Akiyoshi became the first Japanese jazz musician to make a significant mark on the U.S. jazz scene, winning acclaim as a composer and arranger with the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, which garnered 14 Grammy nominations in its 30-year history.

[...]

Akiyoshi closed Thursday‘s concert with a solo version of a composition she originally wrote for her big band, titled "Hope," the last movement of her extended suite "Hiroshima: Rising From the Abyss," dedicated to victims of the 1945 atomic-bomb blast. Akiyoshi found the tune with its message of hope springing from tragedy and destruction a particularly appropriate choice to close her regular Monday-night big-band performances at New York‘s Birdland jazz club following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"We all should have hope," she said, before playing the encore.

[Eigsti's] goal, he says, is to elicit emotion.

"It's possible to look at a painting and be moved to tears," he says. "But I think it happens more often in music, partly because the sense of hearing is closely tied to memory.

"The hardest thing to do as an instrumentalist is to involve the listener, especially when our collective culture reflects attention deficit disorder - we can't even buy whole CDs anymore; we download one tune at a time.

"Dancing used to play a role in jazz. When it was swing, people danced to it. When it was bebop, people danced to it. No one dances to improvised jazz, partly because it has odd time signatures.

``Codes'' is a smart, exuberant reworking of classic tunes from many traditions. With a group of mostly Latin American players, Berroa creates a febrile, never-forced synthesis of Brazilian, Cuban and American jazz that's harmonically rich and rhythmically unpredictable. Where much Latin jazz lurches into a stiff swing, Berroa's band moves easily and nimbly.

Berroa won recording and performing gigs with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Charlie Haden, and the late Latin-jazz showman and percussionist Tito Puente, among many others. His bread-and- butter gig, he says, has been with fellow-Cuban Rubalcaba, who was also first promoted by Gillespie.

Berroa was brought to the great trumpeter's attention by Mario Bauza, who helped launch an early Latin-jazz movement with Gillespie in the 1940s. When a Boston snowstorm delayed Gillespie's regular drummer one night, Berroa got his big break. He toured and recorded with ``the Diz'' for much of the following decade until the trumpeter's death.

"I feel very spiritual or even mystical from being in this world," Cohen said. "Through music and nature -- which are one -- I feel the most spiritual. It comes out in my music, which is a blessing. Because it not only means that it's real, but I've found a channel to express it back."

But Cohen is not all clouds and cherubs. He writes songs about heartbreak ("Emotional Storm"), his bandmates ("For Mark") and lost loved ones ("Elli"). He calls himself a "self-taught freak" whose playing and writing grew from hours and hours of practice. He talks fondly of Paris and Spain, and one of his favorite things about professional music is traveling the world.

[...]

"I like to make records that tell a defined, carved story," Cohen said. "I think that's part of what makes a good record, just like a good book. In general, jazz records are getting to be more improvisational than they used to be.

"Sometimes people make jazz records that are so improvised that you feel like you're in such a mess. You have to realize that in order to set yourself free you have to not be free."

[...] Yet as a soloist and leader, Walton has always been unfairly underrated. Despite having preceded pianist McCoy Tyner in Coltrane's band and having played with saxophonist Shorter during what is indisputably the greatest incarnation of the Jazz Messengers, Walton's name rarely seems to share the same exalted space on the marquee with either Tyner or Shorter (both of whom, unlike Walton, are headlining Eastman Theatre shows at the Rochester jazz fest).

Perhaps Walton missed his bid for immortality when he declined to play on most of the main tracks for Coltrane's classic 1960 Giant Steps. Tyner, on the other hand, played on all of Coltrane's 1965 A Love Supreme, and it cemented his reputation.

"I had to pass on a lot of the songs on Giant Steps because Trane was playing too fast and I couldn't match him," Walton recalls. "Trane worked like an obsessed man who was in pursuit of something, and in the process it turned him into a virtuoso."