So, what, exactly, is jazz? We know it’s black music, we know that many of the artists of the genre are political. But how does one define an art form so heavily based on improvisation and live instrumentation? Better question: Is jazz dead? The Root asked three fresh...

How did you get started in music? Well, I started in music when I was about 4 years old. My mom was watching a Jeopardy! show, and when I was about three years old, I was climbing on top of the television banging out rhythms of the songs I heard, and she was tired of...

Ever since the earliest days of jazz music, the pairing of piano and voice has frequently attained a deeply personal level of communication. It's evident in the distinct chemistry between two rising stars of their instruments: pianist Sullivan Fortner and singer...

There’s an oddly familiar glow to “Aria,” the auspicious debut album by the pianist Sullivan Fortner. If your memory of brightly swinging major-label jazz recordings extends back at least 20 years (honestly, the last time there was infrastructure for such a thing),...