Articles by Andrew Durkin

Gutbucket at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater

by Andrew Durkin
May 24, 2005

Gutbucket Barnsdall Gallery Theater Los Angeles, CA April 18, 2005

Someone recently hipped me to Joel Dorn's comment that “You haven't heard Monk until you've seen him. I must admit that I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to the sound / vision distinction. Although I love live jazz, I have always tried to “tune out (so to speak) the visual information of a live performance. There is a level of concentration ...

Grachan Moncur III: Exploration

by Andrew Durkin
March 21, 2005

Grachan Moncur III Exploration Capri Records 2004

Ralph Ellison once wrote a great essay in which he seemed to predict jazz's ultimate dependence on a music industry driven (and subsidized) by a star system. The irony, Ellison suggested, is that jazz is largely created by anonymous musicians, who because they are “devoted to an art which traditionally thrives on improvisation [...] very often have their most original ideas enter the public domain almost as ...

Kaki King: Legs to Make Us Longer

by Andrew Durkin
March 21, 2005

Kaki King plays the drums. Oh, I know, on the inside sleeve of her latest CD, Legs to Make Us Longer, she quietly lists her instrument as “guitar." And stumbling unawares into the preamble of one of her live shows, you might reasonably assume (before you hear anything) that you're about to get an evening of sensitive folk profundity. After all, that does look like an acoustic guitar in her lap. But these are carefully constructed illusions. Once you close ...

Guy Klucevsek: The Well-Tampered Accordion

by Andrew Durkin
February 15, 2005

I got one of my first impressions of the social status of the accordion from an article that appeared twenty or so years ago in Time magazine. The writer decried'--in laughable terms'--the “menace'? of the instrument, the sound of which he found abhorrent, given all its usual associations with the (underrated) genre of the polka. I can't remember many of the details of the piece, other than a vague sense that it was probably a response to the accordion's contemporaneous ...

Jean-Michel Pilc: Follow Me

by Andrew Durkin
January 8, 2005

Given the Francophobia that has reared its ugly head in American politics over the last few years, it's a relief to see that Stateside jazz fans, at least, are still open to the contributions of European practitioners of the art form. So, for instance, Jean-Michel Pilc's latest CD, the somewhat generically named Follow Me , has been getting great reviews here in the States. And why shouldn't it? A former scientist, Pilc plays with a precision that in places is ...

Yohimbe Brothers: The Tao of Yo

by Andrew Durkin
November 13, 2004

Let's face it: sometimes the claim that a given work “defies genre" (as the press materials for The Tao of Yo , the second release by the Yohimbe Brothers, put it) is more the result of aggressive marketing than anything else. Indeed, “eclecticism" has become something of a PR mantra among musicians in recent years. Its invocation should give us pause.

After all, what is wrong with a good album that clearly leans on one musical tradition or another, or ...

David Sanchez: Coral

by Andrew Durkin
November 11, 2004

David Sanchez's Coral is the latest in what has turned out to be a somewhat lonely genre: the orchestral jazz album, in which a soloist is placed against a backdrop of strings (think Sketches of Spain , Focus , or Charlie Parker with Strings ). It's an airy, lush, thoughtful work, with a program that is a fascinating mix of South American composers influenced by French Impressionists, performed by a Puerto Rican saxophonist with a Czech orchestra in tow (whew!). ...