Instrumental jazz artists have been evolving modern music. Since its birth in the 19th Century, Jazz has been embraced and augmented by people.
Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis – these are classic Jazz figures who popularized the genre and the music spoke to all, traversing national and international boundaries.
In more than a hundred years, when cultures and musical traditions are amalgamating into one another, artists have given Jazz music their own part of the personality and influence to create sub-genres and deviations from classical Jazz.
And, believe this, the fusions though criticized by some, have been appreciated by many, as Jazz has made itself and other genres more visible, vigorous and vital.
In recent years, many new Jazz instrumental artists have made their way into the pop scene and international stages, still recreating and adhering to the classic Jazz music but adding more interesting modern faces to it.
We’ll look at 10 such Instrumental artists making their mark on the map of Jazz music:
1. Kamasi Washington
American jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington studied ethnomusicology and now attracts a multiethnic and multigenerational audience. He holds to progressive music.
Washington’s father was a sax player too, and he wanted his son to take up something else other than tenor saxophone and clarinet, but little Washington did the opposite – he had already found his voice and love in the saxophone, and so his early career began as a student and young musician playing saxophone.
Now as an accomplished saxophonist, he is always ready for important collaborations and projects – which he believes open up a new frontier of imagination for him, as he is always looking for new sources of inspiration for his music; a way to get something in between the necessary new and the unforgettable old.
His self-reflection into his own consciousness and imagination are the gold mines of his improvisations. Like his gentle solos and collaborative music, Washington is a wise and humble man with values, and that is reflected in his passion and music – which he thinks is a medium to tell stories and share ideas with people.
His solo album The Epic (2015) has been considered his masterpiece which was number one on iTunes Jazz charts in many countries – no doubt he has been considered a once-in-a-generation saxophone player, perhaps in the lineage of Coltrane and Sanders.
Kamasi has an estimated net worth of around $13 Million.
2. Christian Scott
Christian Scott is an accomplished Jazz trumpet player from New Orleans. He began his career very early, and now has more than 10 studio recordings to his name.
Christian Scott also known as Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, is a twice winner of Edison-Award for his music – he also began his career very early, under the tutelage of his uncle, jazz artist Donal Harrison Jr. – and holds a degree in Professional Music and Film Scoring.
Scott is basically known for “Stretch Music” in which he attempts to bring cultural and lingual elements and other musical forms to classical jazz music, making it more receptive and soulful.
For many, he is redefining trumpet music, fusing influences from Caribbean Music, African Music and much more into his rich and vibrant jazz musical experiments as a music sorcerer.
He is also trying to bring his personal and racial historical roots through music lineage that has to be rediscovered first and rearranged in between harmony and dissonance. Ancestral Recall (2019) and Stretch Music (2015) are a few of his many far-out albums.
He is married to singer-songwriter and visual artist Isadora Mendez.
Scott’s net worth is around $6 Million.
3. Matthew Halsall
Matthew Halsall is a Manchester-based trumpeter, composer, bandleader and a DJ. Despite having many genre influences, he basically draws from spiritual jazz roots.
Halsall also is the founder of Gondwana Records and his compositions lean on British jazz heritage and progressive world music from which he has found a confluence and has composed heartfelt music for his fans all over the world.
He and his band have been performing and doing gigs all over, and what drives the band leader is his fervent passion for escapism, spiritual jazz and modal jazz too – he takes everything in from classic Blue Note recordings to modern-day electronica.
His album When the World Was One was awarded iTunes Jazz Album of the Year in 2014 and his later album also went on to draw elements from the environment and nature. Imbuing historical influence such as from Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, he has grown more and more instrumental, bringing pianos, flutes, harp strings and electronics to create something completely unique, such as albums: Colour Yes (2009), When the World Was One and most recent Salute to the Sun (2021).
Halsall’s net worth is around $5 Million.
4. Nubya Garcia
Nubya Garcia is a London-based Saxophonist and composer, best known for her distinctive jazz. She is touring the world with rhythms influenced by dub and cumbia.
Nubya, who started to play Saxophone at the age of 10, feels strongly connected to her Caribbean roots and thinks that it is through music that people, who have left their origins, find each other brought alive. This is how she got her influence from reggae, lover’s rock music and modal jazz, voicing her music like an instrument itself, just like her tenor saxophone.
She thinks that jazz means so much to so many people that she feels gratified to find herself in that creative free space. Her debut album Source (2020) released by Concord Jazz, was hailed by The New York Times “as a life’s worth of experience.” She has been awarded many Jazz accolades for creating modern-day timeless classics at a very young age, exploring self and identity roots.
5. Esperanza Spalding
American bassist, singer and composer, Esperanza Spalding has won five Grammy awards to date for her music. She has even performed at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony!
It is worth noting that Esperanza has been a professor at the Berklee College of Music too, the same place where she earned her degree in Music. Her contemporary jazz music intersects with so many other genres like R&B, funk, soul jazz and hip-hop music, and even to musical traditions from Cuba, Brazil and Portugal. And not only this, but she can also sing in Spanish, Portuguese and French other than English.
Over the years, she has been collaborating with her jazz heroes and has always been interested in the creative process of doing live music, and this is what led her to successfully complete a music venture in which she wrote, performed and recorded a new album, Exposure in just 77-hours, and the entire process was live streamed on Facebook.
Her latest release Alive at the Village Vanguard (2023) is a collab with jazz pianist Fred Hersch. Her discography includes Radio Music Society (2012), Songwrights Apothecary Lab (2021), Esperanza (2008) among many others. Jazz press and national newspapers and even TV shows have all featured her performances as something from a musical genius.
Spalding’s net worth is around $2 Million.
6. Moses Boyd
Moses Boyd is a British jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and record producer. He is an exceptional musician getting rave attention in the London Jazz scene.
Together with saxophonist Binker Golding, with whom he has a good rapport, he has released four albums to date, and furthermore, Moses also has a record label of his own, Exodus Records, and he has been producing his solo albums too.
Moses, who doesn’t like to repeat and always wants to try out different things, is known for his experimental genre-hopping jazz music that takes influences from electronica, grime, nu-jazz, fusion, reggae grooves and many other cultural and modern elements.
As a drummer he follows melodies for inspiration and uses “Amen” break, “Funky Drummer” Break, sampler-based rhythms, bass loops, cymbals, and crisp snares to create a piece of hybrid music, and has embraced electronic and acoustic equally to allow himself the creative freedom to make jazz more reciprocal for his audience.
In his most recent album Dark Matter (2020), Moses get pondered deeply into the nature of music that comes more from moods and textures before getting into any structures, and always allowing improvisations in the creative process itself.
7. Shabaka Hutchings
Shabaka Hutchings is a London-based jazz musician who can alternate among tenor saxophone, clarinet and flute. He has noted associations with three jazz groups.
Hutchings has played varieties of music with three parallel bands each with a unique approach to creating music: The COMET IS COMING, SHABAKA & THE ANCESTORS and SONS OF KEMET, accepting influences from local club culture. When performing he wants his music to connect with everybody listening to him and also at the same time reflect upon it – therefore his music are said to be both intelligent and enjoyable pieces.
He has reinvented London Jazz and his performances transpose between high and low register, switching octaves, doing riffs and multiphonics, and creating captivating grooves, strong and sharp rhythms born out of his constant musical meditation and energy. In 2010, he was titled BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist.
His latest solo album Afrikan Culture (2022) is more about self-exploration and connecting to one’s roots, because he believes every piece of music has a personality to it, and for him it is about attitude and how humans are connected through music.
8. Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven is a drummer, percussionist and composer, who has been regarded as a vanguard of modern jazz music. He has even been called a Cultural Synthesizer.
Born to a Hungarian singer mother and a jazz drummer father in Paris, he was raised in a multicultural environment and therefore regard jazz as more of a cultural thing, and for him music comes out of both science and the alchemy of new ideas.
We find him celebrated to cross time and space boundaries taking roots in jazz but elevating it with folk elements, odd meters, intricate groovy and intricate switches, and electronic music, creating discussions that he believes give vitality to his music that can reflect communities and music traditions, connect for collective experience, and basically relies on his ear – the first door for his experiments.
In These Times, which took him more than 7 years to compose and collect, poly-temporal instrumental music is lifted by his personal experience as a musician which he waited for, as he evolved. Makaya, who is also called a “Beat Scientist,” released his first album Split Decision in 2012 with other musicians, and since then he has been touring cities and countries and has produced Singles and EPs and many other albums.
Makaya is married to Nitasha Tamar Sharma, who is a university professor by profession.
9. Braxton Cook
American alto saxophonist and singer-songwriter Braxton Cook has been called a jazz prodigy. He is an emerging artist with already an Emmy win and many albums.
Early in his career as a saxophonist, he toured multiple times with incredible musicians and famous trumpeter Christian Scott and featured in much of his music, but very soon he launched into a solo career making impressions of a composer bringing a hybrid of rich traditional jazz and modern time R&B.
He thinks that it takes a lot of patience to be an instrumentalist, and one must always set goals to connect with people by being honest and making a clear vision as an artist and sticking to your craft emotionally; to be oneself at the fullest.
Altissimo, harder reeds, long tones and overtones – he has been practicing in all ranges and bridges and bringing personal genesis in his career as a saxophonist and vocalist, and all this has been like a personal diary for him capturing moods, nostalgia, feelings chronicling how he has matured as a person over time.
He openly talks about his influence from gospel, soul music, jazz, R&B and pop music which he grew up listening and wants to hold onto them dearly and incorporate all in his music, as he tries to set a new theme for his every new album.
His latest release is Who Are You When No One Is Watching (Feb, 2023). His album No Doubt (2018) attracted more than a million streams in just a single month.
The artist is married to Chaya Yvonne Crowder.
10. Robert Glasper
Robert Glasper is a pianist from Texas who has already won 5 Grammys. His first album was released in 2002, and he is known for his unique genre-blending jazz.
Gasper’s mother was a gospel singer, and this was how jazz, funk and R&B were introduced to him in his childhood when he took a liking to all of them, and soon picked up the piano. He is known for fusing jazz’s syncopated rhythms with hip-hop, post-bob, rock & roll, and R&B, and it’s already nearly two decades since he released his first album Mood (2004).
He has established himself as a renaissance man to some by bringing unimaginable compositions because for him playing on the stage is a spiritual experience, which he has been repeating with his partners, collaborators and musicians together, easily segueing in his harmonies while playing his instrument.
His most successful project to date is the Black Radio albums, which he has been producing in series, and has won him multiple Grammy awards, for his mellow and harmonically diverse compositions coming up with spontaneity than with what is expected from him.
Some of his hit albums are Black Radio III (2022), R+R+Now Live (2021), Dinner party (2020) among others and his single releases are equally popular, and all these have earned him more than 2.5 M Monthly Listeners on Spotify.
He has been married to Journalist and producer Angélika Beener.