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Jazz Articles about Bill Summers

6
Album Review

The Headhunters: Speakers In The House

Read "Speakers In The House" reviewed by Doug Collette


Herbie Hancock's Headhunters (Columbia, 1973) remains one of the seminal works of the jazz fusion era. The group's heavy emphasis on rhythm not only separated it from its guitar-oriented peers of the era, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the middle-period Return to Forever, but also from Weather Report: grooves became increasingly more prominent as that band evolved, but never to the depth of Hancock and company's all-encompassing funk. That solid foundation is more than enough distinction for the first ...

3
Album Review

The Headhunters: Speakers In The House

Read "Speakers In The House" reviewed by Chris May


Although it appears to have been self-released in limited numbers in 2019, this Ropeadope release of Speakers In The House is effectively the Headhunters's first album since Platinum (Owl) in 2011. The band continues to be led and produced by its two Herbie Hancock-era members, percussionist Bill Summers and drummer Mike Clark, who together have kept the outfit intermittently active since Hancock moved on to other things in the mid 1970s. Summers played on the band's debut, ...

3
Album Review

Tony Adamo: Was Out Jazz Zone Mad

Read "Was Out Jazz Zone Mad" reviewed by Nicholas F. Mondello


The translation of “Adam" from Hebrew--from which the surname Adamo springs--means from the “ground" or “soil." It also derives from the Hebrew word for red, a la “red clay." Perhaps that is why any work from Tony Adamo is rare earth--gritty, and flaming crimson. Was Out Jazz Zone Mad Adamo's latest, his first for Ropeadope, is all of those things and more.Adamo is the Heavyweight Champion of “hipspokenword," wherein lingo meets vocalizing at the corner of jazz and ...

5
Album Review

Tony Adamo: Was Out Jazz Zone Mad

Read "Was Out Jazz Zone Mad" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


Some African cultures preserved their history not by the written but by the spoken word, kept by oral cultural historians known as griots. On Was Out Jazz Zone Mad, vocalist Tony Adamo aspires to serve in this same role, as a verbal historian of both official and unofficial African-American jazz and blues culture. This type of jazz jive might wear quickly thin but Adamo writes about jazz and jazz musicians with such detailed intimacy and vision that his words snap, ...

184
Album Review

Bill Summers/Irvin Mayfield: Los Hombres Calientes: Volume 4: Vodou Dance

Read "Volume 4: Vodou Dance" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


Trumpet player Irvin Mayfield has been a primary shaper of the modern musical landscape of New Orleans. He serves as artistic director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and as executive director and artistic director of the Institute of Jazz Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans, and has performed his own arrangements of spirituals and original works with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (2001 commission) and the Louisiana Philharmonic String Quartet. Mayfield also leads his own Quintet and performs with ...


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