Keyboardist Joe Sample and singer Randy Crawford have been together for a long time. Sample worked on Crawford's debut album Everything Must Change back in 1976 and Crawford helped The Crusaders, to which Sample was a member, create a smooth jazz classic with her treatment of the title track of their 1979 albumStreet Life. She says, Joe Sample is a wonderful musician and a wonderful person. I kind of wanted to work with him before I ever met him because I was familiar with their …

Kenny G is an artist of international acclaim. He was the one who helped bring the smooth jazz format for radio into the forefront with his first smash hit Songbird. That came from his 1986 CD Duotones, which brought three other songs that established him as the genre's favorite and the way for other people to get to know the music. He continued to record fresh music for the next 12 years, with one holiday album recorded in 1994. In 1999, Kenny G recorded Classics in the Key …

In the gypsy jazz field, no one does it any better than the Madison, Wisconsin based group Harmonious Wail. Group founder Sims Delaney-Potthoff says, I knew that wanted to play Django Reinhardt inspired music and pretty much talked to people and put the band together. We just got a bar gig and started by trying out tunes. We called it Uncle Cachuk for awhile, then we called it Junior Holstein. None of those really worked as the band kind of started getting liftoff and finding that we had just …

It’s hard to believe that for the past 40 years George Duke has been a staple of the music industry and from the looks of things, this cat plans to be on the scene for a long time to come. "I’m having the time of my life making the kind of music that I want to make. It has been a great ride, it really has and I really have no complaints." Duke told me that being a label owner gives him the freedom to express himself musically. "My label is distributed through Heads Up …

Bassist Gerald Veasely has been making strategic moves throughout his career. His newest CD is called Your Move, referring to the game of chess. He says, jazz is known for the fact that it has a lot of improvisation and a lot of thinking on your feet in the moment. There's a multiplicity of moves you can make within a chess game. Certainly on stage or in the studio or rehearsing your music if it's jazz related, they're so many options that you have. That's part of the fun, just figurin …