Articles by Katie Alvarez

Taylor Eigsti: Prodigy Taking Jazz World by Storm

by Katie Alvarez
March 11, 2004

Listening to the opening moments of Resonance, the Bop City debut of piano whirlwind Taylor Eigsti, is scary enough--those incendiary octaves that ignite “Got a Match" into a post-bop firestorm.

Imagine, though, what it was like to experience this intensity first-hand when this surreally gifted player, all of ten or eleven years old, blew me off the bandstand.

I remember Eigsti as an amiable kid, dark-haired and smiling, as a friend introduced us and asked if ...

Horace Silver: Hard Bop Pioneer Forges Ahead

by Katie Alvarez
February 13, 2004

Looking back over the last fifty years of jazz it is clear that few musicians have had a greater impact on the contemporary mainstream than Horace Silver. The hard bop style that Silver pioneered in the '50s is now dominant, played not only by holdovers from an earlier generation, but also by fuzzy-cheeked musicians who had yet to be born when the music fell out of critical favor in the '60s and '70s. One of the most individual and distinctive ...