Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Sun Ra - A Joyful Noise
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Robert Mugge filmed jazz great Sun Ra on location in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. between 1978 and 1980. The resulting 60-minute film includes multiple public and private performances, poetry readings, a band rehearsal, interviews, and extensive improvisations. Transferred to HD from the original 16mm film and lovingly restored for the best possible viewing experience.
Sunday, November 16, 2025
The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones
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Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Patti Austin, Sarah Vaughn, and Michael Jackson are just some of the recording artists with whom mega-producer and arranger Quincy Jones has created music in his illustrious 60+ year career. Known to many simply as ‘Q’, he has received 28 Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Legend Award, and has been a major force in almost every style of music and entertainment!
Maestro Singleton has gone on record many times, stating Quincy Jones is the most important musician of our time. His mastery of musical styles ranges from jazz and R&B, Brazilian and pop, and everything in between. On October 13, 2018, your CJO, featuring guest vocalist Quiana Parler, dove into Quincy Jones’s repertoire and performed some of his most notable compositions and arrangements.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
New Standard Time: The Great American Songbook - Nnenna Freelon and your...
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The Great American Songbook – Nnenna Freelon and the Charleston Jazz Orchestra
Originally performed live on January 18, 2018
Nnenna Freelon and the Charleston Jazz Orchestra kicked off the 4th Annual Charleston Jazz Festival with their performance of NEW STANDARD TIME: The Great American Songbook. As a six-time Grammy Award nominee, Nnenna has earned a well-deserved reputation as a compelling and captivating live performer. In 2014, Nnenna starred in the critically acclaimed show “Georgia on My Mind: Celebrating the Music of Ray Charles” at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Nnenna is no stranger to the music of Ray Charles, as she toured with him, as well as many other great jazz artists, including Ellis Marsalis, Al Jarreau, George Benson, and others.
Saturday, November 8, 2025
Friday, November 7, 2025
Nnenna Freelon | Shaped by Sound
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-S2E4: Let Us All Be Windows w/Nnenna Freelon
In a deeply intimate conversation, Stone Written host Dr. Rhon (@DoctorRMB) sits down with Grammy-nominated American jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon to discuss her new book and album, exploring how jazz improvisation, deep listening, and ancestral presence shaped her journey through loss.
They reflect on grief’s non-linear nature, the healing power of creativity and community, and the ways memory, music, and everyday rituals open pathways from sorrow to hope.
Nnenna Freelon, born July 28, 1954. Freelon was born Chinyere Nnenna Pierce to Charles and Frances Pierce in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has a brother, Melvin, and a sister named Debbie. As a young woman, she sang extensively in her community and the Union Baptist Church and at St. Paul AME. She recalled, "I started singing in the church, like so many others...."Nnenna graduated from Simmons College in Boston with a degree in health care administration. For a while, she worked for the Durham County Hospital Corporation, Durham, North Carolina.
In 1990, Nnenna Freelon went to the Southern Arts Federation's jazz meeting and met Ellis Marsalis. "That was a big turning point. At that time, I had been singing for seven years. Ellis is an educator, and he wanted to nurture and help. What I didn't know at the time was that George Butler of Columbia Records was looking for a female singer. Ellis asked me for a package of materials. I had my little local press kit and my little tape with original music. Two years later, I was signed to Columbia Records." She was in her late 30s when she made her debut CD, Nnenna Freelon, for Columbia in 1992. The label dropped her in 1994, and Concord Records signed her in 1996.
In 1979, she married architect Philip Freelon. She and her husband raised three children, Deen, Maya, and Pierce, before she decided to perform professionally as a jazz singer. Their son, Pierce Freelon, is a hip hop artist, a Visiting Professor of Political Science at North Carolina Central University, and the founder of the website Blackademics, for which he has interviewed many notable figures such as Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Jesse Jackson. Deen Freelon is a Presidential Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studying social media and politics. Daughter Maya Freelon Asante is a visual artist.
Nnenna Freelon's special instrument
Dianne Reeves, Nina Simone Band, Simone & Lizz Wright - Full Concert | L...
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Sing the Truth is a tribute to the musical heritage of one of the greatest jazz divas of our time, Nina Simone. She died in 2003 at the age of 71. The tribute to her name that was organized a year later became a remarkable project that was only performed in a few places. Three great jazz vocalists, Dianne Reeves, Lizz Wright and Nina's daughter Simone, will pay homage to her work, together with the original Nina Simone Band. The orchestra is led by Al Shackman, the band leader who accompanied Nina for 41 years. Special guest will be Bob Dorough on piano. The repertoire will stretch from Ne Me Quitte Pas to Four Women. Especially that last song will impart in four couplets the impressive artistic scope of Nina Simone.
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Alice Coltrane - Song Of The Underground Railroad (Jazz Jamboree, 1987)
Alice Coltrane performing 'Song Of The Underground Railroad' at international jazz music festival Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, Poland in 1987.
Piano, Harp – Alice Coltrane
Saxophone – Ravi Coltrane
Drums – Roy Haynes
Contrabass – Reggie Workman
Howard Uni.-AFRO BLUE "NATURE BOY" - The Aeolians Oakwood University Alumni
AFRO BLUE "NATURE BOY"
I’ve Been in the Storm So Long — Aeolian Alumni: Ferdinand Era
The Aeolians Oakwood University Alumni 2020 "We Shall Overcome"
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Bayou Maharajah
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BAYOU MAHARAJAH explores the life, times and music of piano legend James Booker, who Dr. John described as "the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced." This roller coaster portrait traces Booker’s life from his early years as a chart-topping child prodigy, his star-studded years playing as a sideman, through to his outrageous solo career characterized by onstage performances in his underwear, dishing out drug-fueled conspiracy theories. Featuring interviews with the likes of Harry Connick Jr., Irma Thomas and Allen Toussaint and a generous helping of archival footage, the film brings to life the unforgettable story of this amazing musician.
James Carroll Booker III (December 17, 1939 – November 8, 1983) was an American New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist and singer. Flamboyant in personality and style, and a pianist of extraordinary technical skill, he was dubbed "the Black Liberace."
His 1960 recording "Gonzo" reached No. 43 on the Billboard magazine record chart and No. 3 in R&B, and he toured internationally in the 1970s. After being mainly a rhythm and blues artist, Booker later fused this genre with jazz and with popular music such as that of the Beatles, playing these in his signature backbeat. He profoundly influenced the New Orleans music scene, where his renditions and originals have been revived and are performed.
Booker's father and paternal grandfather were Baptist ministers. Both were pianists. He was born in New Orleans on December 17, 1939, to Ora, née Cheatham and Rev. James "Jimmie" Harald Booker, a New Orleans Baptist church pastor and World War I army veteran. Nicknamed "J.C.," Booker was a child prodigy, classically trained on piano from the age of six, and played the organ in his father's churches. Due to Rev. Jimmie Booker's health problems, Ora took her daughter Betty Jean (b. 1935) and son James to live near Ora's sister, Eva Sylvester, in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, temporarily on several occasions. Those stays amounted to around half of Booker's childhood up to the age of 8. He returned permanently to New Orleans in 1948, and enrolled in the fourth grade at a school where he befriended fellow students Art Neville, Charles Neville, and Allen Toussaint. By 1949, Booker's parents had separated, and Ora remarried to Owen Champagne of New Orleans.
In 1949, at age 9, Booker was struck by an ambulance in New Orleans, which he said was traveling about 70 miles an hour. According to him, it dragged him for 30 feet (9 metres) and broke his leg in eight places, nearly requiring its amputation. He was given morphine, which he later regarded as a cause of his eventual drug addiction. The accident left him with a permanent limp.
Booker received a saxophone for his 10th birthday in December 1949. He had asked for a trumpet, yet mastered the saxophone despite not having chosen it. But he focused on the piano, and by age 11 was performing blues and gospel organ every Sunday on the New Orleans radio station, WMRY (where his sister had performed). The following year was his last in classical instruction, when Booker learned the entire set of J.S. Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias, performing these at a professional level by age 12.
Rev. Jimmie Booker died in 1953, the year that Booker began high school at Xavier University Preparatory School on Magazine Street. Ellis Marsalis Jr. was band director at the school at the time, and noted the highly advanced quality of Booker's playing of Bach. Even as a working musician by his mid-teens, he excelled at Xavier, especially in math, music, and Spanish, and graduated in 1957. He aspired to become a Catholic priest, but ultimately gave up the idea, instead choosing to express his faith through music.
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