Home » Jazz Articles » Nick Mazzarella
Jazz Articles about Nick Mazzarella
About Nick Mazzarella
Instrument: Saxophone, alto
Related Articles | Concerts | Albums | Photos | Similar ToNatural Information Society: Since Time is Gravity
by Danen Jobe
The concept of trance is one of the oldest in the world. Many older music forms embraced trance for their rituals. One is the Gnawa musical tradition originating in Kano, Nigeria and Morocco, which uses double and triple notes repeated sometimes for hours to induce a religious state while the singer sings stories of spirits. It is played on a gimbri (aka sintir or hajhuj), a three stringed instrument featuring one short and two long goat gut strings over a ...
read moreNick Mazzarella / Ingebrigt Håker Flaten / Avreeayl Ra: What You Seek Is Seeking You
by Mark Corroto
In a trio format, listeners have come to expect alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella to lead and write all the compositions. He introduced himself to the world with Aviary (Thought To Sound Records, 2010), and followed up with three more trio releases with bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly, four if we count Triangulum (Clean Feed, 2017) from his Meridian Trio (Jeremy Cunningham and Matt Ulery). These albums highlight Mazzarella's ability to compose, perform and, maybe of greater significance, organize ...
read moreQuin Kirchner: The Shadows and The Light
by Mark Corroto
Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam war film, Apocalypse Now, was released in 1979. After sitting for 2 and ½ hours, a viewer might have hoped for theater management to stand at the exits to hand out pamphlets explaining what had just gone down. The conflict had ended 4 years prior, and most war movies, pre- Vietnam, were straight-forward, America-saves-the-world affairs. Goodnight. In between a surf crazed Robert Duval, Playboy Bunnies, and the insane Colonel Kurtz played by Marlon Brando, the movie ...
read moreQuin Kirchner: The Shadows and The Light
by Kevin Press
Add Chicago's Quin Kirchner to the growing list of young jazz artists who've dropped impressive multi-disc releases in recent years. It has become a kind of rite of passage for a new breed of heavy hitters, these double-and triple-album sets. They are not vanity projects. Not the good ones, anyway. They come from deep pools of creativity. The kind a very few young artists have accessible to them in the early prime of their careers. Kirchner's follow-up to ...
read moreNick Mazzarella Trio: Counterbalance
by Troy Dostert
Although he is well-accustomed to working in other settings, alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella is perhaps at his strongest in a trio format: specifically, the sax-bass-drums configuration that allows for both maximum harmonic freedom and focused rhythmic interaction. In 2017 his Meridian Trio (featuring bassist Matt Ulery and drummer Jeremy Cunningham) released Triangulum (Clean Feed), an excellent free-bop outing with razor-sharp improvisations and engaging compositions. On Counterbalance he's working with bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly. This unit goes back ...
read moreMeridian Trio: Triangulum
by Troy Dostert
2017 is proving to be something of a breakout year for alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella. He recently released Signaling, a superb freely-improvised duo recording with cellist Tomeka Reid, and now he's followed it up with this excellent outing from the Meridian Trio, where he is joined by his colleagues Matt Ulery on bass and Jeremy Cunningham on drums. Whereas on Signaling we are given a glimpse of Mazzarella's substantial prowess as a sympathetic partner in an unstructured context, here the ...
read moreNick Mazzarella and Tomeka Reid: Signaling
by Troy Dostert
On this captivating, fully-improvised duo recording by alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella and cellist Tomeka Reid, we find a superlative example of two leading-edge musicians who continue to draw vital inspiration from their forbears. Reid, a contributing member of the hugely influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), has previously paid tribute to some of the titans of that organization--figures such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, and Fred Anderson--with Artifacts, her superb 2015 trio release with ...
read more
Giveaway
Days remaining: 2
