NPR Jazz

A founder of the Newport Folk Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival — and perhaps the most important jazz impresario of all time — died Monday.

Schaap was one of the leading jazz scholars in America and the genre's foremost evangelist. He died at 70, after a long battle with cancer.

With help from guitarist Jeff Parker and flutist De'Sean Jones, Chicago-based drummer and producer Makaya McCraven modernizes a song from Jack Wilson's album Easterly Winds.

A longtime touring member of The Rolling Stones, Tim Ries says his favorite nights were the ones without a show — when he and Watts would sneak into town to play the music they loved most.

The versatile and impassioned singer was ready to throw in the towel until she heard a message in a Nina Simone song that told her, "You're going be fine. I understand how you feel. Keep going."

Equal parts torch song and funeral dirge, it's a raw and pining anthem whose heartbreak slowly seeps in as the organ crawls beneath Lady Blackbird's sorrowful vocals.

"Formwela 10" is one of Spalding's more enchanting spells: a shape-shifting chamber invention that ponders the question of what we ask of one another in the course of romantic exchange.

John Coltrane rarely performed the music from A Love Supreme after its release at the end of 1964 – meaning even the most ardent Coltrane-ologists have been unaware of the existence of these tapes.

The tri-city free-jazz band expands and distorts the shape of melody, noise and heart-thumping rhythm.

The four-voiced juggernaut explores the edges of jazz and pop. "Wisteria" is a love letter of sorts for the vocal ensemble and what it represents.