JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater

Named the JJA Guitarist of the Year in June 2011, Russell Malone hails from Albany, Geo. Malone grew up absorbing music from his bedrock, the church, as well as popular blues and country tunes on radio and TV. For his golden-toned melodies played in octaves (try that some time!) and more, Malone is heavily influenced by Wes Montgomery.

It began with the crisis on Wall Street in 2008. Alexis Cuadrado, from Barcelona and now Brooklyn, remembered the poetry of the surrealist Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), whom all Spanish students study in school.

For arranger Gil Evans' centennial, we celebrate a concert from the 2011 Monterey Jazz Festival. Evans was born on May 13, 1912. In three collaborations in the late 1950s, two friends — Evans and Miles Davis — steered their projects into a new era for jazz.

Their first album was Miles Ahead. Named in its honor, this concert is "Still Ahead," with music from the pair's second and third records, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain.

This year, Chicago is celebrating the Studs Terkel centenary — the life and work of the actor, radio host, author, historian and, in the words of the Chicago Historical Society, "ennobler of his fellow man." There will be a re-dedication of the Studs Terkel Bridge, a 100th birthday party at the Newberry Library, a museum exhibit, readings and a film and video festival.

Martin Bejerano received a Chamber Music America commission to compose a New Jazz Work in the summer of 2010. He had proposed a long-form composition that would show how — in the tradition of Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Oscar Peterson — Bejerano could put forth an energetic sound for his own trio, without just playing fast and loud.