Jazz Articles about Charles Overton

About Charles Overton

Album Review

Shabaka Hutchings: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

Read "Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
April 24, 2024

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ... Since signing with with Impulse! in 2018, Shabaka Hutchings has become best known for his incendiary work on tenor saxophone with Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & The Ancestors. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace marks the start of a gentler, more instrospective phase in his music making. The trigger came during the pandemic, when Hutchings fell in love with the Japanese shakuhachi flute. The quietly spoken instrument first edged itself ...

Album Review

Ester Wiesnerova: Blue Journal

Read "Blue Journal" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
June 22, 2022

By any standard, this is a remarkable production. Ester Wiesnerova's debut recording, long in the making, reminds one of Joni Mitchell or Holly Near, although her music is not really music of social protest, but meditations on identity. Since some of it is in Slovak, a language not accessible to a nonspeaker, a listener takes it at face value, purely as music. Wiesernerova's compositions and arrangements are nothing if not striking, especially when framed by percussion, harp, bass and saxophone, ...

Album Review

Ester Wiesnerova: Blue Journal

Read "Blue Journal" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
June 15, 2022

Sometimes, catching the eye can be as important as catching the ear, at least in the beginning. Slovakian singer and composer Ester Wiesnerova definitely catches the eye with her debut release, Blue Journal. Inside a plain brown cardboard box is something of a tactile, as well as visual, treat:--a book covered in rich blue felt, full of photographs and song lyrics, held closed by a loop of black elastic and decorated solely by the title and artist's name written on ...