Articles by Mark Corroto

Album Review

Ken Vandermark: A Living Poets Group

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by Mark Corroto
November 9, 2026

Artists such as Michelangelo, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci relied on the Medici family to support their creative endeavors. Other influential patrons included Catherine the Great of Russia and Louis XIV of France, while in the 20th century, the Rockefeller Foundation and Peggy Guggenheim helped provide artists with the resources to create ambitious works. Today, crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon offer alternative means of support, but they can hardly be expected to finance the large-ensemble projects favored by ...

Album Review

Rempis / Abrams / Ra + Baker: The Walls Of The Temple Are Made Of Sound

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by Mark Corroto
October 30, 2026

Both Chicago architecture and Chicago jazz inspire images of beefy, mammoth structures. The city's skyscrapers, bridges and industrial-strength rhythms seem built to withstand even the harshest winter winds, the kind vocalist Lou Rawls dubbed “the hawk." The quartet of saxophonist Dave Rempis, pianist Jim Baker, bassist Joshua Abrams and drummer Avreeayl Ra trades in similarly brawny sounds on the two-disc The Walls Of The Temple Are Made Of Sound. The group's fifth release since 2016, it follows Scylla (Aerophonic Records, ...

Album Review

Twin Talk: Delights

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by Mark Corroto
October 21, 2026

If you are familiar with “Born in Chicago" by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a song later covered by the Blues Brothers and the Pixies, you know the lyrics: “I was born in Chicago at nineteen and forty-one / Well, my father told me / Son, you had better get a gun." Later, the song offers a different kind of wisdom: “Well, now rules are alright / If there's someone left to play the game." In the 21st ...

Album Review

Nathan Hanson / Steve Hirsh: Memory Is Subjective

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by Mark Corroto
October 16, 2026

It goes without saying that memory is subjective. Saxophonist Nathan Hanson and drummer Steve Hirsh might tell you that, apart from the experience of attending their October 2025 live performance at the 210 Gallery & Art Center in Sandstone, Minnesota, encountering the resulting recording is an entirely different affair. They would be right. Yet Memory Is Subjective is so sincere, and so expertly recorded and mixed, that the listener is placed almost directly within the audience's sound space, experiencing something ...

Album Review

Albert Ayler Quartet: Reference: Albert Ayler Quartet Goin' Home 1964

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by Mark Corroto
October 12, 2026

On February 24, 1964, Albert Ayler entered Atlantic Studios in New York City to record a series of compositions that would help define the saxophonist's legacy and, arguably, alter the course of jazz. The Cleveland, Ohio, native had recently returned from Europe, where he had performed with Cecil Taylor's quartet and at the urging of Swedish saxophonist and clarinetist Bengt Nordström, Ayler recorded a program of jazz standards. That February New York session would eventually be released under ...

Album Review

Ivo Perelman, Elliott Sharp, Cyro Baptista: Triacontagon

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by Mark Corroto
October 10, 2026

To better appreciate Triacontagon, it helps to wind the clock back to Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman's recordings from the mid-to-late 1990s. Consider Man of the Forest (GM Recordings, 1994), Brazilian Watercolour (Leo Records, 1999) and Aquarela do Brazil (Atração Fonográfica, 1999). Each featured fellow São Paulo native, percussionist Cyro Baptista. Perelman, who began his musical life playing guitar, eventually gravitated toward the tenor saxophone and the music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. Two of those early recordings ...

Album Review

Weave4: La Gomma Di Dante

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by Mark Corroto
September 30, 2026

Did the quartet Weave4 reach back 700 years with an eraser and a comma to reimagine Dante Alighieri's famous words: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost?" Well, not exactly. This French-Italian collective of pianist Benoit Delbecq, drummer Steve Arguelles, guitarist Francesco Diodati and Francesco Bigoni on tenor saxophone and clarinet follows up its self-titled album, Weave4 (Parco Della Musica Records, 2023), with 15 ...

Album Review

Chad Fowler / Eri Yamamoto: Polkadots & Moonbeams

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by Mark Corroto
September 29, 2026

Some of the finest duo recordings give the listener the sensation of eavesdropping on an intimate encounter. The recordings of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans come to mind, as does the music of Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Polkadots & Moonbeams, by pianist Eri Yamamoto and saxophonist Chad Fowler, creates that same feeling. Although recorded in a studio, the performance sounds as though it might have been captured for the musicians themselves, an unguarded conversation between two artists listening closely ...

Album Review

Tommy Muellner: Solitary Moon

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by Mark Corroto
September 15, 2026

Today's hipster jazz musicians do not play standards. Perhaps “poseur" is a better description for artists who deliberately eschew classic compositions. Yet standards and familiar songs serve an important purpose in jazz: they provide a shared musical language, a lingua franca through which musicians communicate and listeners can measure the quality of an interpretation. Maybe, just maybe, the poseurs avoid standards because they don't want to be found out. Chicago pianist Tommy Muellner is no poseur. In fact, ...

Album Review

Irene Schweizer: Piano Solo: Prelude To A Kiss And More

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by Mark Corroto
September 8, 2026

It might be a touch of hyperbole to say the world wasn't ready for Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer's 1986 recording Piano Solo: Prelude To A Kiss And More. Yet listening to it some 40 years later, that may well be your first thought. Schweizer (1941--2024) had already established herself as a formidable improviser through recordings such as Wilde Señoritas (FMP, 1977) and Hexensabbat (FMP, 1978), both later remastered and reissued as a double CD by Intakt Records in 2002. She ...