Articles by Matt Leskovic

The Greyboy Allstars: What Happened to Television?

by Matt Leskovic
September 29, 2007

Flip through albums in the bargain Funk/Soul/R&B bin at your local record store and you'll find a mix of classic Meters, Mayfield, and James Brown LPs. If a copy of the Greyboy Allstars' What Happened To Television? winds up in your stack, you probably wouldn't guess it was recorded in 2007.

While many contemporary funk outfits have diluted their music with commercially driven slickness, the Greyboy Allstars have stuck to their roots. Their sound has not smoothed out--it's ...

Charles Lloyd: His Mystical Journey

by Matt Leskovic
September 20, 2007

The life of Charles Lloyd has truly been the proverbial “long, strange trip."

The master reedman experienced an unmatched level of popularity for a jazz musician in the late 1960s. Lloyd (b. 1938) and his quartet, which featured a young Keith Jarrett on piano and Jack DeJohnette on drums, packed clubs and captivated festival audiences worldwide. Voted Jazzman of the Year by Down Beat Magazine in 1967, Lloyd was for a time the darling of both ...

Freddie Hubbard: Straight Life

by Matt Leskovic
August 8, 2007

Creed Taylor's genre-bending CTI Records held the precarious position as the dominant jazz label during the 1970s--the decade during which the music “died. CTI was a contradiction in itself; it had as much to do with the promotion of straight-ahead, hard-swinging jazz as with spawning smoothed-out, easy-listening records that bordered on muzak. For every album as classy as Jim Hall's Concierto (CTI, 1975) there is a dud like Bob James's BJ4 (CTI, 1977), which comes perilously close to disco. The ...

Chet Baker: Chet

by Matt Leskovic
July 29, 2007

With his striking good looks, withdrawn stage presence, and reserved improvisational approach, trumpeter Chet Baker embodied everything that was “cool about jazz in the 1950s. He was peerless when it came to playing ballads, using simplistic phrasing and a tone that was at once unassuming, fragile, stirring, and sexy.

His experience as a singer undoubtedly influenced his interpreting the American popular songbook. By choosing not to use excessive embellishments the focus is shifted back to melody and away ...

Blue Mitchell: Down With It!

by Matt Leskovic
July 25, 2007

It's about time that everyone gets down with Blue Mitchell.

During an era when hard bop giants roamed the earth, trumpeter Blue Mitchell was overshadowed by his more brash contemporaries such as Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. While Mitchell may have not been the most daring hard bop trumpeter, he was unquestionably one of the most steady and reliable.

Consistency is the name of Mitchell's game. His tone is focused and relaxed, and beautifully rounded in ...