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“My
piano,” Adderley, Jr. said, “is in my living room, and the acoustics are
real good. I’ll be doing some standards and some jazz – Cannonball [his
uncle], Coltrane, Miles for sure, Herbie [Hancock] for sure. I’ll also be
performing some Luther Vandross music.” His guests will be: tenor
saxophonist Mike Lee and trumpeter James Gibbs III.
Lee and Adderley
were together in one of the last indoor live club performances before the
pandemic. In late January, they played at Tavern on George in New
Brunswick, part of the New Brunswick Jazz Project’s weekly live music
series. With Chris Berger on bass and Vince Ector on drums, they did some
Cannonball – “74 Miles Away”, the title track of a 1967 Capitol Records
album; Duke Pearson’s “Jeanine” from Them Dirty
Blues, a 1960 Cannonball album on the Riverside label;
and “Big P,” a tune tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath introduced on his 1960
Decca/Riverside album, Really Big! That album
featured Cannonball and Nat’s father, Nat Adderley, on cornet, as well as
Clark Terry on flugelhorn. The quartet also played Burt Bacharach and Hal
David’s “The Look of Love,” and Adderley hinted that the November Social
might also include one selection from that songwriting team.
Gibbs was discovered
by the late jazz vocalist Betty Carter when he was playing at a WBGO-FM
gala at New York’s Five Spot jazz club in 1994. He often tours with
eight-time Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Joe Thomas and has appeared
with a long list of jazz luminaries including bassist Rufus Reid, and
pianists Kenny Drew, Jr, and Cyrus Chestnut.
Since Covid-19 shut
down traditional indoor live performances, Adderley has appeared outside
at Tavern on George, Shanghai Jazz in Madison, Regina’s (a steakhouse in
Teaneck), and in South Orange “where they blocked out a parking lot.” He
also did a duo online concert with vocalist Alyson Williams, a tribute to
the late singer Phyllis Hyman. It was part of the virtual Harlem Week
Festival in August.
NJJS presented two
Virtual Jazz Socials on the NJJS Facebook page in October. On Sunday,
October 18, guitarist Charlie Apicella and his
band, Iron City, presented a concert from Lavallette, NJ, featuring
Apicella originals along with some hard bop and blues standards
associated with jazz legends such as organist Brother Jack McDuff and
tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley. The Iron City Social was rebroadcast on
Sunday, November 1.
On Thursday, October
29, two Juilliard Jazz students, trumpeter James Haddad and pianist Joe
Block, presented an online concert that also featured a mix of their
original compositions with tunes closely associated with jazz giants such
as Roy Hargrove and Thelonius Monk. A highlight of the concert was their
performance of Cannonball Adderley’s “The Old Country” from the classic
1962 Nancy Wilson Cannonball Adderley Capitol
album. Then they finished up with another classic, George
Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.” 
Funding for the NJJS Socials has been made possible in part by Morris
Arts through the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a
partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding
has been provided through a generous grant from Nan Hughes Poole.
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