International Jazz Day: April 30, 2025 (Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, recorded 2025, copyrighted 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 24), after the Death in Paradise episode, my husband Charles (who’d come home from work right as the Death in Paradise show was wrapping up) and I watched a program whose title had intrigued me since I saw it listed on the KPBS Web site: International Jazz Day. It was a show to commemorate International Jazz Day, which for the past 20 years has been celebrated on April 30 (though I’d never heard of it before), and it turned out to be an hour-long concert special from a Frank Gehry-designed auditorium in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. Given what little I’ve been able to find out about it online, I suspect the show, though it carried a 2026 copyright date, was actually filmed on April 30, 2025, partly because April 30, 2026 is a few days away from now and partly because Abu Dhabi, as a member state of the United Arab Emirates (so called because it’s a coalition of Persian Gulf countries who call their leaders “emirs”), is currently under attack by Iranians as retaliation for the U.S. assaults on Iran. The show was sponsored by the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, which until 2019 was known as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until it renamed itself after its long-time director (which seems a bit churlish to me). I quite liked the program even though, as often happens in all-star spectacles like this, their definition of “jazz” was rather elastic. Not only did the program include non-jazz songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the Rolling Stones’s “Miss You,” virtually all the (quite good) vocalists – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Ruthie Foster – sang in all-out rhythm-and-blues or soul styles that had little to do with jazz singing as I understand it. (One of my major wishes for this program would have been the inclusion of Samara Joy, whose CD Linger Awhile won the Best New Artist Grammy Award for 2023. Though she’s not an outright copyist of Ella Fitzgerald, she has enough similarities I’d like to see her star in a Fitzgerald biopic, and her more delicate style of singing would have been a welcome respite from all the R&B/soul howling.)

The program began with “The Thrill Is Gone,” originally written and recorded by obscure blues singer Roy Hawkins in 1951 but which became B. B. King’s signature song when his cover became a mega-hit in 1969. It was sung here by Dee Dee Bridgewater with a succession of three electric guitarists taking solos: John McLaughlin, Leonard Brown, and John Pizzarelli. McLaughlin in particular was a welcome sight; a lot older and decidedly more grey-haired than he was when he emerged in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and became acclaimed as “the white Hendrix,” he was nonetheless in fine form and his chops were quite intact. The next song was George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and though Dianne Reeves’s vocal was excellent on its own terms, she did rather overpower this delicate, wistful romantic ballad. Still, she had some good players in her band, including alto saxophonist Tia Fuller and bassist Linda May Oh. (There were quite a few women musicians in the various ensembles, which was nice; it seems that the glass ceiling in jazz is shattering, or at least cracking, at last. The days when a genius like Mary Lou Williams could be relegated to novelty status because she was a non-singing woman jazz musician are fortunately gone.) The third song was “Voyage,” featuring tenor saxophonist David Sánchez, pianist Kenny Barron (misspelled “Baron” on his chyron), trumpeter Eldred Scott (at least that’s how I scribbled his name in my notes; I take full responsibility for any mistakes in my ID’s), bassist John Pattitucci, and drummer Kendrick Scott.

The fourth song was led by trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, a native of Cuba whose defection to the U.S. was arranged by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie when he was on tour in Cuba with the United Nations Orchestra in 1977. In obvious gratitude, the song he chose to play was Dizzy’s Latin-inflected “Tin Tin Deo,” for which Sandoval sang in Spanish as well as playing a spectacular trumpet solo. The song also included an excellent flute part by a first-rate woman player whose name was too long, convoluted, and Hispanic for me to take down, and the pianist was Danilo Pérez. The next song was “As the Spirit Sings,” a welcome vehicle for John McLaughlin with David Sánchez returning on tenor sax and Marcus Miller on piano. Then there were a couple of numbers celebrating the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s educational mission – among their other activities, they run programs to train the next generation of jazz musicians – including a drum circle on Babatunde Olatunji’s “Jingo” (the song that Carlos Santana covered and had his first major hit on in 1969) and a jazz history presentation that included the Dixieland standard “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The next song was “Take It Easy,” sung by Ruthie Foster with Nasseer Shanne (please don’t hold me to that spelling) playing a bulbous Arab stringed instrument which I think was an oud. (I looked up the oud online and it certainly looks like the instrument I saw on last night’s show; it was also the ancestor of the European lute and the Iranian/Persian “tar,” which later became the guitar and got imported into Spain when the Muslim Moors ruled it from the 800’s to the 1400’s.) What followed was a unique two-piano version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played as a duet by A Bu and Hélène Mercier; it was rather heavily edited (but then Leonard Bernstein once said of the Rhapsody in Blue, “You can cut it any way you like and it will do nothing to the piece except make it shorter”) but the two pianists played the piece with the appropriate swagger. I noticed that A Bu was playing a Fazioli piano and Hélène Mercier was playing a Steinway, exactly the same division that Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig used in their two-piano recording of Carl Nielsen’s Third Symphony, which I reviewed for Fanfare magazine. Sandberg explained in the liner notes to that CD (OUR Recordings 8.226923) that they split the work between two pianos (Nielsen had done the original as a so-called “piano four-hands” score, which means two people sitting at one piano and playing it simultaneously), a Fazioli and a Steinway, because the Fazioli “has an incredibly rich and round bass.” After the Rhapsody in Blue came one of the most pleasant surprises of the evening: an infectious version by singer and rapper José Jones of the Rolling Stones’s song “Miss You.” I’ve never been that big a fan of that song – the Stones put out their version at the height of the disco craze and it was clearly the work of a aging band trying desperately to keep up with the times – and oddly I liked Jones’s laid-back version, complete with a genuinely witty rap section, better. Jones was backed with a band that included Emmett Cohen on keyboards, Nils Lundgren on trombone, and an unidentified Black electric bass players that delivered one of the most exciting and stirring solos of the night. Then Herbie Hancock came on and did his song “Chameleon” on an instrument called the “keytar,” which allows keyboard players to stand in front of a band and bop around like guitarists do. Only Hancock’s right hand activated the keys of the “keytar,” though with his left hand he was able to manipulate a series of electronic controls on the neck that altered the sound and created an infectious slide-guitar effect as well as an echo of the all-electronic instrument, the theremin. The finale was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and while it was a bit disappointing that they didn’t try to treat this song in jazz style, they had a succession of singers as well as Herbie Hancock leading the accompaniment from an old-fashioned standard acoustic piano. The singers included Dianne Reeves, Janis Siegel, Dee Dee Bridgewater (who sang her contribution in French), Kendrick Young, Varijashree Venugopal (a singer from India who sang in her native tongue; I’m guessing it was Hindi but it might have been another of India’s indigenous languages), John Pizzarelli (who also contributed some tasty acoustic guitar), and another name I can’t make out from my scrawl. Arturo Sandoval also came out with a quite good trumpet solo. It was a very nice program and a welcome acknowledgement of jazz’s importance in the world’s musical history over the last 125 years, and my only criticism was that too much of the singing was strident and didn’t have the subtlety of true jazz vocalism as practiced by the late greats like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Ivie Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, June Christy, or Chris Connor. But given how much righteous soul the people who did sing projected, that was at best a minor quibble.