SN: This concert features a double bill of two jazz combos: the Vijay Iyer Trio and Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Apex. What can audience members expect to hear from these two ensembles? In what ways are they …

If you travel by air enough, eventually you’ll show up at your destination but your bags won’t.  When this has happened to me, my missing luggage has eventually shown up, but it’s never fun. The …

In Ann Arbor last month, Cyro Baptista appeared with Luciana Souza.  During the concert, he had the audience in stitches, especially when he showed why Home Depot should consider endorsing him. He said he gets …

What do the Bad Plus, Luciana Souza Trio, and the Schubert Piano Trios have in common? They are a trio of trios coming to Ann Arbor in February, but that’s where the similarities end. While one of these trios plays the chamber music of 19th-century composer Franz Schubert, the other two might be classified as jazz trios. Yet, neither fits traditional notions of a jazz trio. In this blog post I set out to explore “the art of the trio.” Specifically, I set out to ask: what makes a great jazz trio?

When the jazz trio The Bad Plus arrived in Ann Arbor last week for their two-set show at the Mendelssohn Theatre, we gave them a Flip Cam and asked them to shoot some backstage video …