Recent Jazz Articles

The Basses of Our Music

Photographs by William Carter, 1971-1985

Listen to bassist Pops Foster with the Luis Russell Orchestra from 1929, playing “Jersey Lightning." Also on this record are New Orleans men Henry “Red" Allen, Albert Nicholas and Paul Barbarin. Virtually all of the New Orleans bass players depicted in this post played in an ...

Meet Sarpay Özçağatay: Sarpay Özçağatay born in Ankara, Turkey, is a talented flutist, EWI player, composer, performer, and bandleader. Sarpay has performed with many jazz musicians and legends such as Ron Carter, Kevin Eubanks, David Fiuczynski. Terri Lyne Carrington, Eric Gould, Greg Osby, Steve Turre, and many more. He studied classical flute performance ...

First Annual GuitarNow! Festival, Day Two Kailash Mital Theatre Carleton University Ottawa, Canada May 4, 2013 When local guitarist Roddy Ellias--the recipient, that very week, of one of the Jazz Journalist Association's Jazz Hero awards for 2013 (the only Canadian on the list)--created the concept of the first annual GuitarNow! Festival with ...

Meet Jon LaTona: Born and raised in Buffalo, NY. I loved jazz so much that I wanted to go to school for it. Now I have a debut record that I am extremely proud of. It was so thrilling to record because I was working with musicians that I grew up watching and listening to. ...

The Gil Evans Project directed by Ryan Truesdell Jazz Standard New York, NY May 17, 2013

Somewhere along the way, the centennial of a notable jazz figure's birth became a major cause for celebration and reflection. Unfortunately, these celebrations have occasionally become last hurrahs for the dearly departed, as their life's work fades ...

International Jazz Day Istanbul, Turkey April 30, 2013 At a morning press conference opening the 10th annual Panama Jazz Festival in January, 2013, a long table was peopled by dignitaries and musical dignitaries. Festival highlight, saxophonist Wayne Shorter sat in the center (almost like Jesus in the Last Supper configuration), flanked by the ambitious ...

"Perhaps the key to understanding his achievement is to realize that, despite the virtues of his instrumental skills, he viewed himself, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, as a musician first and a drummer only second."

--Ted Gioia

“When I'm playing, I think along melodic lines. For instance, I can go up as the ...

The common element between Sara Serpa's Aurora and Christine Correa's Down Here Below is obviously pianist Ran Blake. Enigmatic to a fault, Blake has made a potent name for himself among improvised music enthusiasts. Blake is an intellectual amalgam of pianists Thelonious Monk and Martial Solal distilled to a dissonant essence.

A long time professor at ...

Reed multi-instrumentalist Alisha Pattillo has a ubiquitous presence in Houston Texas, appearing with her own groups, which take on a variety of formats: Alisha's Quartet, Alisha's Quartet + 1 and Alisha's Quartet - 1. She is also the reed player for the Ezra Charles Band and Steve Krase & The in Crowd.

Pattillo has recently released ...

"Would you support an art strike?" That's the question I've been asking musicians for the past few months. “Will you agree to stop writing and performing music for one year?" In 1990 the London artists Stewart Home and Mark Pawson proposed that all artists cease to “make, exhibit, distribute, sell, or discuss their work" for three ...

Everybody loves the romance of a comeback: the phoenix-like rise from adversity, long-term exile, obscurity or defeat. Think of US President Abraham Lincoln's travails, boxer George Foreman's regaining the World Heavyweight title at the age of 45, actor Sean Connery's return as Bond, David Bowie's eternal reinvention or, indeed, the peculiar cycles of fashion that have ...

Boris (le) Poisson Rouge May 6, 2013

It's hard to corral Boris into a metal-generic corner. Whilst this Tokyo trio's prime reputation revolves around a spiraling psychedelic ascension, it is just as likely to get grubby and direct, or even poppy and spangled. This Poisson show was the first of two nights, dedicated ...

Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen is one of a handful of creative upstarts, like trumpeters Nils Petter Molvær or Erik Truffaz, who are embracing electronics and the improvisational side of jazz in their music. Henriksen's music is an otherworldly amalgamation of different and sometimes opposing elements, with imaginative soundscapes built on the tradition that trumpeter Miles Davis ...

In a time of financial crisis in the world in general and in the music business in particular, the natural thing to do would be to cut down the number of releases and concentrate on safe and palatable productions that cater to a major audience with a predefined taste. However, Oliver Weindling's Babel Label has always ...