Three generations of female jazz singers perform together in New York

Three generations of famous jazz singers will perform together in New York this week.

92NY’s annual “Jazz in July” series on July 20 features Marilyn Maye, Catherine Russell and Ekep Nkwelle, accompanied by the Aaron Diehl Trio. Their concert will be performed in person and also streamed online.

Maye, 96, who has worked with some of the greatest jazz artists of the past eight decades, including Charlie Parker and Count Basie, has been called “one of our greatest living songbook singers.”

Russell, a Grammy Award winner, is 67 and the daughter of Louis Armstrong’s music director Luis Russell.

A finalist in the Sarah Vaughan Vocal Competition and a recent graduate of the Juilliard School, Nkwelle has opened for Cécile McLorin Salvant and Regina Carter, among others. She is 25 and has performed everywhere from the Newport Jazz Festival to the Kennedy Center.

In a recent interview with Forbes.com, Nkwelle said she and her collaborators, three generations of singers, will have “special stories to tell and unique interpretations of the Great American Songbook.”

She said that personally, she is “still discovering the true meaning” of this music and also the importance of the voice in its canon.

Singers, she added, “are often isolated. If the three of us support each other, it will be a wonderful thing. 92NY and Aaron Diehl will create something wonderful and historic.”

Diehl is the new artistic director of “Jazz in July,” which runs this year from July 17-27. He succeeds Dick Hyman, the original director, and Bill Charlap, Hyman’s successor, “with a mission to present a broader, more inclusive spectrum of jazz. He does so in this first season with concerts that include boundary-pushing explorations, global sounds, new perspectives on the American Songbook and more. All through the art of the greats of today and the next generation,” 92NY said.

Diehl commented: “I am deeply honored to be the next artistic director of Jazz in July at 92NY and to build on the extraordinary concept that Dick Hyman and Bill Charlap have developed over the decades. From these fundamental visions, I intend to continue to expand the possibilities of collaboration in this series, with an intimate, thoughtful and nuanced experience around each concert. For me Jazz in July is about creating a shared space where musicians and concertgoers can come together to experiment with artistic honesty and vulnerability, drawing an open-minded, open-hearted audience into their worlds and taking them on a journey.”

This year, the “Jazz in July” concerts will also be streamed online for the first time.