Results for "Alan Shorter"

Alan Shorter

Mephistopholes To Orgasm Revisited

By Alan Shorter

Label: Ezz-thetics
Released: 2024
Track listing: Mephistopheles; Parabola; Joseph; Straits Of Blagellan; Rapids; Outeroids; Orgasm.

Alan Shorter: Mephistopholes To Orgasm Revisited

by Chris May
January 22, 2024

It is often said of a musician, be they alive or no longer with us, that they deserve to be better known. This is emphatically true of the wayward trumpeter and composer Alan Shorter, who was overshadowed during his lifetime by his brother, Wayne Shorter, and who continues to be passed over today in 2024.

Wayne Shorter: An Essential Top Ten Albums

by Chris May
August 26, 2023

At the start of September 2021, trumpeter Terence Blanchard released Absence (Blue Note), dedicated to saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who for health reasons had recently been obliged to retire from performing, at least temporarily. Some people celebrating their eighty-eighth birthday, as Shorter did the previous month, might not welcome being the dedicatee of an album ...

IzangoMa: Ngo Ma

by Chris May
June 6, 2023

The first thing that needs to be said is: this is not a jazz album. Jazz is only one of many musical traditions, most of them South African, that coalesce to form IzangoMa's debut. The percussion-rich, horn-embellished, multi-layered blend weaves together kwaito, mbaqanga, township jazz, marabi, pantsula, mbube, Jamaican nyabhingi drumming, electronica and a whole lot ...

Nathaniel Cross: Deep Vibrations

by Chris May
June 28, 2021

At the time of writing in summer 2021, there are a number of super-talented musicians on London's alternative jazz scene who deserve far more prominence than they have yet to achieve. Some of these players have been ill-served by their record labels. Others have only recorded as sidepersons. A few have chosen to confine their music-making ...

Marion Brown: Why Not? Porto Novo! Revisited

by Chris May
June 3, 2021

Alto saxophonist Marion Brown was part of the band on John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1965), though you would not guess it from Why Not (ESP, 1968). Like fellow Ascension alumnus, tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders' contemporaneous Tauhid (Impulse, 1967), Brown's album inhabited an intensely melodic section of the 1960s' New Thing. As were Sanders' own-name ...

Marion Brown: Capricorn Moon To Juba Lee Revisited

by Chris May
August 13, 2019

The release of this album is an event momentous enough to warrant repeating the preamble to the previously published review of Albert Ayler's Quartets 1964: Spirits To Ghosts Revisited.... Before considering the music on this disc, something else has to be celebrated--the resurrection of Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut label (see past profiles). Founded ...

Dave Burrell: Pianist Navigating the Windward Passages

by Victor L. Schermer
June 11, 2015

Dave Burrell is a master pianist and composer who encountered the avant-garde in the 1960s and has been following his own independent path ever since. He combines classical and jazz elements that are both “inside" and “outside" the mainstream. The title of a poem by J.V. Cunningham, “The Metaphysical Amorist" characterizes much of his playing, which ...

Brian McCarthy: This Just In

by Hrayr Attarian
January 3, 2014

Jazz is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Vermont but the state, despite its size, has had a long involvement with improvised music. Trumpeters Alan Shorter and Bill Dixon taught at Bennington College and guitarist Attila Zoller founded the Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro. In addition to having a small yet ...