Articles by Larry Reni Thomas

Mansur Scott: Great Voices of Harlem

by Larry Reni Thomas
July 25, 2014

Those of us who know better laughed, snickered, recently, when we read that Harlem-based vocalist extraordinaire Mansur Scott was a “rising star." We will agree that he is definitely a “star" because he always shines when he sings. His first album, Sometimes Forgotten Sometimes Remembered (Pao Records, 2010), was excellent and caught the attention of a great deal of music lovers. His latest recording, Great Voices Of Harlem (Pao Records) includes two other singers, Gregory Porter and Donald Smith, who ...

Shana Tucker: Shine

by Larry Reni Thomas
July 23, 2011

Shine is a bright, bluesy, jazzy album from the multitalented vocalist Shana Tucker. She also plays cello and guitar on this set of Tucker compositions, with insightful autobiographical titles like the upbeat “Fast Lane," with a great line “leave the porch light on," and the ever-moving “No Get Back (Together With Me)." These tunes, along with “A Secret That I Keep," are the best and most rhythmic selections on the disc, with snappy, direct lyrics, good beats and simple melodies. ...

Joe Chambers: Horace to Max

by Larry Reni Thomas
August 16, 2010

Drummer/vibraphonist/composer/educator Joe Chambers' Horace to Max is an awesome display of versatility and master musicianship; that's impossible to put away, it gets better with each listen. The distinctive blue-and-black colored cover design is similar to those fine Blue Note records of the 1960s and 1970s. The disc possesses a subtle suggestive theme that can only be described as plain old protest music, showing that times have not really changed; despite being written decades ago, the music's lyrics, meaning and intended ...

Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

by Larry Reni Thomas
July 5, 2010

Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone Nadine Cohodas Hardback; 464 pages ISBN: 10-0375424016 Pantheon 2010

Nadine Cohodas' Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone is a desperately sad but riveting tale about the troubled life and career of this uniquely talented vocalist, pianist, songwriter and activist, born in North Carolina in 1933. It is not the first Simone biography. There are four others, including one ...

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

by Larry Reni Thomas
October 29, 2009

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original Robin D.G. Kelley Free Press ISBN: 0684831902 2009 Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is a meticulously documented, yet easy-to-read chronicle of the roller coaster life of pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. It took Robin Kelley, a professor of History and American Studies at The University of Southern California, 14 years to complete, and is a sometimes humourous, but often ...

Dianne Reeves with Strings Attached at Duke University

by Larry Reni Thomas
October 21, 2009

Dianne ReevesPage Auditorium, Duke UniversityDurham, North CarolinaOctober 9, 2009

Dianne Reeves' fans were in full force on this Friday evening at Duke University's Page Auditorium. The near-capacity crowd, composed of mostly females, seemed to hang on every thing Reeves said and sang. She is a wonderful storyteller, and every tune on the program began with a delightful, quite timely talk. Her rich, finely-tuned voice was in its usually superb form, and she was applauded throughout ...

Etienne Charles: Folklore

by Larry Reni Thomas
August 20, 2009

Trumpeter Etienne Charles' Folklore is a wonderful, colorful, vibrant recording filled with Caribbean flavor, Latin grooves and solid jazz arrangements and solos. A percussionist and composer as well, the 26-year-old Charles has an extremely unique trumpet sound that is his and his alone. He doesn't sound like Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, or Miles Davis, nor does he sound like fellow West Indian native, the Jamaican-born Dizzy Reece (a trumpet sensation of the 1950s and 1960s and one the Caribbean's most ...

Steve Haines Quintet with Jimmy Cobb: Stickadiboom

by Larry Reni Thomas
May 8, 2009

Bassist Steve Haines Quintet 's impressive Stickadiboom is a thought-provoking, energetic, excellently composed and arranged, modern jazz album. Haines, a Canadian transplant who directs the Miles Davis Program in Jazz Studies at Greensboro's University of North Carolina, lived in New York City during a research assignment, playing, hanging out and immersing himself in the jazz scene, where he met legendary drummer, Jimmy Cobb, who is featured on six of the eight selections. Cobb's exceptionally steady and sturdy drum work keeps ...

Becoming Billie Holiday

by Larry Reni Thomas
March 27, 2009

Becoming Billie Holiday Carole Boston Weatherford Hardcover; 120 pages ISBN: 159078507X Wordsong Press 2008

Award-winning poet and professor Carole Boston Weatherford's latest, excellent book, Becoming Billie Holiday--a fictional verse memoir, as Weatherford describes it--reaches out and grabs the reader's attention as if Holiday herself was on stage and her entire life was unfolding before your very eyes. Weatherford's wonderful poems, which have titles from Holiday's songbook, are so ...

DelightfuLee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan

by Larry Reni Thomas
January 14, 2009

DelightfuLee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan Jeffrey McMillan Cloth/Paper; 272 pages ISBN: 978-0-472-11502-0/978-0-472-03281-5 University of Michigan Press 2008

This is an excellent, well-written, abundantly researched, scholarly book on the life and music of one of the great, unheralded heroes of jazz--the trumpeter Lee Morgan--who was shot and killed at Slug's Jazz Club in Manhattan in 1972, at the tender age of 33 years, by his 47 ...