Jazz Articles
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Cecile McLorin Salvant: Oh Snap
by Frank Housh
It feels like Cecile McLorin Salvant is just showing off. The 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant Award Winner follows up Ghost Song (Nonesuch, 2022) and Mélusine (Nonesuch, 2023) with Oh Snap, a post-genre effort with deeply personal lyrics that sound like they were lifted from the diaries of a rediscovered poet. McLorin recorded Oh Snap alone, learning GarageBand and AutoTune as she went. She said, “I felt I had lost a connection to music because it was something that ...
Continue ReadingBrad Mehldau: Ride into the Sun
by Frank Housh
Elliott Smith (1969-2003) recorded six solo studio albums and was acclaimed for poignant, sophisticated songwriting and reedy, melodious voice. Tragically, he suffered from mental health issues and substance abuse throughout his life. On October 1, 2003 Smith died of two stab wounds to his chest. While initial media reports said the fatal wounds were self-inflicted, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner refused to endorse suicide as a cause of death. Toxicology tests found no illegal or controlled substances in his ...
Continue ReadingMary Halvorson: About Ghosts
by Doug Collette
Since Mary Halvorson began her prolific affiliation with Nonesuch Records, she has refused to repeat herself except with a purpose. The simultaneous release of Amaryllis & Belladonna (Nonesuch Records, 2022) was the precursor to the expansive Cloudward (Nonesuch Records, 2024), while About Ghosts represents a retrenchment, albeit a productive one. On five of these eight cuts, the identical Amaryllis Sextet that appeared on the latter LP interacts smoothly with guest saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles. Such synchrony ...
Continue ReadingMary Halvorson: About Ghosts
by Mike Jurkovic
It has become more than an urban legend that Brooklyn's genius-in-residence Mary Halvorson is supernaturally up to something. Some new route around something else. On her second resiliency test of the year--her first, the fiery Bone Bells (Pyroclastic, 2025) alongside hot-house pianist Sylvie Courvoisier still rattles the playlist--Halvorson's About Ghosts tells of wide open spaces with a wide open lens. Its intricate inner architecture is so comfortably ethereal that you sway freely within its charm and frenzy. About ...
Continue ReadingAmbrose Akinmusire: Honey From A Winter Stone
by Frank Housh
Since his debut in 2008 at age 26, Ambrose Akinmusire has created a sapient body of work featuring some of the most unique and sophisticated sounds in contemporary music. His new release, honey from a winter stone is a dazzling kaleidoscope of jazz, hip-hop, and chamber music, as well as a commentary on the contemporary black experience. Akinmusire said, “[i]n many respects this entire work is inspired by and is an homage to the work of ...
Continue ReadingSilkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation
by Katchie Cartwright
Rhiannon Giddens is not afraid of big projects. American Railroad, the album, is part of a larger work, subtitled A Musical Journey of Reclamation, which Giddens initiated with the widely acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble, a diverse international collective of performers, improvisers and composers created by Yo Yo Ma. American Railroad digs into the building of America's transcontinental railway system, focusing on voices that have been missing from public narratives: voices of the laborers on whose backs the hard work fell, of ...
Continue ReadingMary Halvorson: Cloudward
by Doug Collette
The title of guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson's Cloudward alludes to the sense of optimism she has stated she felt when writing the bulk of the material in fall of 2022. And while this palpable sense of faith in the future is in marked contrast to the tangible air of eerie foreboding that surfaced so often on this LP's predecessors, the presence of largely the same personnel lineup--the Amaryllis Sextet-- provides a stable link of continuity. The reappearance of prior collaborators recording ...
Continue ReadingMary Halvorson: Cloudward
by Mike Jurkovic
Guitarist, composer & raconteur Mary Halvorson could very comfortably (and rightfully) wear the sobriquet of “The Charles Mingus of Guitar" if she wanted to. But even that open-ended comparison would limit her as she outdoes herself again on Cloudward. Though it must surely be getting harder to top herself given the string of releases--the deliberately articulate schizophrenia Amaryllis and Belladonna (Nonesuch, 2022), the unbridled trio synergy Multicolored Midnight (Cunneiform, 2018), the crackling mad invention propelling 2018's Code Girl (Firehouse 12 ...
Continue ReadingDarcy James Argue's Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension
by Katchie Cartwright
Darcy James Argue's superb double-album Nonesuch debut offers compositions written throughout his career. He turns to twentieth-century thinkers for “ideas that can help us in the present, that we can reexamine and reconfigure for our own purposes." These include futurist designer Buckminster Fuller, cryptanalyst-computer scientist Alan Turing, composer-arranger Bob Brookmeyer, actress-screenwriter Mae West, trumpeter-mentor Laurie Frink, and musician-beyond-category Duke Ellington, among others. Like West, Argue seems to control his own path. He may not yet be the tycoon she was, ...
Continue ReadingRhiannon Giddens: You're The One
by Katchie Cartwright
Rhiannon Giddens has a voracious musical appetite and a big talent that uses everything to fuel her many creative activities. With a MacArthur, a Pulitzer, and multiple Grammys on her shelf, this has not gone unnoticed. In a body of work that includes musicological projects along with different types of art, You're The One focuses on Giddens as a songwriter, in a variety of idioms. “I hope that people just hear American music," she says. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, ...
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