Nashville, TN — He is known as The Godfather of Gospel Jazz. He is also known as an airplane pilot and mentor, a former NBA player, a television star, a pastor of a thriving church, and dedicated a father and loving patriarch to a large family (Oh yes..and husband to Jewel). He is Ben Tankard. Noted as the producer who discovered Yolanda Adams, Tankard has almost 30 years of award-winning, platinum-selling, chart-topping albums, and radio hits. He has 16 Stellar Awards, is a Stellar Award Honors Hall of Fame inductee, was nominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding ...

PJ Morgan The Transparency Project 1DMV Music Group (release date: June 1, 2018) By Bob Marovich The Transparency Project is the debut instrumental jazz album from Stellar Award-nominated producer and keyboardist Paul Lawrence Morgan, aka PJ Morgan, who Ben Tankard had named as his music director and is currently band director for the Washington Metro area megachurch, Reid Temple AME. The CD’s first two tracks, “Closer” and “Hit the Floor,” are conventional smooth jazz pieces most notable for Morgan’s nimble keyboard work. After these cuts, the album moves into a more explicitly sacred mood, featuring newly-composed songs with vocals (most of them ...

“Thicker than Water” Season Two begins Sunday, January 4, 2015, 9:00 p.m. ET/PT Bravo Media www.nbcunv.com/bravo By Bob Marovich If last season’s premiere of the Tankard Family’s reality television show, “Thicker Than Water,” was about lifestyle, the opener of the second season is about life. The opening episode, to air this evening, opens with the wealthy extended family of gospel jazz artist Ben Tankard preparing for daughter Cyrene’s high school graduation party at the self-proclaimed Tankard Palace in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (although I think I heard son Benji refer to it, with tongue in cheek, as “Bentown”). Several Tankard children rue, ...