Jazz Articles
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Lisa Hilton: Extended Daydream
by Neil Duggan
Lisa Hilton's success story continues with her 31st release, Extended Daydream. Her considerable body of work makes frequent chart appearances and measures streams in millions. She appears in various group formats, but on this occasion, the focus is on her quintet. That quintet is based around her longtime trio with bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Rudy Royston, augmented with the return of tenor saxophonist JD Allen, who has appeared on eight of Hilton's previous albums, along with another ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Lucky All Along
by Mike Jurkovic
Throughout the course of her quietly triumphant, just south-of-the-spotlight, virtuoso career, pianist/composer Lisa Hilton has never actively pursued, Captain Ahab-like, the biggest fish in the sea. She has played alongside many of the biggies--Christian McBride, Antonio Sanchez, Nasheet Waits, Sean Jones, JD Allen--but finds the greatest comfort, harmony, and camaraderie among her long-standing rhythm mates: bassist Luques Curtis, drummer Rudy Royston and, for their third quartet recording, trumpeter Igmar Thomas. Hilton does a lot of pretty things with a simple Latin sway ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Lucky All Along
by Neil Duggan
Another Lisa Hilton album, and for many the world seems a better place. Lucky All Along is the pianist's 30th release, proving that it can take a long time to be considered a jazz success story. Her blend of jazz, Latin, pop and blues means she counts the number of plays on streaming services in the millions and her albums bother the top of those charts which count radio plays and numbers of downloads. She is not considered particularly hip ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Coincidental Moment
by Mike Jurkovic
As good as Coincidental Moment is, there is an uncharacteristic sense of sameness infused in many of these bossa blues. As she notes in the liners, lauded and long-trusted pianist Lisa Hilton intended the music to illuminate the cool energies and history of jazz while relating to these hair-shirt times in which we find ourselves privileged to listen to her music . But perhaps it crossed some invisible line where what has been accepted as gospel from Hilton--her ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Paradise Cove
by Lisa Hilton
"I think we all need jazz in our lives these days. From its inception, jazz and blues were created to boost moods or morale by America's earliest composers, such as Scott Joplin, Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, and Nick La Rocca around the beginning of the 1900s. The music on Paradise Cove was composed and created to refresh and reboot our collective spirits and inspire all to create a personal “cove" or protected “paradise" for our well-being. Our world desires and ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Paradise Cove
by Mike Jurkovic
At a time in our collective consciousness when it appears nothing is functioning as it once did, or is as reliable as it once was, or gives us purpose and solace as we once knew, along comes the soft sustaining magic of Lisa Hilton's gorgeous new recording, Paradise Cove, and for all of its enchanting forty-five minutes all is right with the world again. Hilton may not have the wild chops of many of her peers or the ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Life is Beautiful
by Mike Jurkovic
There's an affirmation of goodness to the music of pianist Lisa Hilton, a quiet something of a positive nature that is known intrinsically true. But the world and its crowded barges of babbling talking heads are frantically convincing us all otherwise. So listen in to Life Is Beautiful before it's all too late. Without flash, pyrotechnic soloing, or virtuoso histrionics, Life is Beautiful casts an aura that envelops and holds. Intimately reworking tunes she has recorded throughout her ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: Transparent Sky
by Mike Jurkovic
It is a real wonder why a genuinely and generously creative spirit such as pianist Lisa Hilton hasn't broken through to a larger audience. Her philosophy of new ideas tied to older heartbeats, countered effusively by an actively improvisational impressionism, has resulted in a discography brightly colored with real beauts such as Chalkboard Destiny (2019), Oasis (2018), Escapism (2017), Day & Night (2016) and Nocturnal, (2016) (all on her own Ruby Slippers Productions.) Now add Transparent Sky to ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: More Than Another Day
by Peter J. Hoetjes
Pianist and composer Lisa Hilton's More Than Another Day is yet another effort reacting to the gloom which hung over the music industry in 2020. That does not mean the album is necessarily bleak. A brief survey of the cover photography will tell a very different story. Donning a wide-brimmed hat, blonde hair splayed out over a black summer dress, carrying a bouquet of white roses in one hand and a weathered, vintage suitcase in the other, Hilton seems to ...
Continue ReadingLisa Hilton: More Than Another Day
by Mike Jurkovic
It's very comforting to know that, as Annus Horribilis (2020) crashes to its long awaited, cursed demise, pianist/composer Lisa Hilton delivers, as she has faithfully over the past few years, a year-end gift to aficionados everywhere with her soulfully bluesy More Than Another Day. When you consider all our anxious caution for the year ahead, More Than Another Day may be a more laid back affair given 2019's watermark Chalkboard Destiny (Ruby Slippers Productions), 2018's ascendant Oasis (Ruby ...
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