Editor’s Note: The following served as the First Take column, which is our editor’s letter, in the April issue of DownBeat.

At the end of last summer, over the Labor Day weekend, vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa took time out from preparing for her concert with Joshua Redman at the Detroit Jazz Festival to take a real chance: her first Blindfold Test, in front of a live audience. Silky smooth in her vocal delivery, Cavassa proved to be adept at this musical guessing game, too. She recently signed a deal with Blue Note Records, with a new album expected to drop later this year.

On March 20, the night before the release of Defiant Life, the new Vijay Iyer-Wadada Leo Smith duo album from ECM, the label was throwing what their invitation termed a “private listening party” at Bang & Olufsen, the high-end electronics store on Madison Avenue in New York.

Brooklyn is indisputably a power spot in the musical universe, especially in terms of its contributions to jazz, R&B, hip-hop and other genres. Who better to sing praises to the place and its historical and ongoing influence than a musically gifted native daughter?