Trevor Smith

Like some fellow Austrians before him, Mozart, Haydn and Mahler, keyboardist Joe Zawinul deserves a place in the upper echelon of composers. Exhibit A for his inclusion would be the soul ballad "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," a piece Zawinul wrote in 1966 for Cannonball Adderley. But that was only the beginning.

The Newport Jazz Festival was just one year old when the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet blazed onto its stage in 1955. By 1960, when pianists Dave Brubeck and Horace Silver each played a rollicking set, the event was an institution, known all over the world. And so it remains today — though there's something to be said about the fest in that formative era, when every step forward was historic.

On this episode of Jazz Night in America, we check out a concert from the archives that I just had to take a listen to. It features one of the greatest pianists ever, Monty Alexander, and my mentor and hero, the late bassist Ray Brown.

The smooth, booming voice of Gregory Porter brought a galvanizing force to jazz when he broke onto the scene about a decade ago. It's a voice of exhortation, flowing out of the gospel church. A voice of dignity, in the mode of his hero, Nat King Cole. A voice of reassurance, whether aiming for the heavens or toward a single soul across the room.