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Anthony Wilson

Wilson’s first recording— Anthony Wilson (1997) — featured a nine-piece “little big band” and garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Large Ensemble Jazz Recording. It was followed by Goat Hill Junket (1998), and Adult Themes (2000). His fourth recording with the nonet, Power of Nine (2006) was included in the New Yorker’s roundup of that year’s top-ten jazz albums.

Born in Los Angeles, Wilson is the son of the late jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson. That lineage has deeply informed his creative trajectory, compositional choices, instrumental groupings and the wide-ranging discography that blooms out of them. Wilson’s acclaimed collection of organ-trio albums — Our Gang (2001) and Savivity (2005), with Hammond organist Joe Bagg and drummer Mark Ferber, and later Jack of Hearts (2009), featuring Larry Goldings on organ, and alternating drummers Jim Keltner and Jeff Hamilton, reimagine and reframe post-bop, soul-inflected jazz.

An inventive soloist and sensitive accompanist, Wilson has provided texture and authority both on stage and in recording sessions for jazz legends such as Ron Carter, Mose Allison, Bobby Hutcherson, Madeleine Peyroux, Bennie Wallace, Joe Sample, Al Jarreau, Harold Land, the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. Since the late 1980s he has been a member of his father’s jazz orchestra, assuming the leadership of the ensemble since the maestro’s passing in 2014.

While his footing is firmly in the jazz idiom, Wilson pivots with ease into other genres. Over the last decade, he’s been part of sessions and performances with a diverse roster of artists, including Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Leon Russell, Aaron Neville, and Barbra Streisand. In 2009, he arranged and orchestrated Brazilian composer Ivan Lins’ “Love Dance” for Ms. Streisand’s grammy-nominated album, Love is the Answer.

Since 2001, he has been a core component of Diana Krall’s quartet, after joining her for a series of concerts in Paris at the Olympia Theater which became the Grammy-winning recording and concert film Live in Paris (2002).

A gifted composer as well, Wilson, while still in his 20s, won the Thelonious Monk Institute International Composers’ Competition in 1995. Since then he has received commissions from IAJE, the Henry Mancini Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the luthier John Monteleone — for whom Wilson composed “Seasons,” a song cycle for a quartet of Monteleone’s handcrafted instruments called “The Four Seasons.” The premiere performance of the piece, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, coincided with the Met’s exhibition “Guitar Heroes” in 2011. That same year Wilson released Campo Belo, a collection of original songs recorded in São Paulo, which partnered him with three of Brazil’s up-and-coming musicians, pianist André Mehmari, drummer Edu Riberio and bassist Guto Wirtti.

Bennie Wallace: French Postcard

Read "French Postcard" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
May 2, 2026

In 2001, saxophonist Bennie Wallace released a breakout album, Moodsville (Groove Note). It was Wallace in the quartet setting, with Mulgrew Miller on piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Lewis Nash on drums--an all-star cast. What was striking about the sound was its immediacy, its authenticity. It was a bunch of time-tested Great American Songbook tunes and jazz standards laid down with an insouciant grace and relaxed confidence. No bells and whistles, but rather an unpretentious trip into the tradition ...

Album Review

Eddie Daniels: To Milton With Love

Read "To Milton With Love" reviewed by Artur Moral

by Artur Moral
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Even in a field as conducive to covers as jazz, it is unusual to find a complete reinterpretation of an album with all its tracks in their original order. Interestingly, 2025 has seen several releases of this type, some widely known and deservedly acclaimed, like Branford Marsalis' Belonging (Blue Note Records, 2025), which pays homage to Keith Jarrett's European Quartet. But another project with these same characteristics has gone much more unnoticed, and unjustly so. To Milton With Love is ...

Radio & Podcasts

The Final Batch of My Favorite 2025 Jazz Things - Part 6

by Ludovico Granvassu
January 10, 2026

Enjoy the last installment of our retrospective dedicated to the songs discovered over the past six months that left a lasting impression.Happy listening!Playlist Ben Allison “Mondo Jazz Theme (feat. Ted Nash & Pyeng Threadgill)" 0:00 The Five Corners Quintet “Lighthouse" Chasin' the Jazz Gone By (Columbia) 0:16 Host talks 5:29 Makiko Hirabayashi Weavers “Ghosts" Gifts (Enja/Yellowbird) 6:28 Host talks 11:32 Rufus Wainwright, Pacific Jazz Orchestra “The Saga of Jenny" I'm a Stranger Here Myself--Wainwright Does Weill ...

Album Review

Anthony Wilson: House of the Singing Blossoms

Read "House of the Singing Blossoms" reviewed by Joshua Weiner

by Joshua Weiner
December 14, 2025

Guitarist Anthony Wilson is well known for his session and touring work with vocalists, including Diana Krall, Norah Jones, and Paul McCartney, as well as his time in the big band led by his father, the late trumpeter Gerald Wilson. But in the early 2000s, he also released four albums with his own nonet, sharing solo space with five horns, which taught him a great deal about writing and arranging. House of the Singing Blossoms captures Wilson's return to this ...

Live Review

Anthony Wilson Nonet At Joe Henderson Lab

by Steven Roby
September 8, 2025

Anthony Wilson Nonet Joe Henderson Lab San Francisco, CA September 4, 2025 Anthony Wilson chose a high-wire debut for his first time leading his own band at SFJAZZ: nine musicians packed onto the Joe Henderson Lab's stage--roughly 20 by 12 feet--to open the 2025-26 season. The Nonet fit like a well-designed puzzle. More importantly, the sound breathed. The Lab's acoustics let dense voicings bloom without smear, and the band used the intimacy to make ...

Radio & Podcasts

Anthony Wilson’s Nonet Blooms Again on House of the Singing Blossoms

by Steven Roby
August 17, 2025

Guitarist-composer Anthony Wilson is circling back to a format that has shaped his voice since the beginning: the nonet. His new live album, House of the Singing Blossoms (Sam First Records, 2025)), documents two nights at Los Angeles listening room Sam First and sets the stage for four shows at SFJAZZ's Joe Henderson Lab on September 4-5. The return to nine pieces, Wilson says, is not nostalgia--it is renewal! “The first band that I recorded with was a ...

Radio & Podcasts

Several Silent Ways & More

by Bob Osborne
August 7, 2025

The arrival of a new Anthony Wilson album with his interpretation of Joe Zawinul's “In A Silent Way" lead me to dig out other versions--a live rendition by Weather Report plus the two versions from the The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions box set release by Miles Davis. Zawinul's haunting melody is the centrepiece of all four versions on the show. In addition, some re-released music from John Hicks, and new releases from across the wide world of jazz.

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