café in the 1930s, a blues-drenched American juke joint in 1940s, or tonight Saturday, Sept. 22, in the Fremont Theater. Peyroux had a fairly peripatetic upbringing. Born to "hippie" parents in Athens, Georgia, she was raised in New York and California before her parents divorced when she was 13 and she and her mother moved to Paris. Today she lives in Brooklyn, though she said in a recent phone interview, "I travel so much I'm not super grounded to any one place." Her newest, Anthem, was produced and co-written by four-time Grammy winner Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock), who she's co-written with in the past. What sort of show should people expect when she appears this weekend at the Fremont? "Right now, we're going to be presenting songs on this recording in a traditional jazz context," Peyroux said. "We're a quintet, and I think the approach, in a way, is a pop approach. A lot of the great jazz standards were pop songs at the time. It's more about the lyrics and the story, a story that's a personal plea from one person to a whole bunch of other people, a personal message, a political message." Anthem's title track perfectly encompasses that sentiment and sounds like a classic American Songbook jazz standard with a contemporary twist: "The birds they sang at the break of day/ Start again I heard them say/ Don't dwell on what has passed away/ Or what is yet to be// Yeah the wars they will be fought again/ The holy dove she will be caught again/ Bought and sold and bought again/ The dove is never free// Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060; min-height: 14.0px} READ THE FULL New Times ARTICLE

Join KUVO: Denver on The Nightside with host Andy O' on Sunday, September 23 from 8 to 10 pm as we celebrate John Coltrane's birthday! "Trane Tracks" celebrates Coltrane's poetry and song. John was born in Hamlet North Carolina on September 23, 1926. He would go on to become one of the most influential and beloved figures of the Jazz world. Much poetry has been written about Trane and his own musical output was prodigious. On Wednesday, March 6 1963, Coltrane and his classic Quartet - McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones - went to Van Gelder Studios in Englewood, NJ and cut a complete album's worth of material, including several original compositions that were never recorded elsewhere.  They spent the day committing these to tape, taking time with some, rehearsing them two, three times, playing them in different ways and in different configurations. The session has now resulted in an entire studio album featuring unheard originals released 55 years later. This is, in short, the holy grail of jazz and was titled - Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album on Impulse! Records.

When we think of jazz, there are a few notable labels that stand out as icons of the genre: Verve, Atlantic, Columbia and Blue Note, to name a few. But we also think of Impulse!, the iconic label established by legendary record producer Creed Taylor in 1960. Set up under the umbrella of ABC-Paramount Records (the same ABC that's now part of Disney), Impulse! began life with a short list of legendary artists, including Ray Charles and swing veteran Benny Carter, as well as John Coltrane, who released more albums than any other performer on the label. As a result, the label became known as "The House That Trane Built." Impulse! had a run of two decades in the 1960s and '70s that were unlike just about anything else, constantly at the forefront of innovations in jazz, and sometimes outside of jazz: Prog-rock outfit Genesis were the rare rock band to actually issue an album through the label. Impulse!'s branding extended beyond its amazing sounds; the orange, black and white design scheme of the albums made them stand out on any shelf, and each record's cover was adorned with stunning photography. The list you see below isn't just an introductory guide to the music but likewise a gallery of incredible design. And with Impulse! in headlines again for the release of a lost John Coltrane album, the outstanding new work by Mercury Prize-nominated Sons of Kemet (and a newly unearthed recording by alum Charles Mingus), we saw fit to compile a list of 25 of our favorite releases to be stamped with the iconic logo. It should be noted that, like many of our other surveys of significant labels, we stuck to one release per artist (with one sort-of exception). With Impulse! that was a particularly tough decision, since some of these artists released so much amazing material. But that being said, albums such as Coltrane, Ascension, Africa Brass, Journey in Satchidananda, Ptah the El Daoud, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Tauhid, Deaf Dumb Blind, Thembi, Karma, The Magic of Ju-Ju, Fire Music and various other albums are, without question, essential. We simply made the decision to focus on certain albums for the sake of personal preferences or to highlight something unique that wasn't represented in other albums. (We also didn't include Impulse! reissues of Sun Ra's catalog, since it wasn't the original label of release-sorry!) Regardless, these essential Impulse! Records albums all merit repeat spins. We hope you enjoy the journey. SEE Impulse! Records: 25 Essential Albums via TREBLE

For a countertenor, music history is a broken line. At one end is the treasury of parts written for castrato singers during the Baroque era; at the other, an explosion of contemporary music. In between is the 19th century: the mainstay of opera, and a countertenor void. Anthony Roth Costanzo, 36, has just released "ARC," a recording that bridges the Great Countertenor Gap, finding common ground between the music of Handel and Philip Glass. An early-music ensemble, Les Violons du Roy, accompanies Mr. Costanzo's gleaming, often emotionally raw soprano on tracks alternating between the two composers. "I'm glad I'm a countertenor, even though I can't sing ‘Tosca' at all the best opera houses and make my money with that," he said in a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. "I've had to carve out my own path. And in the end that's what I find most exciting." It's in the live production he's created to accompany the album - at the Barnes Foundation, as part of Opera Philadelphia's O18 festival this weekend and next, and at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in November - that Mr. Costanzo can really show off his entrepreneurial chops. The show, "Glass Handel," features choreography by Justin Peck. The painter George Condo, who created the cover art for the disc, will produce a live artwork from behind a backlit scrim. Videos directed by nine artists, including Mark Romanek (better known for his collaborations with Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift), James Ivory, Pix Talarico and Maurizio Cattelan, will play. A small army of "people movers" transport audience members, who remain seated, from one area of the space to another. And everyone, from the dancers to the movers, will wear costumes designed by Raf Simons, of Calvin Klein. Even Mr. Costanzo's water bottle will be clad in couture. Though the project was produced in collaboration with Opera Philadelphia, National Sawdust, and the art-fashion media company Visionaire and Cath Brittan, it was Mr. Costanzo who raised the bulk of the budget and inspired artists to contribute their work for free. (The value of those contributions brings the true cost of the show to several times the official $500,000 budget.) It's not the first time Mr. Costanzo has had to hustle to mount a production. In his senior year at Princeton University, he wrote a show about a fictional castrato, unlocking $35,000 from college funds. Even after a win at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2009, he understood he needed to generate opportunities for himself. "The Met is great," he said, "but it's not going to be my bread and butter. And then what do you do? Do you go around singing Bach in churches and do all the Baroque operas you can in Europe? Or do you create something new?" This summer he became the first Westerner to perform in a Kabuki show at a storied theater in Tokyo, in a take on the classic "Tales of Genji" he created in Kyoto in 2014. After each performance, Mr. Costanzo would work through the night on "Glass Handel." "I would stay up until 4 or 5 a.m., talking to people in New York on the phone, and then rest so I could sing the next day," he said. He estimates he spent eight hours a day on fund-raising for eight months. Back in the United States, he befriended Mr. Condo, an amateur lute player who bonded with Mr. Costanzo over readings of Dowland. Mr. Condo introduced Mr. Simons to the project. "I'm like, ‘Raf, I can't raise that much money; I don't have it in my budget,'" Mr. Costanzo said, recalling his reaction when Mr. Simons agreed to dress the performers. "I already have to raise half a million dollars for this show, and I'm a single person." Mr. Simons agreed to donate hundreds of garments and pairs of shoes. He declined to comment on the value of his contribution, and Mr. Costanzo said it was hard to put a dollar figure on the value his high-profile collaborators - and their respective millions of followers on social media - bring to a niche music endeavor. The videos, too, materialized free of charge, in large part through the intercession of Visionaire. Mr. Cattelan, an enfant  terrible of the art world best known for his 18-karat-gold toilet called "America," contributed a hallucinogenic collage set to Handel. Mr. Romanek sent in a mesmerizing single-take film of a street dancer gliding to Glass under a freeway overpass in Los Angeles. "The reason they did it," Mr. Costanzo said, "is that even though they are at the top of their game, creative freedom means a lot." That freedom, ultimately, is what drives him, too. "I'm 36, and I have a really nice career doing what I do," he said. "But do I want to be a singer for hire? How do you move the needle? When do you try to make this a turning point? Not only for me, but if I'm really passionate about getting new audiences for classical music - where are they?" SIGN UP for Glass Handel - Saturday, Sunday and Sept. 30 at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; operaphila.org. And Nov. 26-27 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Manhattan; nationalsawdust.org.    p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #606060; min-height: 14.0px}

On her previous album, "Wonderland," Alice Sara Ott explored the music and myths of Edvard Grieg and his native Norway. Now "Nightfall," which Ott calls "one of the most personal recordings" she has made, gathers music by three composers who lived and worked in France. Ott writes of the album's title, "Nightfall is that magical hour when day and night face each other and the sky descends into twilight. For a brief moment, light and darkness are in harmony and merge together." The album reflects as much, reveling in mystery, magic, and contemplation, even with a monster of a piece like Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" on the program. READ THE FULL Texas Public Radio ARTICLE

Composer Max Richter will release his original soundtrack to new Yann Demange-directed film White Boy Rick via StudioRichter and Deutsche Grammophon this November. The Oscar-tipped film stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Jason Leigh and is based on the true story of teenager Richard Wershe Jr., who became an undercover informant for the FBI and later a drug kingpin, during the crack epidemic and war on drugs in '80s Detroit. Richter's soundtrack mirrors and amplifies the murky underworld of the film, drawing on drone and industrial influences, as well as the composer's trademark ambience. White Boy Rick is available to stream now on Spotify and will be released on vinyl on 30th November. The soundtrack follows the reissue of Richter's critically-acclaimed The Blue Notebooks earlier this year. Richter also features in FACT Magazine's new film, exploring the art of scoring for film. SEE The Vinyl Factory PAGE & WATCH THE VIDEOS