Jazz Articles about Keith Javors

Oleg Kireyev and Keith Javors: The Meeting

by Howard Mandel
May 15, 2023

How far must a reeds virtuoso from Bashkiria--a town in the Ural Mountains, southeast of Moscow towards Mongolia--and a pianist-composer-educator from southern Illinois, now living in Philadelphia, have to go to get together? Not very, based on the music Oleg Kireyev and Keith Javors arrive at on The Meeting. Simply to a shared sense of joy in swinging rhythms, warm, rich harmonies and singable songs. In their second co-led album Kireyev and Javors offer more delightful proof that ...

Oleg Kireyev & Keith Javors: The Meeting

by Edward Blanco
May 17, 2016

Performing together since 2007, Russian saxophonist Oleg Kireyev and Philadelphia-based pianist Keith Javors formed a solid quartet they eventually led to the studio for their debut album Rhyme & Reason (Inarhyme Records, 2010). The Meeting is their follow up recording with a program of four originals and three re-imagined tunes from The Great American Songbook delivered in a tasteful post-bop style. Interestingly enough, it was Kireyev who discovered Javors while surfing the internet and cemented their friendship while ...

The American Music Project: On the Bright Side

by AAJ Italy Staff
March 22, 2010

"This is our music, American Music: Miles, Coltrane, Billie Holliday, Tupac Shakur, Stevie Wonder, can you hear me". Il piano degli American Music Project è chiaro. Non lascia sottintesi, non è ambiguo, non è pretenzioso, non è presuntuoso. Se questa è la tradizione della musica americana, perché creare steccati tra jazz, hip-hop, poesia, R&B, gospel, funk e Motown Records? Più interessante e stimolante mettere tutti d'accordo e non segregare nessuno, in nome della purezza artistica. La stessa alla quale la ...

Keith Javors: Mo

by Mark Sabbatini
July 15, 2004

Mo' City Jungle is a bit like a mediocre blind date where the person in question makes a nice first impression but reveals an unpleasant identity crisis as the evening progresses.

Pianist Keith Javors' third album is a bit frustrating because his septet of players indicate early what they're capable of, but seldom live up to that potential. The result is an uneven album that can't decide if it wants to be modern or fusion-influenced jazz. Also, someone ...

Keith Javors: Mo' City Jungle

by John Kelman
April 4, 2004

With a style that is reverential yet modern, Keith Javors’ Mo’ City Jungle pays tribute to the Detroit jazz scene with a programme of nine originals that bristle with energy, group interplay and soloing of the highest order.

Javors is a thirty-something pianist who is also an educator at the University of North Florida; but refuting the adage that “those who can’t do, teach,” Javors’ writing and playing could only come from someone who has done plenty. With a style ...

The Keith Javors Quartet: From Here to the Street

by Jack Bowers
March 1, 2003

Pianist Keith Javors, who is now an assistant professor of Jazz Studies at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, recorded this set of his original compositions more than three years ago in Marquette, Michigan, with “deep gratitude and respect to [his] musical heroes: Benny Green, Mulgrew Miller, Herbie Hancock and the late Kenny Kirkland.” Javors, who is clearly a talented musician, has absorbed many of their more adaptable notions and added a few wrinkles of his own to produce ...