Women don't receive the NEA Jazz Masters Award very often. But when a woman does win, she is most likely a singer. Singers both male and female are pretty well represented in the Awards: More than 10% of all award-winners have been vocal artists. Do what you will with these numbers, but the story they tell isn’t a bad one for singers. (It’s another matter for female instrumentalists, however.) View post to read more.

NYC-based Harbinger Records specializes in recording artists who interpret the Songbook, though typically their singers have tended to be Broadway stars rather than jazz stylists. In 1985, co-founders Ken Bloom and Bill Rudman saw an opportunity in the release of the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Cotton Club, and set out to make a recording with Maxine Sullivan, one of the few remaining Cotton Club singers still actively performing at the time. The result, Maxine Sullivan: Great Songs from the Cotton Club, now stands as a historical record of one of the most influential singers from the formative years of jazz history. View post to read more.

On May 11-16, 1976, sax player Stan Getz and singer/guitarist João Gilberto met up to play at a then-new jazz club in San Francisco, Keystone Korner, continuing the brilliant confabulation they’d begun on their seminal Brazilian jazz recording, Getz/Gilberto (Verve). In February of this year, Resonance Records launched the live recording from that week of performances— Getz/Gilberto ’76, a stunning snapshot of several exceptional musicians at the peak of their careers. View post to read more.

Even though vocal jazz standards derive from the U.S. musical theater tradition of the early 20th century, very few stage musicals have featured a score for jazz singers. Two recent jazz musicals, both conceived and written by prominent jazz instrumentalists, chart fresh territory in this regard. View post to read more.

Musical ideas travel across global cultures these days as quickly as fire. Through any number of tech-dependent cultural exchanges, a musician can share an idea within seconds of its conception. Of all musicians, though, singers alone face a hurdle that limits their ability to participate in this rapid-fire sharing across cultures: barring singers who rely solely on vocal improvisation, all singers must make themselves understood verbally. Thus jazz singers are often limited by the languages they speak—or more accurately, by the ones they don’t. View post to read more.