Jazz Articles

Sal Mosca: Thing-Ah-Majig

by Brandt Reiter
August 23, 2005

Often referred to as Lennie Tristano's prime pupil, 78-year-old Sal Mosca has spent the greater part of the last half-century teaching rather than performing or recording, so any new disc by the low-profile pianist is immediately something of an event. Thing-Ah-Majig, recorded in 2004 and especially noteworthy as Mosca's first trio recording since 1959, does not disappoint.The program is what you'd expect from a Tristano disciple: five warhorse standards (plus one Mosca original, the leisurely “Nowhere ), picked ...

Sal Mosca: Thing-Ah-Majig

by Derek Taylor
April 7, 2005

School spirit can sometimes be a liability in jazz, a genre where individuality remains a paramount attribute. Critics lumped drummer Shelly Manne in with the Cool clique early on, even though his flexibility in taste and technique embraced a host of styles from swing to hard bop to early free. Similarly, allegiance to one's mentors, while admirable, occasionally carries peripheral costs of association. Sal Mosca knows these predicaments all too well. As one of Lennie Tristano's most prodigious pupils, and ...

Bluth/Messina/Chattin: Formations

by AAJ Staff
October 1, 2000

The current standard for piano trio music was largely set in the '60s. Recordings by the Bill Evans Trio and the Wynton Kelly Trio, for example, established basic paradigms that have persisted until today. Today's popular trios led by young pianists such as Brad Mehldau and Jacky Terrason, for example, derive much of their style from this influential period.

Formations, a trio outing led by pianist Larry Bluth, falls in much the same category. It builds off jazz standards, either ...

Charles Sibirsky/Mark Josefsberg Quartet: The BQE

by AAJ Staff
September 1, 2000

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway receives its due credit on The BQE for bringing the two halves of this quartet together. It also appears in its own way through the music itself: ranging from dreamily slow to head-long fast, changing tempos and moods at a moment's notice. Sibirsky asserts that most of this record was improvised, built around spare compositional frameworks. Indeed, the openness of the quartet to evolution and devolution is the record's greatest quality.

While the members of the rhythm ...

Larry Bluth, Don Messina, Bill Chattin: Five Concerts and a Landscape

by Robert Spencer
August 1, 1998

The title to this one derives from the five concerts where these ten selections were recorded; the landscape, by the late Annette Bluth-Lukemire, to whom this disc is dedicated, is on the front cover. Most of the cuts are the sorts of standards favored by Tristano-school players like Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz; pianist Bluth, backed by the bass of Messina and the drums of Chattin, plays them in Konitzian manner – sweetly and brightly, but with daring and piquant ...