Harvard Hosts Amir ElSaffar and Susie Ibarra in a Free Concert That Blends Iraqi Maqam, Philippine Rainforests, and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Music

On Thursday, October 1, 2026, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, Harvard University’s John Knowles Paine Concert Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts hosts the Ming Mei Residency Concert, curated and presented by Claire Chase. The event is free and open to all ages, and it pairs two of the most boundary-dissolving figures in contemporary improvised and composed music for a program that reaches from the microtonal scales of the Middle East to the indigenous percussion traditions of the Philippine highlands. This is live music in the fullest possible sense: no studio, no mediation, just two extraordinary musical minds performing for an audience in a room built for exactly this kind of encounter.

The first half of the evening belongs to Amir ElSaffar’s New Quartet, featuring Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, Tania Giannouli on piano, and Ole Mathisen on tenor saxophone. ElSaffar, a classically trained trumpeter and vocalist who also earned a degree in traditional Iraqi music, built his reputation by combining contemporary jazz improvisation with the ancient modal system of Iraqi Maqam, a tradition of extraordinary harmonic complexity that operates on microtonal intervals not found in the Western equal-tempered scale. To bring this into the concert hall, ElSaffar performs with a custom-tuned microtonal piano, altered to align Western keyboard pitch with the quartertones and nuances of Middle Eastern scales. The result is music that exists in genuinely new harmonic territory, belonging fully to both the jazz and the Maqam traditions while sounding like neither in isolation.

The second half is dedicated to Susie Ibarra’s “Sky Islands”, her 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork performed by Talking Gong, guest percussionist Levy Lorenzo, and the Parker Quartet. Inspired by the biodiversity of the Philippine rainforests and drawing from the indigenous musical traditions of the Kalinga and Cordilleras peoples, the piece incorporates wired living plants and traditional gongs alongside the conventional chamber ensemble. Register through the Harvard University event page.

The West Orange Jazz Festival Delivered: Seven Hours, Seven Acts, and a Landmark Honor for WBGO’s Dorthaan Kirk

The 19th Annual West Orange Jazz Festival took place last Saturday, September 19, 2026, from 1:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center at 4 Boland Drive in West Orange, New Jersey, serving simultaneously as the grand reopening of the newly renovated venue and its 25th anniversary celebration. Produced by Pleasant Valley Productions and hosted by artistic director and longtime WBGO radio host Monifa Brown, the non-stop seven-hour outdoor festival delivered exactly what the occasion demanded: a full day of live jazz across every level of the scene, from student ensembles to internationally recognized headliners, in a setting that felt both celebratory and deeply connected to the community the venue has served for a quarter century.

The seven-act schedule ran from 1:00 PM through closing. NJPAC TD Jazz For Teens, directed by Mark Gross, opened the afternoon, followed by the Jaleel Shaw Trio and the Montclair State University Jazz Ensemble under Dr. Oscar Perez. The late afternoon featured headliners: the Freddie Hendrix Experience and Fellowship, internationally renowned vibraphonist Joe Locke in his Songs and Stories solo format, the Antoinette Montague Experience, and Dion Parson and the 21st Century Band closing the evening. Attendees also enjoyed local food vendors, artisan booths, and a beer and wine garden throughout.

The festival’s most significant non-musical moment was the presentation of the inaugural OSPAC Jazz Fest Spirit Award to Dorthaan Kirk, NEA Jazz Master and a foundational figure in the development of WBGO FM, the New Jersey public jazz station that has broadcast this music to the region for decades. Kirk’s lifetime of dedication to preserving jazz, both through her work at WBGO and through her personal relationship with the music during her marriage to saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, earned her an honor created specifically to recognize a life spent in service to the art form. It was the right award given to the right person.

Smoke Jazz Club’s Two-Week Thelonious Monk Festival: Renee Rosnes, James Francies, and Joel Ross Honor the Birthday of the Genius

Smoke Jazz and Supper Club on Manhattan’s Upper West Side has announced a two-week Thelonious Monk Festival running October 7 through October 18, 2026, honoring the birthday of the legendary pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, born October 10, 1917. Monk’s music has always been among the most demanding and most rewarding in jazz: rhythmically unpredictable, harmonically angular, built on a relationship to space and silence that no other composer in the tradition has quite replicated. A two-week festival dedicated entirely to his language, performed by musicians who have spent their careers developing their own relationships to it, is one of the most musically serious programming decisions any club makes, and Smoke executes it with the seriousness it deserves.

The first week, October 7 through 10, features the Renee Rosnes Quartet in a program titled “Monk’s Sphere,” with tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover, bassist David Wong, and drummer Carl Allen. A special highlight: on Friday, October 9, the 8:30 PM set will be broadcast live on WKCR Radio 89.9FM to celebrate the station’s 85th anniversary, giving the Monk Festival a radio broadcast dimension that Monk himself would have recognized and appreciated.

The second week, October 14 through 18, marks the leadership debut at Smoke for James Francies, the Blue Note recording artist and pianist who has established himself as one of the most compelling young voices in contemporary jazz. Francies leads his trio with Luca Alemanno on bass and Jeremy Dutton on drums, joined by vibraphonist Joel Ross as special guest. All sets run at 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM, with a late 10:30 PM set added on Fridays and Saturdays.

The Polish Jazz Festival London Closes Its Second Edition This Weekend with a Punk-Jazz Finale at Kings Place

The 2nd Annual Polish Jazz Festival London, running September 11 through September 27, 2026 across Cadogan Hall, Union Chapel, and Kings Place, has delivered one of the most culturally significant jazz festival programs in London this year. Curated by Łukasz Droździel and building on a completely sold-out 2025 debut, the festival showcases the depth, breadth, and historical weight of Poland’s jazz tradition, from the Iron Curtain-era avant-garde that developed in isolation from Western jazz to the contemporary electro-jazz innovators bringing it into the present. A four-part BBC World Service documentary series tracing the legacy of the Polish jazz movement accompanies the festival.

Among the most discussed events was the EABS live premiere: the Wrocław-based electro-jazz quintet performed a rediscovered 1976 funk and jazz fusion recording originally made by Tomasz Stańko and Andrzej Trzaskowski behind the Iron Curtain, a record never performed live in the 50 years since it was made. Hearing it performed for the first time before a London audience is a genuine historical event. The vocal programming has been equally strong, with Urszula Dudziak celebrating her 83rd birthday in performance, Kayah presenting her Jazzayah world-music program, and Anna Maria Jopek at Cadogan Hall. The Warsaw Jazz Takeover at Union Chapel featured the Marcin Masecki Trio, Warsaw Village Band, and HVMBLE, with British guitarist Robert Luft as guest.

The festival closes this weekend. On September 26, the UK premiere of Mariusz Szypura’s “Chopin Residue” is followed by pianist Leszek Możdżer performing the works of legendary film composer Krzysztof Komeda. On September 27, the young punk-jazz group Kosmonauci (The Cosmonauts) close the entire festival at Kings Place in a finale that captures what this edition has done best: honor the tradition and then blow right past it.

Tonight in New York: Ed Palermo Big Band at the Iridium, Mingus Big Band Monday Residency, and Live Sets at the Blue Note

If you are in New York City tonight, Monday, September 21, 2026, the live jazz calendar is stacked. The Ed Palermo Big Band performs live at The Iridium on Broadway, bringing the distinctive musical intelligence and humor that Palermo has built his ensemble around for decades. Palermo’s big band occupies genuinely unusual territory in the orchestral jazz world: deeply schooled in the tradition and capable of performing any standard with authority, but equally committed to arrangements that subvert expectation and reward listeners paying close attention.

Downtown, the Mingus Big Band holds its Monday residency at The Pocket Jazz Club, carrying forward the tradition established by Charles Mingus and maintained by his estate through the Mingus Music organization. The Mingus Big Band has been one of the most consistently extraordinary large ensemble jazz experiences available in New York for decades, performing Mingus’s complex and emotionally charged compositions with a rotating cast of exceptional musicians who bring fresh perspective to material that rewards endless revisitation. At the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village, Luke Titus and Emily Bear take over separate evening sets. WBGO’s Live Jazz stream tracks all of tonight’s live sets in real time.