Jazz Articles

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Kanji Ohta & The Jazz Family with Jimmy Heath: Our Jazz Family

by Dan Bilawsky
September 26, 2013

The music that appears on Our Jazz Family was meant to serve as an aural commemorative keepsake-of-sorts. Pianists Kanji Ohta and Toshiko Kiryu celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary by putting on a concert with their family and friends in 2002. The concert was recorded and kept as a private memento at first, but ten years later, as the couple celebrated their silver anniversary, they decided to share what they had made a decade earlier. The music that ...

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James Zollar: Zollar System

by Raul d'Gama Rose
August 17, 2010

It is an unfortunate fact that trumpeter James Zollar is nowhere near as well-known as he should be. But that may be about to change. Zollar Systems may be about to put Zollar in an orbit all his own. A genuine renaissance man of the horn, Zollar is a singular voice on the instrument that is jazz music's vanguard accouterment--the one that heralded the legend of Buddy Bolden and those of Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jabbo Smith and Bubber Miley, ...

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James Zoller: Zollar System

by C. Michael Bailey
March 7, 2010

James Zollar is a musical treasure hidden in plain sight. He has played and recorded as a sideman for a variety of artists, including Cecil McBee, Tom Harrell, Weldon Irving and Sam Rivers, as a member of Wynton Marsalis' brass section in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, The Duke Ellington Orchestra and several of Don Byron's bands. While he leads his own mainstream-oriented quintet, Zollar has recorded only one collection, the very fine Soaring With Bird (Naxos Jazz, 1998).

Twelve ...