Jamie Cullum to Perform Two Sets at CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival

NEWPORT, RI -- British singing and piano sensation Jamie Cullum brings his eclectic mix of jazz, pop and rock-influenced music to the opening night celebration of the CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival* on Friday, August 6, at 8:00 pm at the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport Casino. The evening opens with the saxophonist/singer Grace Kelly.

The festival continues August 7 and 8 at Fort Adams State Park; Cullum is set to perform on the Fort Stage on Saturday. Tickets and more information are available at newportjazzfest.net.

Get a sneak preview of Jamie Cullum in performance when he appears on The Bachelorette on Monday, May 31, at 8:00pm on ABC. For more information, visit http://abc.go.com/shows/the-bachelorette. Jamie Cullum, who has played guitar and piano since age eight, developed an avid interest in jazz from his older brother. He was inspired by piano icons Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck and spent some of his formative years living in Paris, where he honed his abilities performing in jazz clubs. Cullum will perform selections from The Pursuit, his first album in four years, as well as some of his favorite jazz standards and his own originals. His latest music embraces the full range of his diverse talents and far-flung musical passions. While it covers more stylistic ground than anything he's done previously, the album offers the same musical fluency, emotional commitment and lyrical wit that helped to make Cullum's prior releases Twentysomething and Catching Tales international crossover hits selling more than four million combined copies worldwide. He recorded his first album, Heard It All Before, at age 19, followed by Pointless Nostalgic.

After spending two years touring in support of Catching Tales, Cullum retreated from the spotlight and spent much of the next two years working on a variety of musical and non-musical endeavors. He and his older brother and frequent collaborator, Ben, joined forces for a dance music project, “BC vs. JC," that found the brothers creating melodic dance music in clubs across England. Jamie also contributed to albums for Pharrell Williams, the Count Basie Orchestra, Japan's Soil & Pimp Sessions, Norway's Beady Belle and France's Camille, as well as spent time as a Goodwill Ambassador to Ethiopia for UNICEF. Cullum's highest profile side projects saluted his courtship with Hollywood, beginning with the animated Disney feature Meet The Robinsons, in which Jamie was the singing voice of Frankie The Frog. He followed with his vocal on the Golden Globe-nominated “Best Original Song" from the John Cusack film Grace Is Gone, and culminated in his co-writing and performing with Clint Eastwood for the Golden Globe-nominated “Best Original Song" from 2008's Gran Torino. Now, he's back on the road celebrating The Pursuit at concert across Europe and the United States.

Eighteen-year-old Grace Kelly's career is definitely on the fast track. Wynton Marsalis (who performs on the Fort Adams Stage on Sunday) was so impressed with her three-night stand as guest of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in November 2008 that he invited her to join the ensemble at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Harry Connick, Jr. heard her in a master class and invited her to sit in with his band and she has been a featured guest on NPR's Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland. In addition, Grace has received numerous honors including The Boston Music Awards' “Outstanding Jazz Act," WCVB-TV's “Five Bostonians to Watch," Downbeat Critics Poll's youngest ever “Alto Saxophone Rising Stars," the Boston Phoenix's “Best Jazz Act in Boston" in the 2009 Best Music Poll (for the second consecutive year) and three ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Award. To this astonishing list of credits, Kelly adds Mood Changes, the fifth release on her PAZZ label. The album mixes six standards with four Kelly originals. She is particularly excited about the strides that Mood Changes reveals in her band leading skills. “There's nothing like playing my own music with my own band," she acknowledges. She also enjoyed critically acclaimed success on her previous album, Gracefulee, which has dominated the DownBeat Student Awards over the past four years. A student at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Grace enjoys “... playing all the time and just living music all day." Her College is also represented at the festival by the Berklee Global Jazz Institute Septet on Saturday afternoon.

George Wein made history 56 years ago when he started the festival era with the Newport Jazz Festival. Along with his company, New Festival Productions, LLC, Wein continues to present the best in established and rising stars, this year including Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea Freedom Band with Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride & Roy Haynes, Ahmad Jamal, Wynton Marsalis, Maria Schneider Orchestra, Chris Botti, Jason Moran's Bandwagon, Jon Faddis Quartet, Gretchen Parlato, Fly, Julian Lage Group, JD Allen Trio, David Binney Third Occasion Quartet, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society and many more.

allaboutjazz.com

Java Jazz Festival 2012: Some Tid-Bits from the Fest

Java Jazz Festival 2012 has been passed, yet many of us should still experience the jazz-lag after receiving the blows from stage to stage. Aside from enjoying jazz being served by around 2000 musicians from all over the world, it’s also interesting to see what’s happening outside during the festival.

It’s clear that Java Jazz Festival has become an important part of the lifestyle. Speaking of fashion, many people tried to dress up jazzy for this occasion as we found vests, blazers and of course the Sinatra’s fedora hats everywhere, other than the casual dress like t-shirts and jeans. Looking at the number of attendance, we can have a solid proof that jazz is actually not that difficult to digest. All ages from small babies to seniors packed in to catch their favorite artists, or even just to absorb the sense of jazz. For us, all these showgoers brought a different kind of excitment to see in a festival as big as this. It’s normal to see puzzled face when they were trying to find the stage or people running in full speed because they didn’t want to miss the selected show. There were many funny things, cool moments or unique situations all around the venue that we didn’t want to miss, not to mention the lovely blue sunset sky which appeared above the venue for the whole three days.

Salute to our photographers, they still managed to snap some shots in between their duty to take stage photos and squeezing through crowds. So now we want to share their off stage during the foremost music bash on earth. (Please click each thumbnail at the end of this article to see the photos).

There were many sweet couples seemed to drown their romance into Java Jazz by hugging each other while enjoying the show. Java Jazz Festival has also become the meeting point for artists around the world, including those who came from the same country said hi to one another. Fans took the chance to take pictures with the artists if they were lucky enough, while others had such a good time with their family and friends inside.

What Java Jazz Festival brings to us is not just a simple jazz event. Yes it’s gigantic, with thousands of artists and hundreds of show for total 3 days, but more than just that, we could also see the kind of jazz lifestyle under one roof living peacefully and harmoniously. We just remember a song from Level 42 titled “Love in a Peaceful World”, and we experience the essence in this festival. How lovely to have it through jazz. Not only jazz can entertain us to the max, but it can also carry the message of peace. Thank you Java Jazz! We’ll see you again next year.

jazzuality.com

Norah Jones and the Music She Loves

It took Norah Jones precisely one year to become a household name. Her debut album, “Come Away With Me,” was released in February 2002, and by the following February it had sold four million copies and she had won five Grammys.

A side project she created the following year is less well known. As a diversion from the pressures of following up one of the best-selling debuts of all time, Ms. Jones and four friends formed the band the Little Willies (named after her childhood hero, Willie Nelson) and began playing her favorite country songs at a series of unannounced gigs at the Living Room, a tiny music venue in New York.

“I think I had to leave home for me to know how much country music meant to me,” said Ms. Jones, who moved to New York in 1999 after studying jazz composition and performance in high school and college in Texas. “I listened to Hank Williams, Dolly Parton and Willie growing up, but I wanted to play jazz. When I listened to Bill Evans, I transcribed the chords. When I listened to ‘Red Headed Stranger,’ I just listened to enjoy it. But it really seeped in more than I could have known.”

Almost six years after the Little Willies released its self-titled 2006 debut, the band — which features Lee Alexander on bass, Jim Campilongo and Richard Julian on guitar and Dan Rieser on drums — is finally unveiling its sophomore set, “For the Good Times.” The album, which will be released on Jan. 10, includes covers of songs by Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton.

In the final days of December, we put Ms. Jones on the spot and asked her to create an on-the-fly five-song playlist of her favorite Texas songwriters — artists she’s been inspired by, performed alongside or covered with the Little Willies.

WILLIE NELSON, “PERMANENTLY LONELY” “He’s my No. 1,” said Ms. Jones, who has earned Grammy nominations for three of her duets with the country legend — “Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You),” “Dreams Come True” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The Little Willies’ version of Mr. Nelson’s “Permanently Lonely” is on the upcoming album.

“Willie’s songs are deceptively complicated,” Ms. Jones said. “He’s like a twisted jazz musician under all that country. He writes these chords that are just beautiful — the way they come together so simply, yet they go against normal forms that you learn as a musician. But he makes them sound so beautiful and simple. You don’t try to that, you just do. And that’s what’s great about Willie: he just does.”

TOWNES VAN ZANDT, “NO PLACE TO FALL” A song considered by many to be one of the late great Texas songwriter’s signatures, the Little Willies included it on its 2006 debut.

“I tend to listen to Townes when I’m feeling melancholy,” Ms. Jones said. “And this is one of Townes’s most beautiful songs. For the Little Willies, it was one of the easiest and most natural things we’ve recorded. That’s the best kind of situation, when the song kind of plays itself. For that to happen, it has to be a pretty incredible song.”

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, “BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS” Mr. Kristofferson recorded “Best of All Possible Worlds” in 1970 for his debut album “Kristofferson,” and 36 years later, the Little Willies laid down the same track on its debut release. (The title track of the band’s new album, “For the Good Times,” is also one of Mr. Kristofferson’s songs.)

“Best of All Possible Worlds” is “so much fun because it stacks up a lot of words and a lot of clever lines; it’s so well crafted, but also so soulful,” Ms. Jones said. “That’s the trick to songwriting — you want craft, but you also need soul and honesty. And who’s as inherently soulful as Kris Kristofferson? Look at ‘For the Good Times.’ It’s one of the most heartbreaking, beautiful lyrics ever. If he only wrote those two songs, he’d be on the list. But obviously, he’s given us so much more.”

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE, “IF YOU WANT ME TO STAY” “I’ve always loved the fact that Sly Stone was born in Denton,” said Ms. Jones, who went to college in Denton at the University of North Texas. She has yet to record a Sly Stone song.

“He’s just one of those people,” she said. “You put on a Sly Stone record and it changes your mood. It feels so good. I might be crazy, but I also feel like I can hear the Texas in his singing. I feel like you can hear the country in the back of his voice and the pronunciations, the way he splits syllables.”

CINDY WALKER, “YOU DON’T KNOW ME” Ms. Walker, a country songwriter, had Top 10 hits in every decade from the 1940s to the ’80s, and big-name musicians from Ray Charles and Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley and Mr. Nelson performed her songs.

“I didn’t know much about her until Willie did that ‘Songs of Cindy Walker’ album and I realized I knew half of those songs. I grew up on them,” Ms. Jones said. “ ‘You Don’t Know Me’ is so fantastic because it strikes the perfect balance of simplicity, directness and heart.” 

www.nytimes.com

Julian Pavone is World’s Youngest Professional Drummer

Guinness World Records has recognized a U.S. boy as the youngest professional drummer. Julian Pavone was certified as of March 21, 2010, when he was 5 years 10 months and 3 days old, Guinness announced Tuesday.

The rules for London-based Guinness say a drummer must play on at least one commercial record and be paid for the work. The drummer also must have given at least 20 concerts of 45 minutes or longer within five years. Julian is 7 and lives outside Detroit.

His drummer-father, Bernie Pavone, said Julian’s percussion background dates back before birth. “I used to play music on my wife’s stomach all the time when she was pregnant with Julian,” Guinness quoted the father as saying.

Julian has appeared on about 150 television and news shows, including “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Martha Stewart,” “The Maury Show,” “FOX News Dayside” and “Inside Edition.”

The previous record holder was Tiger Onitsuka of Japan, who was recognized at age 9 years, 9 months.

Source : cbsnews.com

Bridesmaids Movie Review by Anna Smith at Empire

Anchorman, Superbad, The 40 Year-Old Virgin… Producer Judd Apatow has helped make the last seven years a lot funnier. Meanwhile, fans of mainstream female-focused comedies have mostly been offered insipid J-Lo vehicles and Sex And The City movies. Thankfully, Apatow has turned his attention to the fairer sex, although most members of this bridal party are far from coy. Kristen Wiig’s Annie has a blunt wit, a regular fuck-buddy (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) and could drink Bridget Jones right under the table. She also has a tendency for self-doubt and a problem with organisation, both of which come to the fore when she’s asked to play Maid Of Honour for Maya Rudolph’s Lillian.

Co-writer Wiig has created a heroine with bitterly funny, relatable character observations and a genial, down-to-earth performance. Annie is no clotheshorse tripping in her heels, nor is she man-obsessed. She may go for the wrong kind of guys but her main concern is a female friendship, and it’s this that makes Bridesmaids stand out from the regular chick-flick crowd.

Lillian’s engagement is a wake-up call for Annie, casting a spotlight on her singledom. The last thing Annie needs is an immaculate rich bitch upstaging her at every opportunity. Enter Rose Byrne as Helen. The mistress of the backhanded compliment, Helen’s always on hand with a patronising comment about Annie’s bridal party preparations. She also gives the nervous flyer something to calm her down on a plane, leading to the film’s funniest scenes.

At its best, Bridesmaids is proper, laugh-out-loud, sides-clutching, grin-at- your-mates funny. The airplane scenes see a sky-high Annie trying to sneak into first class to join her friends, even failing in her attempts to insult the air hostess. Meanwhile, each character has a subplot building, including Megan (Melissa McCarthy), who’s confidently cracking onto a man she’s convinced is an air marshal. When these strands come together, it’s explosively hilarious — just like the bridal shop scene where the girls get sudden, debilitating food poisoning. Like many a guys’ comedy, the film isn’t afraid to flirt with gross-out, but doesn’t throw in toilet humour for the sake of it. It makes it relevant to both plot and character and, just possibly, funny to women who normally hate that kind of thing.

Regular Apatow fans will be on the floor at this point, and that’s another thing that makes Bridesmaids unusual: it appeals to men too. Yes, a lot of the humour revolves around female rituals and neuroses, but the writing’s strong enough to bridge the gender gap. It’s no surprise this has been compared to The Hangover, a buddy-wedding-comedy that drew fans from both sexes. Bridesmaids even has its very own Alan in Megan, the outspoken, overweight and somewhat deluded sibling of the groom.

It’s a shame, then, when Bridesmaids shoehorns in a romance, even if it is with the lovable Chris O’Dowd. Playing a kindly cop, O’Dowd provides a shoulder for Wiig’s character to cry on but their scenes cost the film its pace. Even Matt Lucas (Annie’s flatmate) feels like he’s wandered in from another film, albeit a very funny one. Still, while Bridesmaids isn’t perfect, it does have moments of comedy perfection. And precious little in the way of Manolos.

The Tree Of Life Movie Review by Ian Nathan

For his fifth film in 40 years, you wonder whether magisterial slowcoach Terrence Malick took stock of his recent output — such abstruse meditations on war, colonialism, and the ineffable fabric of nature as The Thin Red Line and The New World — and felt it was high time he brought a halt to this worrying slide into crass commercialism. After six years chewing over a bit of Heidegger with his Weetabix, and smothering his intentions in a blanket of secrecy like an impenetrable hybrid of J. J. Abrams and J. D. Salinger, he has summoned forth a dizzyingly impressionistic study of family life that doubles as a vaulting enquiry into the very nature of the universe and the possibility of God.

Kubrick’s 2001 comes close, but Malick’s philosophy pines for the salve of love and spirit, and comes light on psychotic super-computers. Even the hardy concept of dialogue falls prey to his exquisitely aloof vision. Against the constant murmurings of nature, we catch only odd lines and whispered voiceovers querulously calling to a hard-of-hearing deity: “Where were you?”

In other words, the kind of highly personal filmmaking where we must first pass though the dawning of time — literally nebulous bodies billowing cloudlike against the black veil of the universe; raw planets spewing gas and lava, primordial pools fecund with boiling matter; sparks of life in the nuclei of swarming cells, dancing proto-fish spinning lightwards, and a wounded plesiosaur on a desolate beach as a meteor strike scours the surface clear for the birth of mankind — before we get to what is commonly referred to as a scene. Cycles of life and death on a cosmic scale contrasted with the intricate dynamics of family.

Actually, instead of beginning at the very beginning, the film kicks off in the mid-1960s with news of the death of R. L. (Laramie Eppler), our protagonist Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) brother, aged only 19. How he died remains elusive, but Malick’s younger brother is reputed to have committed suicide at 19. This shudder of grief will reverberate like a meteor crash through the film, stirring the first of so many questions: what does the loss of a loved one mean against the backdrop of eternity? Much, it transpires.

It is this unshakable heartache, as bitter as the taste of a madeleine is sweet, that casts Sean Penn’s grown-up Jack down a Proustian time tunnel from the metallic canyons of present day Houston, by way of the aforementioned Creation, to the sun-softened enchantment of his childhood. Jack and his two brothers (all three actors wonderfully naturalistic unknowns) are nurtured in an Edenic youth recalled via an organic pulse of ‘memories’: fragments of story, grace notes, wisps of emotion, the odd flicker of Lynchian weirdness. Together an uncanny distillation of how human memory stirs its keeper, awash in Malick’s transcendent imagery: light cascading through leaves, the kiss of a breeze on wild grass, filigree curtains billowing through window frames, dogs running wild.

Theirs is a harmony held in balance by the opposing poles of their parents. A luminous, angelic mother (Jessica Chastain), made holy by the exaltation of Jack’s recollection, bestows a lilting ideology: “The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you follow.” She is exemplified as grace. While the astonishingly mature Brad Pitt as Jack’s terse patriarch — a soul damped down by quashed aspiration, veering between brutal discipline and astringent love — espouses the doctrine of nature: nothing can be achieved without will. Even without the scaffolding of story, this is a sublime evocation of the tides of ecstasy and torment flowing through an American boyhood.

Malick conducts his five editors the way great composers conjure art from thin air, creating an unforgettable symphony of beauty, introspection, and wells of unabashed feeling. And to accompany such cinematic inspiration, not for this director the dreadnought snarls of Nickelback, but extracts of Couperin, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler and Bach, interposed with Alexandre Desplat’s yearning score. The very execution poses its own spiritual enquiry — how can such beauty be created in a meaningless void?

The result is so disarmingly unironic, and therefore open to mockery, it’s easy to see why it was met with a chorus of boos from Cannes’ sincerity-phobic critics. Sure, at times it lifts off too far, becoming too remote and self-involved to fully grasp. And the closing images of Sean Penn blundering across a metaphorical beach in his sodden Armani suggest a potential afterlife as drunkenly off-kilter as that rum-do at the end of Lost.

It is equally clear why The Tree Of Life landed the Palme D’or — against the brute attack of modern cinema it feels heaven-sent. A film awestruck by life: why are we here? What are we for? Where did it all go wrong? And where could it yet go right? Malick doesn’t pretend to have actual answers. But then neither, one suspects, does Transformers 3.

Craig Ferguson Gives Rose Byrne a Lap Dance on ‘The Tonight’

We kind of think Craig Ferguson was just waiting for an invitation on ‘The Tonight Show’ (Weeknights, 11:35PM ET on CBS). He was sitting on the couch while Jay Leno was talking to Rose Byrne about her experience working on ‘Bridesmaids.’

When Byrne started talking about how Kristen Wiig took the ladies out for a night of bonding, that wound up at a male strip club, Leno started really probing her for details.

“Oh, don’t act like you’ve never been there,” Ferguson said to him.Craig Ferguson Gives Rose Byrne a Lap Dance on 'The Tonight Show'

Leno was asking if they were facing toward her or away from her, wanting an idea of how they straddled her. When Byrne started trying to explain, Leno asked Ferguson to demonstrate, and ‘The Late Late Show’ host was more than happy to oblige.

He Tweeted about it shortly afterward. “Aw crap. I just gave Rose Byrne a lap dance on the Tonight Show. I may have gone too far,” he wrote, adding the hashtag #creepyscotsman.

Well, Ferguson is okay with being kind of creepy on his own show, so why not ‘The Tonight Show’ as well?

‘Rescue Me’ Items Head to Smithsonian, Callie Thorne Talks Final Season

‘Rescue Me’ is fast approaching its swansong. As the cast, crew and fans start to ponder life without the drama, it’s been revealed that creator Denis Leary is giving items — including his firefighter costume and tools — to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Executive producer Peter Tolan and actor Lenny Clarke (Teddy Gavin) will join Leary for a donation ceremony at 2PM ET Thursday.

The objects will join the museum’s popular culture history collections. The Smithsonian says today’s ceremony is the first in a series of events to mark the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 and examine how it will be remembered and how life has changed.

‘Rescue Me’ focuses on the professional and personal lives of a group of New York City firefighters in the fictitious Ladder 62/Engine 99 firehouse as they deal with the grief of losing friends and relatives at Ground Zero. It tackles the daily drama of the life-and-death situations associated with being a firefighter while exploring the ways the men use dark humor to protect their true emotions.

'Rescue Me' Items Head to Smithsonian, Callie Thorne Talks Final Season

The Series Finale of ‘Rescue Me’ is due to air on Wednesday Sept. 7th, a few days ahead of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Leary’s co-star Callie Thorne, who’s played Shelia Keefe since the beginning, has spoken about the sadness of filming the final scenes after seven years of working with the same cast and crew.

She told ‘People’ that “The final days of ‘Rescue Me’ were terrible. There were a lot of tears. Especially when people heard, ‘That’s a series wrap on Denis Leary.’ A lot of the guys got really choked up.”

“Denis didn’t cry,” she added. “But he was very quiet. Which is a big deal for Denis Leary.”