Jazz

Kieran Culkin and wife Jazz Charton made good on their Emmys pact, recently welcoming their third child, according to the former’s “Succession” co-star.

Oscar and Emmy winner Culkin’s on-screen sister Sarah Snook, also an Emmy-winning actor, announced the arrival of the couple’s newest child while speaking to Access Hollywood on Monday. “I met the little baby, it’s so cute,” she said during the premiere of Peacock’s “All Her Fault.”

“They’re very happy and so cute,” she added.

A representative for Culkin did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation. Charton, a contributor for the Financial Times, has not yet publicly addressed the arrival of their littlest one.

“A Real Pain” star Culkin, younger brother of “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin, tied the knot with Charton in 2013. They share two children, Kinsey Sioux and Wilder Wolf, and lovingly teased a plan to grow their family during the 75th Emmy Awards in January 2024.

Culkin, 43, famously used part of his acceptance speech for the lead actor prize to remind Charton, 37, of the deal they had struck prior to the ceremony. As he acknowledged his wife and children, Culkin declared, “I want more.”

“You said ‘maybe,’ if I win! I love you so much,” he told Charton from stage.

Charton confirmed that baby No. 3 was on the way in late September, sharing a cheeky Instagram post that also tapped into her well-documented fan love for “Matrix” star Keanu Reeves. “Saw Keanu Reeves on broadway and now I’m 9 months pregnant,” she captioned her post, which featured photos of her baby bump, “This is very on brand for me.”

She revealed she was expecting amid the debut of Reeves and longtime “Bill & Ted” collaborator Alex Winter’s production of “Waiting for Godot.” She quipped in her caption that she had “made a deal with this baby to let me make it to this [show] before labor, not sure what it wants in return but I’m CLEARLY a woman of my word.”

Snook, the first to break the couple’s baby news, has remained close to her “Succession” co-star since the hit HBO drama concluded two years ago. Culkin and Snook respectively starred as Roman and Shiv Roy, two of numerous potential — ahem — successors to media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox). “Succession” aired from 2018 to 2023 and won a total of 19 Primetime Emmy Awards, including acting prizes for Culkin, Snook and co-stars Jeremy Strong and Matthew Macfadyen.

With the arrival of Culkin and Charton’s third child, it’s clear that the “Succession” legacy now extends past powerhouse performances, viral memes and memorable lines. Anyone got a ludicrously capacious baby bag?

Elliot Zwiebach was 62 years old when he sang in front of a live audience for the first time.

The retired reporter had always loved show tunes, but he’d never considered singing in public before.

“I sang for my own amusement, and I wasn’t very amused,” he said recently.

But one night, after attending a few open mic nights at the Gardenia Supper Club in West Hollywood as a spectator, he got up the nerve to step onto the stage and perform a tune backed by a live band.

For his first song, he picked the humorous “Honey Bun” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific.” It was frightening and he didn’t sing well. And yet, the following week he came back and did it again.

Sixteen years later, Zwiebach, now 78, is a core member of what the event’s longtime host Keri Kelsey calls “the family,” a group of roughly 25 regulars who sing jazz standards, show tunes and other numbers from the Great American Songbook at the longest-running open mic night in L.A.

“It’s very much like a community,” Zwiebach said on a recent evening as he prepared to sing “This Nearly Was Mine,” another song from “South Pacific.” “Everyone knows everyone.”

For 25 years, the small, L-shaped Gardenia room on Santa Monica Boulevard has served as a musical home for a diverse group of would-be jazz and cabaret singers. Each Tuesday night, elementary school teachers, acting coaches, retired psychoanalysts, arts publicists and the occasional celebrity pay an $8 cover to perform in front of an audience that knows firsthand just how terrifying it can be to stand before even a small crowd with nothing more than a microphone in your hand.

“You are so vulnerable up there with everyone staring at you,” said Kelsey, who has hosted the open mic night for 24 years and once watched Molly Ringwald nervously take the stage. “But it’s also the most joyous experience in the world.”

The singers are backed by a live, three-piece band led by guitarist Dori Amarilio. The rotating group of musicians — a few of them Grammy winners — arrive not knowing what they will be playing that night. Some singers bring sheet music, others chord charts. And there are those who just hum a few bars and allow the musicians to intuit the key and melody enough to follow along. Poet Judy Barrat, a regular attendee, usually hands the evening’s piano player a copy of the poem she’ll be reading and asks him to improv along with her.

“It’s totally freeform,” said Andy Langham, a jazz pianist who toured with Natalie Cole and Christopher Cross and often plays the Gardenia. “I read the stanzas and try to paint pictures with the notes.”

The Gardenia, which opened in 1981, is one of the few venues in L.A. specifically designed for the intimacy of cabaret. The small, spare room has table service seating for just over 60 patrons and a stage area beautifully lit by an abundance of canned lights. Doors open at 7 p.m. on Tuesday nights, but those in the know line up outside the building’s nondescript exterior as early as 6 p.m. to ensure a reasonable spot on the night’s roster of singers. (Even though there is a one-song-per-person limit, the night has been known to stretch past 12 a.m.) Nichole Rice, who manages the Gardenia, takes dinner and drink orders until the show starts at 8:30 p.m. Then the room falls into respectful silence.

“This is a listening room,” said singer-songwriter Steve Brock, who has been attending the open mic night for more than a decade. “I’ve been to other rooms where I’m competing with tequila or the Rams. Here, when anyone goes up in front of that microphone, everyone stops.”

On a recent Tuesday night, the show began as it always does with an instrumental song by the band (a piano, guitar and upright bass) before an opening number by Kelsey. Dressed in a black leather dress and knee-high boots, she had this time prepared “Mack the Knife.” “This may be one of the loungiest lounge songs ever,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I really like it.”

The first singer to take the stage was Trip Kennedy, a bearded masseur who performed “The Rainbow Connection” in a sweet tenor. When he finished, Kelsey shared that she was cast as an extra in “The Muppets Take Manhattan.”

“It was the most ridiculous thing,” she said, filling time as the next singer consulted quietly with the band. “I was a college student who dressed up as a college student for the audition.”

Dolores Scozzesi, who sang at the Hollywood Improv in the ’80s between comedy sets, performed a moody arrangement of “What Now My Love.” “This is a [chord] chart from 2011,” she told the audience before she began. “I want to try it because these guys are the best.”

Zwiebach performed a medley of two Broadway hits, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (which he altered to “his face”) and “This Nearly Was Mine,” easily hitting all the notes. After, his young friend Ian Douglas, a relative newbie who started attending the open mic night in the spring, sang the jazz standard “You Go to My Head.” Zwiebach praised the performance.

“I know that song very well and you did a great job,” he said.

Monica Doby Davis, who once sang with the ’90s R&B girl group Brownstone and now works as an elementary school teacher, also performed “You Go to My Head.” Although she had left the entertainment business decades ago, she said finding the Gardenia open mic night 13 years ago “brought music back to my life.”

There were many beautiful, intimate moments that night, but perhaps the best was when Tom Nobles, an actor and retired psychoanalyst in a purple knit cap and thick plastic glasses, forgot the words to “Lost in the Masquerade” by George Benson.

He stumbled for a moment, a bit perplexed, before turning to his friends for help.

“Whoever knows the words, sing it with me,” Nobles said to the crowd.

Quietly at first and then louder and stronger, the whole room broke out into song.

We’re lost in a masquerade. Woohoo, the masquerade.

Jack DeJohnette, the prolific and versatile jazz drummer who played with Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Charles Lloyd, Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis — including on Davis’ groundbreaking 1970 album “Bitches Brew,” which helped kick off the jazz fusion era — died Sunday. He was 83.

His death was announced in a post on Instagram, which said he died at a hospital in Kingston, N.Y., near his home in Woodstock. DeJohnette’s wife, Lydia, told NPR the cause was congestive heart failure.

As a member of Davis’ band in the late ’60s and early ’70s — a group that also counted Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Keith Jarrett and Billy Cobham among its members — DeJohnette pumped out psychedelic rock and funk rhythms that put Davis’ music in conversation with that of artists like James Brown and Sly Stone. In addition to “Bitches Brew,” which was inducted this year into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, DeJohnette played on Davis’ “At Fillmore,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner” albums, the last of which was panned by critics when it came out but now is regarded as a jazz-funk landmark.

DeJohnette won two Grammy Awards on six nominations; in 2012, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts.

Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, who played on DeJohnette’s 1992 album “Music for the Fifth World,” called DeJohnette “the GOAT” on social media on Monday and wrote that his “influence & importance to Jazz, and contemporary improvised music can not be overstated.”

DeJohnette was born Aug. 9, 1942, in Chicago. Encouraged by an uncle who worked as a jazz radio DJ, he learned to play piano as a child and went on to play with Sun Ra as he circulated among the forward-looking artists of Chicago’s Assn. for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He moved to New York in the mid-’60s and joined Charles Lloyd’s quartet before collaborating with Evans and then with Davis.

“We couldn’t wait to play,” he said of his tenure in Davis’ band in a 1990 interview with The Times. “Miles developed our talents by allowing us to progress naturally, having us play his music and accept the responsibility that goes with discipline and freedom. He learned from us, and we learned from him.”

After leaving Davis’ band, DeJohnette continued collaborating with Jarrett, the influential pianist; the two formed a long-running group known as the Standards Trio with the bassist Gary Peacock that focused on material from the Great American Songbook. The drummer also led the bands New Directions and Special Edition and formed groups with Ravi Coltrane and with John Scofield.

In 2016, he released “Return,” a solo-piano album that served as a sequel of sorts to 1985’s “The Jack DeJohnette Piano Album.” According to the New York Times, DeJohnette’s survivors include his wife, who also managed his career, and their two daughters.

SALT LAKE CITY — Walker Kessler had 22 points and nine rebounds, Lauri Markkanen scored 20 and the Utah Jazz beat the Clippers 129-108 on Wednesday night in the season opener for both teams.

Brice Sensabaugh added 20 points off the bench for Utah, which set a team record for points in a season opener.

Kessler, the longest-tenured member of the Jazz, went 7 for 7 from the field. He blocked four shots and finished with four assists.

The new-look Clippers appeared confused on the court at times in a disappointing debut for a team with lofty aspirations. Ivica Zubac led them with 19 points and seven rebounds. James Harden and Brook Lopez each scored 15. Kawhi Leonard had 10 points on 3-of-9 shooting.

It was their most lopsided season-opening loss in 17 years.

Utah made its first 19 shots in the paint, as crisp passing and precise ball movement led to layups and dunks.

Widely expected to finish near the bottom of the NBA this season, the Jazz had 38 assists on 48 baskets and shot 55% from the field. Keyonte George led Utah with nine assists to go with his 16 points.

Ace Bailey, the No. 5 pick in this year’s draft, has been ill and was limited to 20 minutes for the Jazz. He scored two points.

Bradley Beal also was on a minutes restriction in his Clippers debut and had five points.

Taylor Hendricks, who sustained a gruesome broken leg in the third game last season, returned to the court and looked bouncy coming off the bench for Utah. He finished with 13 points and five rebounds.

The Jazz led 78-47 at halftime after shooting 71.8% from the field. The Clippers gave up 78 points in a half only once last season, while the Jazz hadn’t scored that many in a first half since the 2023-24 season.

Utah was 12 for 12 on two-point field goals and added four threes in the first quarter.

THEY’VE been together for seven months now and it appears that Demi Sims and Jazz Saunders’ relationship is going from strength to strength.

The former TOWIE star took to Instagram on Saturday to share various pictures of the pair together, and in one snap, the two look very cosy as she grabs her girlfriend’s bum.

The cheeky photo shows Demi, 29, hold onto Jazz’s derriere as they embrace, with Demi’s face being hidden behind her ladylove’s face.

Jazz is wearing a sexy red lace dress as the two look as loved up as ever.

She also uploaded pictures of herself as a bridesmaid at a wedding and spending quality time with her family, including sister Frankie Sims.

Demi captioned the post: “What a good month.”

Made in Chelsea star Jazz was quick to comment on the pictures as she said: “I am going to frame 3^rd pic x.”

She also told her girlfriend: “You are perfect,” as she responded: “You are.”

Fans also commented on the snaps as one gushed: “Genuinely my favourite couple, both glowing with happiness.”

Another commented: “You two are literally perfect aren’t you.”

During the latest instalment of Made in Chelsea, the lovebirds appeared to have a small blip when Jazz asked her best friend Julia Pollard if she thinks Demi and her are compatible.

Julia told her she didn’t, which got back to a frustrated Demi, who asked to speak to Julia.

Jazz’s worst fears came true as she was stuck between her best friend and her girlfriend.

However, Jazz and Demi managed to get back on track and put on a united front, despite her best friend not championing her relationship.

Demi told The Sun earlier this year: “Romance is going really good, Jazz is a lovely girl and we really get along and it’s just really healthy.

“We actually met through Jazz’s friend Yasmine [Zweegers], she saw me on a night out and said to Jazz, ‘You’d really fancy Demi, she’s a bit of you’. That’s how it all started.

“I’m really enjoying, we really get along and I’m so happy to have met her.”

The pair – who first started dating in March – were spotted sharing a steamy snog in the loos of a posh celeb spot in London.

They later made things more official between them, with a sweet ‘girlfriend proposal’.

Jazz took to social media to share a glimpse with her fans, while captioning the post: “A weekend for the books.”

She then shared photos from the beautiful moment that Demi asked her to be her girlfriend.

There were blooms and picnic bits, as well as an iPad with a photo of them in the middle.

The couple’s moment was filmed by someone nearby, and they captured Jazz running up the hill and greeting Demi, before nodding as she realised the question she was being asked.

Demi replied in the comments of the post: “She said yessss.”

They enjoyed a lovely al-fresco picnic with coffees while celebrating the special moment.

And a very happy Jazz also shared photos with her girlfriend Demi, while holding hands.

An immigrant drama by Rudi Goblen about two brothers born in Nicaragua, “littleboy/littleman,” now receiving its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is an American story at its core.

Lest we forget our past, America is the great democratic experiment precisely because it’s a land of immigrants. Out of many, one — as our national motto, E pluribus unum, has it. How have we lost sight of this basic tenet of high school social studies?

Our tendency to ghettoize drama — along racial or immigrant lines — reflects the failure to understand our collective story.

Goblen, who (like a.k. payne, author of “Furlough’s Paradise”) was a playwriting student of Geffen Playhouse artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney at Yale, has created not a conventionally worked out two-hander, but an intuitively structured performance piece. Infused by live music and inflected with hip-hop style poetry, “littleboy/littleman” crashes through the fourth wall to make direct contact with theatergoers, who are seated on three sides of the playing area and always just a high-five away.

Marlon Alexander Vargas, the dynamic, sweet-faced performer who plays Fito Palomino, the more creative and mercurial of the two brothers, is on stage interacting with the audience before the play begins. As the musicians — music director Dee Simone on drums and Tonya Sweets on bass — warm up the crowd from their platform at the back of the playing area, Vargas, ever-in-motion, greets theatergoers and counts down to the start of the show.

Rules are spelled out at the top that make clear that this isn’t one of those docile theatergoing experiences, in which the audience is expected to keep mum as the actors do all the work. Spectators are encouraged to make some noise — to show love when they want to show love and to show it even when they don’t.

These friendly instructions are impishly delivered by Vargas, whose performance outside the play has an effect on our experience of his character inside the play. The fate of Fito is the emotional crux of the drama, and what happens to him matters all the more to us because of our theatrical connection to Vargas, our de facto host and impromptu buddy.

Goblen sets up a drama of fraternal contrasts. Bastian Monteyero (Alex Hernandez), the older and more straitlaced of the two brothers, has a tough, no-nonsense demeanor that’s all about discipline and conformity. He’s a bit of a recluse, but he plays by the rules and demands the same from Fito.

A street performer, Fito dreams of opening a vegan restaurant that will offer his community access to affordable, healthful meals. This idea seems far-fetched to Bastian, and he tells Fito that if he wants to continue living with him, he’s going to have to get a real job.

Bastian hooks Fito up with a friend who’s employed at a cleaning service. But scrubbing public toilets isn’t Fito’s idea of an alternative course. Bastian wants his brother off the streets. There are dangers afoot in Sweetwater, Fla., far worse than unpleasant paid work.

A law officer in town, a sadist who demands complete subservience, has it in for Fito, who describes this menacing figure as “a gangster with a badge.” He also calls him “brown on the outside, white on the inside,” and bemoans to his brother the Latino infighting (“the worst thing they ever did was give us all flags”) that only divides people who have political reason to be in solidarity.

Bastian, who affects a white-sounding Midwestern voice when he hustles donations in his telemarketing job, can’t help taking the latter comment personally. He’s made no secret that he wants to change his name so his resume won’t be ignored when he applies for management jobs.

The two brothers have different fathers, and Fito doesn’t have the option of passing. In any case, he’s more embracing of his identity as a person of color than Bastian. What both of them have in common is that they survived both their harrowing childhoods in Nicaragua and their unrelentingly challenging journeys in America, having been raised by a single mother, whose death still haunts them.

Bastian and Fito love each other, but don’t always like each other. Hernandez’s Bastian is a formidable presence, angry, strict and domineering — the qualities he’s needed to navigate a bureaucratic system that has little concern for the feelings of immigrant outsiders. Vargas’ Fito, by contrast, has his head in the clouds and his heart on his sleeve. Goblen never loses sight of their affection even as their conflict grows louder and more bruising.

“littleboy/littleman” is tricky in its theatrical rhythms. It’s like a piece of music that keeps switching harmonic structures, not wanting to get stuck in the same groove. Goblen’s manner of writing is closer to free jazz or freestyle hip-hop than traditional drama.

Director Nancy Medina’s staging, circumnavigating a theatrical circle, lifts the audience out of its proscenium passivity into something almost immersive and definitely interactive. Tanya Orellana’s scenic design and Scott Bolman’s moody lighting create a performance space that is well suited to a work composed as a series of riffs. The influence of McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” is palpable not only in the thematic architecture of the play, but also in how the piece moves on stage.

The staccato nature of the writing is helped enormously by the entrancing acting of both Vargas, who breezes through different theatrical realms as though he had wings, and Hernandez, who locks realistically into character. It’s a credit to the play and to the performers that, by the end of “littleboy/littleman,” the differences between the two brothers seem less important than what they have in common.

Not all the dramatic elements are smoothly integrated, but the production ultimately finds a coherence, not so much in the music (composed by Goblen himself), but in the emotional truth of the brothers’ pressure-cooker lives. Vulnerability unites not only Bastian and Fito, but all of us witnessing their story who hope against hope that compassion will somehow win the day.

Choreographer and California Hall of Fame inductee Alonzo King brings his San Francisco-based contemporary ballet company to Long Beach for an evening of dance immersed in the spiritually rooted, avant-garde jazz stylings of Alice Coltrane, including her seminal album “Journey in Satchidananda.” In addition to this tribute to one of America’s only jazz harpists, the company will present a fresh take on Maurice Ravel’s suite of Mother Goose fairy tales, “Ma mère l’Oye,” which was originally written as a piano duet in 1910.

Where: Carpenter Performing Arts Center
When: Nov. 8, 8 p.m.
Price: Starting at $38.75

Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots.

In January, Bradford’s house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders.

Despite it all, he’s still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.)

At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ Home,” a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity.

“That’s all I have left,” Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years old. I don’t have years to wait around to rebuild.”

For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It’s his and his wife’s fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they’ve done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage.

Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he’d run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles.

“We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn’t spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,” Bradford said. “We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”

These days, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. “The company said they won’t insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,” he said, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”

But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age.

“It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford said. “How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”

The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him.

With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette played with so much raw feeling,” Bradford said. “He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning.

He’s equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery’s field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.

“You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,” he said with a laugh. “But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.”

He’s been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena’s Ice House in the ’70s.

Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I remember someone coming into our club in the ’70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and he said, ‘Well, everything.’ I told him, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You can’t live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.”

He’s worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one’s life and community are vulnerable.

Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly “woke” history.

“I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,” Bradford said, shaking his head. “But now we’re back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.”

Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything.

“You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a hit,” he said. “Folks said, ‘Oh, it’s so sad. We told you he couldn’t play on a professional level.’ But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn’t get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.”

Eddie Palmieri, the Grammy-winning Nuyorican pianist, bandleader and composer who helped innovate Afro-Caribbean music in the States and transform the New York salsa scene, died on Wednesday. He was 88.

According to a post on his official Instagram, Palmieri passed away in his Hackensack, N.J., home. The New York Times confirmed via his youngest daughter, Gabriela Palmieri, that his death came after “an extended illness.”

Multiple celebrities chimed in to pay their respects, including Spike Lee, Ramon Rodriguez and representatives from Fania Records, the pioneering New York salsa label, also released a statement.

“[On Wednesday], Fania Records mourns the loss of the legendary Eddie Palmieri, one of the most innovative and unique artists in music history,” the statement said. Palmieri briefly recorded music with the label but also released music under Tico, Alegre, Concord Picante, RMM and Coco Records.

Others took to social media to mourn the loss, including David Sanchez, a Grammy-winning jazz tenor saxophonist from Puerto Rico, who uploaded a slideshow of photographs of the two. Sanchez recounted the time when his soprano saxophone was stolen — and Palmieri helped him pay for a new one. “Your being and your music will continue to live on in the hearts of many,” Sanchez wrote in the Instagram caption.

Palmieri’s contemporary Chuchito Valdes, a Grammy-winning Cuban pianist and bandleader, also chimed in with an Instagram post lamenting the loss: “A sad day for music. One of the greatest of all time is gone, an innovator. The man who revolutionized salsa and Latin jazz. My great friend.”

Born on Dec. 15, 1936, in East Harlem to Puerto Rican parents from Ponce, Palmieri was the younger brother of Charlie Palmieri, the late piano legend known as the “Giant of the Keyboards.”

The family later moved to the South Bronx, where they opened up a luncheonette called “Mambo”: a name chosen by young Eddie, who was enthralled by the Cuban dance hall rhythms. He often controlled the jukebox with blissful Latin jazz tunes by Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez and Machito.

Palmieri was deeply influenced and inspired by his older brother, who was nine years his senior and introduced him to prominent big-band acts of the 1940s, like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Woody Herman, all of whom seemed to dissolve by the end of World War II. Though Palmieri had an itch to lean into the timbales like Tito Puente, he would eventually follow in his brother’s footsteps and take piano lessons from Margaret Bonds, one of the most prominent African American concert pianists at the time.

Although he briefly joined his uncle’s orchestra, Chino y sus Almas Tropicales, as a timbal player, Palmieri rose to fame as a pianist, playing with various bands including the Eddie Forrester Orchestra, Johnny Segui and His Orchestra, and eventually Tito Rodriguez and His Orchestra, which was a main act at the Palladium Ballroom between 1958 to 1960.

“In the audience, you could have maybe a Marlon Brando, Kim Novak, all the Hollywood starlets because it was the height of the mambo,” said Palmieri in a 2013 interview with Jo Reed. “On Saturday, you had the blue-collar, mostly Puerto Rican. And then Sunday was black, Afro-American. It was intermingled or different nationalities that had nothing to do whether you were green, purple, white, we came to dance.”

But in 1961, Palmieri went on to start his own band, La Perfecta, an ironic title given its not-so-perfect setup. It formed as an eight-piece Cuban conjunto, which ditched the traditional jazzy saxophone. There were timbales, congas, bongos, bass, piano and vocals — but with a twist of its own kind: the inclusion of two trombones, played by Barry Rogers and Jose Rodriguez, instead of the costly four-set trumpets. Palmieri also added a whistling flute, played by George Castro, for a charanga edge (in the place of a traditional violin).

“La Perfecta changed everything in the history of our genre, in my opinion. Certainly in New York,” said Palmieri. “And then influenced the world, because after that all the pawn shops got rid of their trombones.”

His group helped usher in the iconic salsa genre with their first album, “Eddie Palmieri and His Conjunto ‘La Perfecta,’” dubbing him the nickname “Madman of salsa.” However, he was not too fond of the emerging term, which seemed to cram different styles like mambo, charanga, rumba, guaracha and danzón into one single category.

“Afro-Cuban is where we get the music,” explained Palmieri in a 2012 interview with the Smithsonian Oral History Project. “The influence of the Puerto Rican is the one [that] upheld the rhythmical patterns and the genre of Cuba. So then that becomes Afro-Caribbean.”

La Perfecta went on to release its most famed album, “Azúcar Pa’ Ti” in 1965. It included the song “Azúcar,” an eight-minute track that was later added to the National Recording Registry in 2009.

In 1976, Palmieri became the first to win a Grammy for the inaugural category of best Latin recording, for his album “Sun of Latin Music.” He holds a total of eight Grammy awards. In 2013, the National Endowment for the Arts honored him as a Jazz Master and the Latin Grammys granted him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

But Eddie Palmieri’s impact spanned beyond his own accomplishments. He was a mentor, a teacher and an advocate for Latin music and culture, which includes advocating twice for the inclusion of the Latin jazz album category in the Grammys — first in 1995, then again in 2012 after its removal.

Palmieri was predeceased by his wife of 58 years, Iraida Palmieri, who passed away in 2014 — and who he often referred to as “Mi Luz Mayor.” He is survived by his four daughters, Renee, Eydie, Ileana and Gabriela; his son, Edward Palmieri II; and four grandchildren.

Chuck Mangione, the Grammy-winning flugelhorn player and prolific jazz musician known for songs including “Feels So Good” and “Children of Sanchez,” has died.

Mangione died in his sleep Tuesday in his home in Rochester, N.Y., his manager Peter S. Matorin confirmed to The Times on Thursday. He was 84.

The New York native, over the course of his career which began in the 1960s, earned a reputation as a stylish, lyrically smart trumpeter and played alongside jazz giants Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Sam Jones, Ron Carter and Kai Winding. He also collected 14 Grammy nominations, notably winning two prizes: one for his smooth “Bellavia” in 1977 and another a year later for the titular anthem he composed for the 1978 drama “The Children of Sanchez.”

This story is developing.

July 9 (UPI) — Jason Moran, an acclaimed pianist, composer, educator, bandleader and recording artist, said he has left his position as jazz artistic director at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

The center, which receives federal funds, has undergone dramatic changes since Donald Trump became president again and he installed himself as chairman. He ousted arts center President Deborah Rutter and Board Chairman David Rubenstein, and replaced board members appointed by former President Biden.

A number of artists have been replaced or have voluntarily quit, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, who canceled a run of his Broadway hit, Hamilton, next year.

The Kennedy Center declined to comment to NPR.

Moran, who accepted the position in 2011, one year after his predecessor, Billy Taylor, died, didn’t mention any disagreements with Trump or others in a post on Tuesday on Instagram.

Moran, 50, described “14 years of inviting thousands of artists to share their work with audiences.” And he was grateful “to an incredible staff that ushered artists from the negotiation to the after party.”

In his role, he developed programming and curated artists for one of the largest jazz programs in the United States.

He hosted performances and education programs that included the National Endowment for the Arts’ “NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert” and Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead, a residency for emerging artists of which Moran is an alum.

Moran, who scored the films Selma and 13th, tours the world as a performer. In 2010, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

“Thank you to the composers, comedians, choreographers, performance artists, skateboarders, filmmakers, authors, illustrators, dancers, photographers, sculptors, scientists, crews and on and on,” he wrote. “These young ones are beautifying the stage. And with that, I bowed on Juneteenth.”

Moran, who was born in Houston, began studying the piano at age 6, according to information posted on the Kennedy Center website. He attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and then Manhattan School of Music in New York City.

At the college, he attended a class by saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

“My first day on the job at The Kennedy Center was when Sonny Rollins was receiving his Kennedy Center Honor,” Moran wrote,

The center, which includes a 2,465-seat Concert Hall, the 2,347-seat Opera House, the 1,161-seat Eisenhower Theater and the 320-seat Family Theater, made its public debut on Sept. 8, 1971.

Trump attended the opening night of Les Miserables on June 11.

During his first term, Trump didn’t attend a performance there, including the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony after several performers honored at the annual gala spoke out against him.

Lalo Schifrin, the six-time Oscar nominee and prolific composer best known for his Grammy-winning “Mission: Impossible” theme, has died. He was 93.

Schifrin died Thursday morning at a hospital in Los Angeles, his son Will Schifrin, a writer and producer, told The Times. He reportedly died of complications from pneumonia.

The Argentine-born composer infused elements of jazz, rock and funk into classical orchestral music and is credited with helping to change the sound of movies. Schifrin was Oscar-nominated for his scores on the films “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), “The Fox” (1967), “Voyage of the Damned” (1976), “The Amityville Horror” (1979) and “The Sting II” (1983). He also earned a song nomination for “People Alone” from the 1980 drama “The Competition.” In 2018, Schifrin received an honorary Oscar.

Schifrin wrote more than 100 scores for film and television over the course of his Hollywood career, including for the movies “Dirty Harry” (1971), “THX 1138” (1971), “Enter the Dragon” (1973) and the “Rush Hour” trilogy, as well as TV shows including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Starsky and Hutch.”

“I learned to be a chameleon,” Schifrin told The Times in 2018. “In motion pictures, the real creator is the screenwriter and the director and the producer. I have to work for what they have made. Like a chameleon, I do whatever is necessary.”

In 2011, Schifrin modestly described himself as a “music maker.” While the catchy theme for the spy series “Mission: Impossible” remains one of his best known pieces, Schifrin told The Times “it was just work.”

“For everything I’ve done, I did my best,” Schifrin said in 2016. “I like what I did. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, but it’s OK. … If people like it, to the point of embracing it, great. That doesn’t happen too often.”

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1932, Schifrin was exposed to music from a young age. His father Luis served as the concert master of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colón. And Schifrin was just 5 years old when a trip to the movies with his grandmother made him realize that it was the music that made the horror film so scary.

Schifrin began studying piano under Enrique Barenboim, the father of pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, when he was 6. He discovered and fell in love with modern American jazz as a teenager. Upon the suggestion of one of his teachers, he applied for a scholarship to attend the Paris Conservatory. During his time there, he made money playing at jazz clubs.

After returning to Buenos Aires, Schifrin started his own jazz band to perform at concerts and on TV. He eventually met American jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who invited him to work for him in the U.S. In 1963, while he was working with Gillespie after moving to New York, Schifrin was offered a job in Hollywood.

“My first movie was called ‘Rhino,’” Schifrin told The Times in 2011. “It was a low-budget movie, but it was the beginning.”

Schifrin is survived by his wife, Donna, and his children, William, Frances and Ryan.

The iconic New York jazz club Blue Note announced Tuesday the opening slate of shows for its long-awaited Los Angeles location, which includes Robert Glasper, Charlie Puth and Killer Mike. After delays caused by construction and permitting in the wake of L.A.’s January fires, the venue will open its doors in mid-August with local favorite Robert Glasper christening the new venue Aug. 14 and 15.

Located in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard and Ivar Avenue, the celebrated jazz institution is rolling out a roster of A-list artists in jazz and other genres. Following Glasper’s two opening shows, Grammy nominee Alex Isley will headline Aug. 16 and 17.

The first month is particularly stacked, as the team behind the Blue Note is taking the responsibility of introducing the ethos and the way they do shows to an L.A. audience very seriously.

Like the New York Blue Note location (the brand has clubs around the world, including in Napa, Tokyo and Honolulu), artists will be doing two shows a night. Both Blue Note Entertainment President Steven Bensusan and Director of Programming/Talent Buyer Alex Kurland have emphasized that the L.A. location will reflect a local vibe, including in the acts they book.

Among the first run of shows will be a heavy slate of local artists, including Terrace Martin with guest Kenyon Dixon Aug. 19 and 20, Braxton Cook Sept. 9 and 10, Kamasi Washington Sept. 30 to Oct. 5 and Oct. 7 to 12, Keyon Harrold Nov. 18 and 19 and many more.

The rest of the released schedule, which runs into 2026, features a stellar array of jazz luminaries such as Branford Marsalis Oct. 21 and 22, Esperanza Spalding Sept. 2 to 7, Ravi Coltrane Aug. 28 to 31, Kenny Garrett Sept. 11 to 14, Cimafunk Nov. 20 and 21, and a Lady Blackbird residency multiple dates.

Also sticking to the Blue Note ethos, there is a healthy dose of musicians from a variety of genres, such as Charlie Puth Oct. 16 to 19, Andra Day Nov. 28 to 30, Killer Mike Sept. 19 to 21, Slum Village Oct. 20, Ben Folds Dec. 11, Mayer Hawthorne Aug. 25 and more.