Friday night, Terence Blanchard plays the Taylor Library at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He recorded his new album, Choices, there this spring. Blanchard premiered music from Choices this past weekend when he played New York City. In the New York Times, Ben Ratliff reviewed the show:

This is a band whose lineup changes have become significant — they swing attention toward young musicians — and as of this year its tenor saxophonist is Walter Smith III, who seized a couple of spots on Thursday to improvise with furious continuity. Mr. Smith’s own song “Him or Me,” with surprise rests, odd phrase lengths and opaque harmony, became the show’s peak: everyone in the band, including the pianist Fabian Almazan, the bassist Ben Street and the drummer Kendrick Scott, smoked through all that complexity. Mr. Smith’s solo ran through a few choruses with dam-breaking force and binding logic, using tension and release and working up to split tones. Mr. Almazan played a dense and imaginative solo, improvising with both hands around the center of the keyboard. The music already felt lived in, and open enough to keep changing.

               

For our friends in NYC:

Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, Terence Blanchard, Dr. Ike from the Ponderosa Stomp, and journalist Larry Blumenfeld will speak on a panel titled, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” The show’s hype says, “Top players in the New Orleans music scene discuss the fight to preserve art and culture in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina,” but unless Larry and Ira have been hiding their talents from me, Blanchard will be the lone musician on the bill. Still, the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation has been actively trying to do exactly what the hype promises, and I’ve been on panels with Larry, whose writing from the last few years has largely documented the challenge of making music and keeping the brass culture alive in New Orleans after Katrina.

Afterward, the musician - Blanchard – will perform with his Quartet.

For tickets, click here. Jazz Promo Services subscribers can get a   25 percent discount by using code WSJ10 at check-out. Subscriber or not, you might as well try it.

               

Terence Blanchard’s March concert in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Taylor Library has been postponed. The show was to debut work that he is recording in the Taylor Library for his upcoming album, Choices. It will be rescheduled later in the year.