Well, look at that! Today is my 50th birthday.

It’s a big round number — you might call it a milestone — and I feel pretty good about it. On some level I’m channeling one of our cultural heroes, Sally O’Malley, as embodied by the great Molly Shannon. (I too like to kick, and stretch, and KICK.)

Kidding aside, there’s a cottage industry of books and articles (and probably TikToks) about turning 50, and why it marks the cusp of a rewarding life stage. I don’t know anything about that. But I will cop to a general peace of mind about the whole situation — maybe because this threshold has loomed for a while now, and I’ve been subliminally steeling myself. Also, at this point I know who I am, what I’m up to, and where my priorities are aligned. Who has the time for existential dread?

Over the weekend I celebrated with a late-summer backyard luau featuring some of my favorite homestyle Hawaiian food and a few dozen friends. Because we prepared everything from scratch, the days leading up to it were hectic. But we were blessed with perfect weather, and the evening was a blast. The backyard luau concept is also how I celebrated my 40th, and it was the one and only wish I had for 50. We called the party “Nate Five-0,” after a network television staple from my childhood. (Yours too?)

A lot of my family is scattered on the west coast or in the middle of the Pacific, so there were some key people who couldn’t make it this time. But I was knocked out by all the friends who traveled to the Philly suburbs to join this celebration. First to arrive was a dear college friend, Kalyani Fernando, who lives in Denver and has been staying with us for the last several days. She’s the person who introduced me to my future wife, Ashley Lederer, some 25 years ago. Here they are in unintentionally synchronous floral prints. (As the invitation said: Aloha Attire!)

One thing I love about throwing a party like this is how it gets folks to reconnect. Here below is a shot from early in the evening, with another pair of college friends, Charles Soule and Bart Miltenberger. I met them both within the first week or two of freshman year, and for a couple of years we played together in a jazz combo.

Another musical cohort in attendance, which should come as no surprise, is a cabal I’ll identify here as the Jazz Mafia: all of my fellow scribes and scene-builders who made it out, most of them traveling from other points along the eastern seaboard.

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The luau was such a blast that I found it hard to say goodnight. A handful of us ended things into the wee hours, now indoors, sipping bourbon and listening to records. (What else would you expect?) At some point I took the shrink wrap off something I’d bought as a gift to myself: Jason Moran Plays Duke Ellington on double LP. I believe this was produced in a limited edition of 500; my copy is #56, and sounds tremendous. (You can buy the album either on LP or CD at Yes Records, here.)

Another thing I like about throwing a luau? Leftovers. The evening was such a blur of socializing and serving that I honestly didn’t savor our mixed plate with full attention. It was much easier to focus the following evening. The only thing missing was the Lomi Lomi Salmon, which we’d already demolished.

In case you’re curious about the menu, here’s what we served:

Pupus:

• Musubi (Tofu and/or SPAM™️)

• Tropical Fruit Kabobs

• Taro Chips

• Roasted Macadamia Nuts

Dinner:

• Green salad with Pietro Shoyu Dressing1

• White rice with (optional) Furikake

• Hawaiian Macaroni Salad

• Lomi Lomi Salmon

• Shoyu Chicken

• Kalua Pork

Dessert:

• Butter Mochi

• Guava-Passionfruit Dole Whip™️

These were mostly family recipes, jotted or printed on 3 x 5 inch notecards. But as we were prepping for the party, Ashley discovered an excellent local-style cookbook by Maui-based writer and photographer Alana Kysar. It’s called Aloha Kitchen, and features many of the recipes that have been staples of my upbringing. The ingredients and processes are really similar to what I was taught in our home kitchen. So if you’d like to make any of the delicious food we served, that’s where I would steer you.

Anyway, Happy Birthday to Me! Tonight we’ll throw some burgers on the grill and I will finally open my presents. (There are a few record-shaped packages in the pile.)

If you’re feeling generous and happen to be a free subscriber to The Gig, now would be a great time to upgrade to a paid sub. Just saying! It would be a gift that keeps on giving. As I clear this milestone, I’m excited about what lies ahead.

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Because, I like to kick! And stretch! And KICK! 🦵🏼😜

Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda was born on Aug. 27, 1937 — 89 years ago this week, a little over a decade after her husband, John. There’s a lot happening on the Coltrane 100 front in the days and weeks ahead, but for now, let’s focus on Alice, who blazed her own trail as a keyboardist, harpist, composer and spiritual seeker, while raising a family and a broader community.

This year brought us Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, an illuminating biography by Andy Beta. Last month, his extended book tour brought him to Solar Myth in Philadelphia, for a ticketed event that also featured a solo concert by keyboardist and composer Surya Botofasina. The room was packed, the spirit was present, and the discourse was engaging and astute.

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Andy, who also runs (check it out), brought musical clips, which you’ll hear at a few points in the talk. Surya, who sat silent for the bulk of the interview, waited until the right moment to speak — and then dropped some seriously deep insights, drawing on his upbringing at Swamini Turiyasangitananda’s ashram, where she served as his musical and spiritual mentor. The performance that followed our talk was not unlike what he conjured on the 2024 album Ashram Sun.

I think you’ll really enjoy this conversation, which was recorded by Beau Gordon and produced by Ars Nova Workshop; thanks to both, as well as to Andy and Surya. Now I’ll give the last word here to the author, who notes in his prologue the remarkably wide embrace of the Swamini’s musical legacy over the last decade or so. “Yet I’m reluctant to classify Alice Coltrane as an example of a beloved artist going from obscurity to belated discovery,” he clarifies. “The stars are always above us, but the conditions on Earth must be right to fully glimpse their splendor.”

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Last Wednesday evening, as a solar eclipse approached totality over Europe, I was quick-stepping across London streets toward The Jazz Cafe. There I had an appointment to experience natural wonders of a different sort, courtesy of the pathfinding British saxophonist, bandleader…

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Midday sun blazed over Fort Adams on Sunday, as the Newport Jazz Festival made an impromptu pivot. Sienna Spiro, a buzzy young retro-soul siren from London, had just informed the Newport Festivals team that she wouldn’t be appearing as …

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As this post sails out into the world, I’m heading up to Fort Adams State Park for the Newport Jazz Festival. More on that in a future dispatch, but if you happen to see me there, please say hello. In the meantime, I w…

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The Gig has published some past coverage of McCraven, and I want to be sure you knew about it. In the early weeks of 2025, I collaborated with the brilliant photographer on a photo essay chronicling McCraven’s artist residency at the NYC Winter Jazzfest. That package went out on Jacob’s Substack, That Million Dollar Bash, cross-posted here. One of the photos that Jacob took for this project ended up on the cover of McCraven’s EP The People’s Mixtape.

That Million Dollar Bash

Makaya McCraven: Four Days In the Moment

Nate Chinen, The Gig…

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2 years ago · 28 likes · 9 comments · Jacob Blickenstaff and Nate Chinen

What I wrote at the top of the photo essay feels just as true to me today:

Any performance by Makaya McCraven hums along a few different frequencies at once. What happens on the bandstand, pulsing with the push-pull dynamics of his drumming, is only the most tangible. There’s also history in the cut, an inside language of allusion and inference. At this point, too, there’s a metanarrative — the result of inexorable forces that turn a musical process into a musical product, requiring constant intervention to keep the pilot light aflame.

At the risk of overwhelming you with media, I also wanted to (re)-share audio of a panel that I assembled and moderated at the North Sea Jazz Festival, with McCraven, Kassa Overall, and Alexander Sowinski of BADBADNOTGOOD. This was a 40-minute conversation, and it went to some really cool places.

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Extra Bars

• In case you weren’t aware, Makaya McCraven’s most recent album is a double LP called Off the Record, which assembles the four EPs he released last year. It’s great.

• McCraven has inspired plenty of sharp critical writing. Among my contributions: a review of Universal Beings for Pitchfork, and a review of In These Times for NPR.

• There are a couple of video clips dropped into the interview. They come from footage of McCraven and his band at at Thalia Hall Chicago on Oct. 1, 2025. If you want to watch the whole thing, here it is below. Video by Brian Ashby and Sulyiman Stokes, audio recording and mix by Dave Vettraino. Thanks to Team McCraven, including the gang at Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis.

Look, I had to go with some kind of elbow-nudge in the subject line.

When you’re talking about Steven Bernstein — Sexmob ringleader, verified trickster, the guy who once titled a series of album bumpers “Human Bidet” (Parts 1 through 6) — you can’t come calling with a yawn for a hook.

But I’m a…

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Ten days ago, the British pop go-getter RAYE opened the 60th edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival with a precisely calibrated gesture.

Illuminated by a moody spotlight at the Auditorium Stravinski, she started into a song with some richly layered history, against a backdrop of lightly strummed acoustic guitar, sparse electric piano, and a subtle slick of strings. The song was “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” by the English folk-rock goddess Sandy Denny, who wrote it in 1966 and famously recorded it with Fairport Convention in ‘69.

RAYE chose a different resonance to call out during a mid-song spoken interlude. “In 1976, on this stage, on the third of July — 50 years ago today — Nina Simone stood, basically right here,” she said, with a touch of wonder in her voice. “And she sang this song so much more hauntingly beautiful than I ever could.”

If cynicism is your fallback position in the face of pop pageantry, you have plenty to work with here. RAYE appears in a black sheath dress with peekaboo lace cutouts, her hair and styling suggesting a riff on classic Hollywood chic. She stands on a slowly rotating stage designed to resemble an eight-sided watch bezel — the result of intense involvement from Montreux Jazz’s global brand partner, Audemars Piguet, which co-created this production through its APxMusic initiative. The title of the show, THIS STAGE MAY CONTAIN MOMENTS IN TIME, nods to the function of a timepiece as well as the form of a retrospective, for festival and artist alike. And RAYE’s worshipful nod to Nina in ‘76 elides the more complicated aspects of a historic Montreux set that now elicits both breathless reverence and some bold remonstrance (in The Guardian, in 2020) that Miss Simone “seemed skittish and disoriented” on that stage. Needless to say, Nina never graced a festival on the wings of a corporate luxury brand.

Can you set all that aside?

I can, for a few reasons — the first of which is fully present in the music. RAYE brings power and pliability to her vocal on “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” along with a steady command of dramatic tension and tonal shading. She sounds tremendous. And if you settle in for the entire two-hour show, which ARTE Concert has posted for free, you’ll encounter other winning tributes to icons from Montreuxes past, including James Brown and Prince. Nearing the half-hour mark, RAYE ventures back-to-back tributes to Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald, respectively, with “Georgia on My Mind” and “Summertime.” She sits at the piano for the latter — it was the first song she ever learned to play, she explains — and the urge is to extend her some grace. She doesn’t need much. Her interpretation doesn’t evoke Ella so much as a melding of Motown and Édith Piaf, and she imbues it with voluptuous feeling. She also nicely tees up a solo by the sharp London-based trumpeter James Copus; tosses in some scat aerobics; and uses a lyrical tag in the coda (“Don’t you cry”) to segue into her own tune, an uptempo swinger with the self-explanatory title “I Hate the Way I Look Today.”

“I Hate the Way I Look Today.” (the period is part of the song title) represents just one of many jazz allusions, flirtations, or appropriations on RAYE’s latest studio album, THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. Another comes three-fourths of the way through an antic, atmospheric epic called “The WhatsApp Shakespeare.” — effectively soundtracking a dire turn in the song’s narrative with a Mancini film-noir flourish.

RAYE’s new album, lavishly furnished and independently released, marked another upward leap in an already stratospheric career. Strikingly, her greatest success came after she walked away from a deal with Polydor, delivering My 21st Century Blues in 2023. That one opens with an onstage introduction at an imaginary jazz club, flying team colors. Maybe it was a form of manifesting, given that RAYE made her debut at Montreux Jazz the following year, documenting it with a live album. That festival booking came months after she set a new record by winning six Brit Awards, including the ones for British Album and British Artist of the Year.

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I have no metric for gauging which portion of the jazz public regards RAYE as an imposter, and which portion sees her as an ally. (Those aren’t the only two options, of course.) What I can say with certainty is that she talks the talk: in interviews, she claims a formative bond with jazz, citing songs like “Summertime” (this version, from Ella and Louis’ Porgy and Bess) and “Let There Be Love” (this one, from Nat King Cole’s 1962 date with George Shearing). She also walks the walk, by which I mean she moves fluidly in spaces like the Newport Jazz Festival, which she appeared last year, and the Blue Note, where she rolled up for a Billboard Indie Live event last month.

Here’s what else I can say: THIS TOUR MAY CONTAIN NEW MUSIC, which RAYE piloted through the first half of this year, both harnessed and honored jazz protocols in a way that few pop artists ever credibly manage. I can say that because I caught a date on the tour — in mid-April, such a wildly busy stretch that I decided to wait on posting about it. But my notes are close at hand (and I take great notes). So just as RAYE prepares to rev up her band’s engines as the opening act on Bruno Mars’ stadium tour, I’m finally weighing in here with a jazz-literate (but decidedly not jazz-snobbish) review of her preposterously ambitious live show.

If you’re a paying subscriber, read on! If you haven’t yet upgraded, maybe now’s the time? In addition to this report, you’ll get the full archive at The Gig, future editions of Take Five, and the ability to comment and join chats. Thanks for reading!

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RAYE: THIS TOUR MAY CONTAIN NEW MUSIC

The Met Philadelphia, April 19, 2026

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It seemed like everyone and their uncle released a mid-year album list in 2026. That’s cool, I recognize the hustle. I even contributed to one, at NPR Music. (I leaned into honest pleasures for both album and song picks: respectively, Kacey Musgraves and Tomeka Reid. Both have been on regular rotation here.)

I thought about posting my own mid-year album roundup here at The Gig, but something about it felt obligatory until I tweaked the timeframe. So what you’ll find below is a Take Five of killer music just appearing on the horizon line. A few are out in August, the other two in September. So consider this a handcrafted musical amuse-bouche, with the assurance that you won’t have long to wait for the main course.

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Before we dive in, I do want to shout out one album that’s already been released: Mana, by trombonist-and-now-vocalist Kalia Vandever. It dropped on International Anthem almost a month ago, the same day they performed an excellent solo set at Solar Myth in Philly. Before the show, Vandever joined me for an onstage interview, which you can now hear in the new episode of The Late Set from WRTI.

I hope you enjoy the episode. I also hope you’ll check out Kalia’s album, if you haven’t yet. And in that spirit, shall we proceed?

Take Five: Mid-Year Forecast Edition

July 7, 2026

Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer, Dafnis Prieto, “I Wanted a Map”

Multi-reedist Henry Threadgill, pianist Vijay Iyer, drummer Dafnis Prieto: here are three distinguished artists deeply serious about composition, in both notated and spontaneous forms. Their history as a cooperative trio goes back more than a dozen years — back to a benefit for The Jazz Gallery, which has hosted them a handful of times since, as recently as last month. Around the same time, we received the welcome news of a studio album, Fifteen, due out on Nonesuch on August 21. The news came with a single, and the single came with a video from the session.

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On this day 70 years ago, tragedy struck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

A car bearing trumpeter Clifford Brown and pianist Richie Powell lost control on a rain-slicked stretch of the highway near the Bedford Interchange, 200 miles west …

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So, and I did a thing. Earlier this week, we hoped on Substack Live — he from his music studio in Portland, Oregon, me from a home office just outside of Philly — for a talk we called Honest Songcraft in the Slop Era. It was, as we’d hoped, a far-ranging yet focused conversation about creative practice, productive friction, and the way we’re all making do at a moment of peak precarity. It was also, as I knew it would be, a lot of fun. I’m happy to bring you the full video here at The Gig. Gabriel is doing the same on his platform, .

Among our fruitful digressions was one on the merits and limitations of Stephen Sondheim’s music for the stage (which prompted some friendly pushback from a noted artist in the comments, and which I think Gabriel is going to follow up on). We also, of course, talked about artificial intelligence and other forms of automation, with what I’d like to call a fair amount of nuance.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Speaking for myself, in the interest of full disclosure: The Gig is a 100% AI-free zone on the level of the sentence, and with respect to self-expression. But I do take advantage of some AI tools built into the platform — like the acknowledgment above, which struck me as a friendly touch. The sentiment is true to life, even if the gesture came from someplace else.

My promise to you is that I’ll never use an LLM to do my writing or thinking, let alone my listening. After all, that’s the good stuff! I want it for myself, and I’m grateful that on some level you want it, too.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my talk with Gabriel — let us know what you think! Even if you disagree with any part of what we’re saying. Thanks for checking it out!

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The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded each summer at MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire, honors artists of exceptional achievement across a range of disciplines. Its first recipient was Thornton Wilder, who worked on Our Town during one of his MacDowell residencies. Since then the medal has been bestowed on the likes of Edgard Varèse, Georgia O’Keef…

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Chris Speed’s Yeah No sounded like nothing else when they first formed 30 years ago. The members of the band — Speed on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Cuong Vu on trumpet and electronics, Skúli Sverrisson on electric bass, Jim…

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We bring you glad tidings of good conversation on Tuesday, June 16, as a composer and a critic find common ground on Substack Live. We’re calling this discussion “Honest Songcraft in the Slop Era,” with all due sincerity (and just a little cheek).

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The composer in question has a newsletter, . The critic is yours tr…

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JAŸ-Z pulled up to The Roots Picnic prepared to make a meal out of the metanarrative.

First: a strange silhouette in a blue haze, crowned by an unfamiliar nimbus. The Afro was the first reveal1 — in which he reveled, surveying the crowd in imperial silence for 40 seconds. Then came the deli…

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This image above captures Gregory Hutchinson performing with the Christian McBride Trio at Ronnie Scott’s, on Nov. 4, 2025. Taken by the London-based photographer Tatiana Gorilovsky, it was just deservedly named Jazz Photo of the Year in the 31st annual Jazz Journalists Associ…

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Sonny Rollins. What can you even say? He was the last of the Mohicans1 — an essential piece of jazz’s midcentury-modern picture, the only surviving subject in Art Kane’s iconic yearbook photograph A Great Day in Harlem. But longevity is just one factor at play. We lionize Sonny, profoundly mourn his passing, …

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The subject exists in itself, and however faithful or fanciful the reverential gesture, there’s always a distance between that point of origin and this port of arrival.

Miles Davis — who named a late-career album Aura, though probably not with Walter Benjamin in mind1 — held fast to this truth. When asked to honor Duke Ell…

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At a pivotal juncture in The Black Clown, Davóne Tines joins an onstage coterie, taking part in their jubilant kick line as the band makes a jitterbug ruckus. Freedom! sings the assembled in full-chested gospel harmony, raising the proverbial rafters, while a stilt-walker in …

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