Give us your jazz hands. Today’s episode focuses on the genre whose influence can be felt through every style of popular music today. Luckily, there is a growing contingency of artists and collectives around the world leading a new jazz movement and redefining how the genre is considered in popular discourse. We’ll listen back to conversations with harp visionary Brandee Younger; Chicago’s beat scientist Makaya McCraven; London’s freshest innovator Shabaka Hutchings; Grammy-winning bass prodigy Esperanza Spalding; seven members of Los Angeles’s West Coast Get Down, AKA the Wu-Tang of Jazz; Detroit’s genre-defying Ian Finkelstein, Jon Dixon and Marcus Elliot; and the New York ensemble Onyx Collective. These artists are some of many who are carrying the genre into the future, while respecting the greats who came before them.
