On Wed., April 30, Jazz 88 will celebrate International Jazz Day 2025 by spinning selections illuminating the truly global reach of jazz. Matt Silver got a head start on the April 27 edition of “Breaking Jazz.”
Hello! This is Matt Silver. I host a new jazz release show on Sunday evenings called "Breaking Jazz," where, each week, I bring you the music and musicians of the moment — jazz as it’s being played today. This past Sunday evening, on "Breaking Jazz," I celebrated International Jazz Day 2025. I realize I was three days early to the party, but "Breaking Jazz" is but a humble weekly program; wait 'til next week, and, by then, the ship's way too far out of port.
And more to the point, the music "Breaking Jazz" champions — new jazz, largely from the up-and-coming and newly arrived bands and musicians — is so heavily influenced by so many distinct and overlapping ethnic, regional, national, and transnational musical aesthetics and sensibilities that it'd be malpractice for this particular show to let International Jazz Day 2025 pass without a substantive acknowledgment. So, consider this that.
JAZZ, as we understand it, comprises an amalgamation of the African diaspora’s rhythmic inheritances, Western European harmonic conceptions, and the folk-inspired melody making of Tin Pan Alley via the Pale of Settlement. It’s the sum of jazz’s component parts that makes it distinctly American. Idiomatically, the music evolved from Storyville in New Orleans to Prohibition-era Chicago, on through the Harlem Renaissance to Kansas City’s 18th and Vine and mid-century explosions into modernity on Central Avenue and on 52nd Street — and in North Philadelphia, Detroit’s West Side, and D.C.’s U Street.
And though the confluence of cultural influences that constitute jazz’s foundations could only have happened in 20th century America, enthusiastic, appreciative, knowledgeable, and highly sophisticated audiences have developed in metros throughout the world over the past 75 years. Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, Havana, Buenos Aires, Rio, Zurich, Shanghai, Tokyo, Tel Aviv. Jazz did for global musicianship what the Dream Team did for basketball’s global reach. The NBA has more international superstars playing a distinctly American game than ever before…and these guys are good. Really, really good. Same thing goes for jazz. Each generation, a higher and higher proportion of the world’s best young jazz talent is coming from Europe, from the Middle East, Central and South America, and South and East Asia.
Brazilian pianist and composer José Luis Martins, now based in Washington, D.C., released his fourth album, “Odyssey Mixtape,” earlier this month (April 2025) on Origin Records. Accompanied by flutist Alex Hamburger, bassist Romeir Mendez, drummer Dana Hawkins, and guitarist John Lee, Martins’ music embodies the mélange of multi–cultural influences permeating contemporary jazz both in the U.S. and internationally. Photo by Jamie Sandel.
In 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization — better known as UNESCO — at the behest of UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and legendary jazz pianist Herbie Hancock — declared April 30th International Jazz Day, with the goal of highlighting the significant diplomatic role jazz plays in uniting people in all corners of the globe. I’d hope we wouldn’t need a calendar day established by UN decree to celebrate jazz’s reach. One of the goals of "Breaking Jazz" is to celebrate that in some small way every week, no matter the time of year. And, heck, I don’t need the UN to tell me which way the wind blows; that organization in 2025 gets nearly as much wrong or incomplete as it gets right. But International Jazz Day is overwhelmingly a net positive, occasion to recognize the extent to which jazz has fostered camaraderie and accelerated acknowledgment of our shared humanity between musicians and music lovers across cultures that are otherwise very different from one another. As best I can understand it, this is exactly what makes jazz distinctly American. It embodies the highest of our enumerated ideals. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
This past Sunday evening on “Breaking Jazz,” we celebrated International Jazz Day 2025 by dedicating the entire show to musicians who’ve found their way to this great American artform from an incredible diversity of non-American backgrounds.
The piece we opened the show with, “Sea of Clouds” — the first half of the Tracy Yang Orchestra’s two-part “Scene Taiwan Collection” — won Yang the 2021 BMI Charlie Parker Prize for original jazz composition. It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. It beautifully integrates classical and regional motifs Yang would’ve grown up with, and, at the same time, presents a decidedly contemporary sensibility. Slick in the best way — sustained by genuine substance. Humble yet ambitiously populist in the way of Aaron Copeland’s music. Ethereal in some sections; earthy and galvanizing and muscular in others.
This is the essence of why international contributions to this foundationally American artform is so very welcome and necessary. The overarching worldview is generally similar, but the perspectives are different. It’s like a compelling concurring opinion from a thoughtful/creative supreme court justice. The conclusions are the same; it’s how the justices arrive at those conclusions that’s different. If, for you (as it is for me), the music is paramount, this is the kind of diversity that ought to be most highly coveted. And it’s why such strong international engagement with jazz has made, and will continue to make, the music even better.
Yang, a one-time practicing physician in Taiwan, emigrated to the United States to pursue a career as a jazz musician, in doing so becoming a highly sought after young composer, conductor, and arranger. Her most recent album, OR (or Operating Room) — a nod to her background in surgical medicine — was released in August of last year from Brooklyn Jazz Underground.
Also featured was Max Zbiral-Teller. With a background in traditional Irish music, the musician better known as Max ZT has also trained under masters of Senegalese and Indian musical forms. And NPR has called him the “Jimmy Hendrix of the hammered dulcimer.” Together, he and bassist Moto Fukushima (a wonderful Japanese six-stringer steeped in the American jazz tradition) combine to form House of Waters. On Becoming, their most recent release from Snarky Puppy’s GroundUP Music, earned the band a 2024 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental album. On it, ZT and Fukushima are joined by one of the most celebrated drummers of the last 25 years, Antonio Sanchez. Call it fusion or world music; file it under jazz-adjacent to cover all bases or — please, only if you must — describe what they’re doing as a “tapestry of sound.” These guys clearly don’t care how their music is classified or categorized; they only care that it’s good and that it moves you. Well, it is, and it does.
You can catch the rest of the International Jazz Day edition of “Breaking Jazz” right here, on-demand. Here’s a sneak preview of what you’ll find: a European big band (in my opinion, the best ensemble of its kind in the world) incorporating the Scotch-Irish folk music sensibilities of Appalachia into a killer chart arranged by a Los Angeles-based saxophonist; a Turkish pianist and composer playing a melancholic Cuban montuno; a tune from the debut recording of a young drummer of Guatemalan and native American backgrounds born and raised in Cork, Ireland; and a classically trained jazz violinist from northeastern Italy with a new sextet comprising instrumentalists from Spain, Argentina, South Korea, and the United States.
Listen to Breaking Jazz’s special International Jazz Day edition. And get a worldview.
