As the musical director of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which premieres tonight, keyboardist Jon Batiste, 28, will program the music that millions will see and hear each weeknight. He comes from a musical family of note in New Orleans and has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the Juilliard Jazz program. He’s been…

Some say that Billie Holiday is the greatest jazz singer ever. Her crystalline vocal clarity sounds like a bell, and the way she bent, swooped on and swerved around notes was from the heart of the blues. She could be girlish and youthful, but even as a teenager, she intoned a gravelly quality of maturity.…

“If at times my artworks do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.” —Jacob Lawrence, 1970 The opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration…

Maybe the two-city Small Axe: Acoustic Performance Series tour signals Lauryn Hill’s return to the contemporary-music scene. Her sporadic appearances and legal troubles did little to give fans hope that the artist who blew us away on the Fugees’ The Score and the path-breaking The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was indeed back for real, for…

Jamaican-born Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociology professor since 1969, likes to tackle big issues. Slavery and Social Death and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, two of his most acclaimed works, traverse centuries and continents. Now he’s confronting the issue of culture and black youths. In the newly released The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black…

After D’Angelo finally dropped his first recording in 14 years, Black Messiah, last December to wide critical acclaim, his fans and the music industry exhaled. On Saturday night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the reclusive artist brought his new band, Vanguard, and the sigh of relief became a secular ritual of jubilation for a…

The two-hour documentary premiering Monday on HBO, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, chronicles the career of the Godfather of Soul, from his ascension in music at the height of the social revolution of the 1960s through his impact on hip-hop and pop music. Filmmaker Alex Gibney begins and ends this fine documentary with an iconic…

In 1984, my junior year as undergrad at Hamilton College, I had the distinct honor of playing with trumpet legend and educator Clark Terry. I held the first alto-saxophone chair in the school’s jazz big band. The evening before the concert, band director Don Cantwell, Terry, a few select band members and I had dinner…

On the occasion of the announcement of the 2015 class of NEA Jazz Masters—the nation’s highest honor for jazz artists—let’s take note of three recently departed NEA jazz masters: trumpeter Joe Wilder, singer Jimmy Scott and pianist-composer Horace Silver. Each of these soft-spoken, graceful men was a musical stylist of originality. Wilder carved a path…

On May 26, the day that would have been his 88th birthday, the iconic trumpeter Miles Davis was honored in New York City with the unveiling of a street, Miles Davis Way, on the West 77th Street block where he lived in Manhattan from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. “The contribution he made to…