IJS Presents Jazz star T.K. Blue - CD Release "Planet Bluu"

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About "Planet Bluu"

Featuring T.K. Blue on Saxophone, Flute, and Kalimba, with Trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr., Pianist Davis Whitfield, Bassist Dishan Harper, and Drummer Orion Turre – with Special Guests Steve Turre and Dave Kikoski

On the heels of performing with the Herbie Hancock Institute at the 2024 International Jazz Day Concert in Tangier, Morocco and the 2024 NEA Jazz Master Award Ceremony as leader and musical director of the African Rhythms Alumni Ensemble, T.K. Blue, is thrilled to announce the release of Planet Bluu, one of his most compelling and significant works to date. Having performed and recorded closely with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and NEA Jazz Masters Dr. Randy Weston, Abdullah Ibrahim and Jimmy Scott, leading saxophonist, flutist, composer, arranger, and educator T.K. Blue offers this latest release as his 14th album as band leader.

Planet Bluu features trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr., pianist Davis Whitfield, bassist Dishan Harper, and drummer Orion Turre, as well as Steve Turre on trombone and shells (“Planet Bluu,” “Chrystal Lake Bluu,” “Chessman’s Delight,” “Turquoise Bluu”) and Dave Kikoski on piano (“When It’s Time to Say Goodbye”). The album will be released October 25 via JAJA Records.

Speaking of the master artist’s vast body of work, New York’s Hot House Jazz Guide has hailed T.K. Blue’s “supple and at times searing tone on alto and flute,” and taken note of his “Afro-diasporic eclipse of jazz [with] West Indian and Latin rhythms, and Gnawa music from Morocco.” All About Jazz has praised his “skill, passion, and commitment to musical diversity.” And, describing his 2017 album Amour, DownBeat wrote that Blue “exudes armloads of dexterity and guileless charm… [He] is a craftsman so in love with his work that it doesn’t even feel like work.”

Within this context, Planet Bluu creates a world that “lies just beyond the realm of our imagination,” says Blue. Describing it as “a dream so fragile that if you whisper its presence, this magnanimous world might vanish into thin air,” Blue delights that “Planet Bluu is a place devoid of war, famine, systemic racism, gender discrimination, and religious intolerance.” Yet, while “this ebullient planet lies just beyond the boundaries of our galaxy in a perpetual state of munificence,” to use T.K.’s words, here on “terra firma,” he and his colleagues “had music to make!”

Blue identifies the effervescent quality of African hand pianos on Planet Bluu as the sonic source of the album’s ineffable vision. In addition to being a formidable saxophonist and flautist, T.K. is a master player of these instruments, including the kalimba, sanza, lukembi, mbira, and bongo which differ in name according to the regional origins of their distinct constructions, tunings, and timbres. Players of African hand pianos are often known as Griot or Jalis, the aural historians of traditional African society. Deeply influenced by his parents’ diasporic African heritage in Trinidad, Tobago, and Jamaica as well as his own extensive travels through Africa – including three USIA State Department tours – Blue also shares how, rooted in his diverse African experience, Planet Bluu creates “sounds of joy and music that is rhythmically upbeat for folks to experience in their hearts.”

Planet Bluu offers solace — a world of beauty, cooperation and ingenuity, bathed in azure shades. It is his hope that this music “will help in the healing process of Mother Earth and bring all of humanity together in the realm of love and forgiveness! “

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ABOUT T.K. BLUE

T. K. Blue (also known as Talib Kibwe, born Eugene Rhynie, February 7, 1953) is an American jazz saxophonist, flautist, composer and educator from New York City. His parents were Jamaican and Trinidadian, and he has used their Afro-Caribbean musical styles in his own work. He has worked with, among others, Don Cherry, Jayne Cortez, the South African pianist Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim), and Randy Weston, for whom he was musical director.

Blue has also taught at professorial level at of jazz studies at educational institutions including Suffolk Community College, Montclair State University, and Long Island University.

While attending New York University between 1971 and 1975 with a double major in Music and Psychology, Blue threw himself headlong into music, concentrating on the saxophone. During these undergraduate years, he lived in the East Village, partaking in the full range of the scene, from lessons with elders to deep involvement in the avant-garde. He participated in the Jazzmobile program, studying jazz theory, harmony, sight-reading, rhythmic training, improvisation and big-band performance, with Jimmy Heath, Chris Woods, Sonny Red, Frank Foster, Jimmy Owens, Ernie Wilkins, Thad Jones and Billy Taylor. At Jazz Interactions, Blue studied with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef and Joe Newman, and at the Henry Street Settlement with Billy Mitchell and bassist Paul West. In 1979 Blue received his Master's in Music Education from Teachers College at Columbia University.

After performing and traveling extensively with Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) from 1977 to 1980 – variously billed during this period as Talib Qadr, Talib Qadir Kibwe and Talib Abdul Kadr – Blue moved to Paris in December 1981, remaining there until 1989. In 1986 he recorded Egyptian Oasis, his first record as a leader, and that sparked a number of State Department tours to some 20 countries in Africa.

Back in the USA since 1990, he has worked constantly, in a wide range of styles and situations, and recorded his second CD, Introducing Talib Kibwe, released on Evidence in 1996. His more recent recordings as leader include 2008's Follow the North Star, a suite inspired by the life of Solomon Northup (commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts), Latin Bird (2011 – "Highly recommended" by AllMusic's reviewer Ken Dryden), and in 2014 A Warm Embrace, about which Don Bilawsky on All About Jazz has written: "Blue's skills as an arranger, perhaps more than anything else, are responsible for the success of this project, as he's able to create beauty from simplicity at times.... A Warm Embrace is simply a beautiful work of art."

His 2019 album The Rhythms Continue is a tribute to Randy Weston, with whose group T. K. Blue worked from the 1980s, taking on the role of music director and arranger in 1989. The New York City Jazz Record characterized the CD as "possibly his most heartfelt, a dedication to the memory of his longtime employer and mentor. ... Blue performed in Weston's African Rhythms band for 38 years, his life deeply affected by his relationship with the legendary pianist." Described by the New York Amsterdam News as "a memorable suite of 19 enthralling compositions by Weston, Melba Liston and Blue", it features other members of Weston's band – bassist Alex Blake, tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, and percussionist Neil Clarke – with guest pianists Sharp Radway, Mike King, Keith Brown and Kelly Green, as well as Min Xiao Fen on pipa.

Augmenting his long-term relationships as musical director with Weston, as well as with the Spirit of Life Ensemble at New York's Sweet Basil jazzclub, Blue's other recent affiliations include: Odadaa, a group led by a drummer from Ghana, Yacub Addy; percussionist Norman Hedman's pan-African band Tropique; tap dancer Joseph's Tap and Rap, to jazz tunes by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane; and emerging singer Jeffrey Smith.

T.K. was part of the June 2008 photo session called "A Great Day In Paris" — in homage to Art Kane's historic 1958 photograph A Great Day in Harlem — that featured more than 50 musicians from the USA who resided there.

For several years an adjunct professor at Suffolk Community College and Montclair State University, Blue was also a full-time professor and director of jazz studies at Long Island University-LIU-Post.

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Host or Publisher The Institute of Jazz Studies Rutgers-Newark