Gary Fukushima

What could be better than touring the world alternately with a trendsetting jazz group (Kneebody) and an Italian pop star (Luciano Ligabue)? For bassist Kaveh Rastegar, what's better is to keep doing the former while spending more time in Los Angeles at the forefront of all things musically interesting and......

Jazz in L.A. is enjoying a modern renaissance, in which new players abound with innovative sounds. But sometimes it's OK to indulge in nostalgia. Take Alan Broadbent, who was a young disciple of Lennie Tristano, one of the great historical jazz pianists, and soon afterward found employment as the pianist......

In the age of automation, auto-correct and Auto-Tune, it's more common to see a DJ mixing beats and tweaking knobs than someone playing piano. One never sees the same person doing both simultaneously, yet that's precisely what Mark de Clive-Lowe does. He's a jazz musician whose improvisational mastery extends beyond......

It's a dirty secret that many fine indie-rock musicians were at one time studying or playing jazz. Some will never admit it, for the j-word can mean career suicide in certain circles. Others embrace it and use it to their advantage. Bassist Todd Sickafoose earned some street cred playing with......

Still-young piano sensation Hiromi Uehara frequently draws comparisons to an anime schoolgirl superheroine, but her ever-growing body of impressive work has linked her of late to larger heroes, such as LeBron James. Her muscular technique and king-size pianistic vocabulary, coupled with a torrent of energetic charisma, make her a true......

Bassist Ryan McGillicuddy, keyboardist Joe Bagg, guitarist Jamie Rosenn, and drummer Jason Harnell were among those who threatened to shift the balance of power in the L.A. jazz community, from established veterans to a new generation of upstarts. Now the young guns are new veterans fending off an insurgency of......

It would be a headline tailormade for 60 Minutes or Nightline: Talented Jazz Saxophonist Has Rare Kidney Disease. This story has been Dayna Stephens' reality for 15 years, and it has earned him an outpouring of love from thousands of musicians and fans alike. This illnesss, however, unfairly shifts the......

A recent study in a respected medical journal claims one in three people will be arrested before they are 23 years old. Nikos Syropoulos is 23, and though his name sounds like a James Bond villain, his depravity is limited to being a wicked sharp composer and a total badass......