Jazz Articles
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Jon Gordon: 7th Ave South
by Jack Bowers
Some of life's moments, even when buried in the past, remain almost as fresh and memorable as today's. Such is alto saxophonist Jon Gordon's memory of his first visit to New York City's then-jazz center, Greenwich Village's 7th Avenue South, which was “the first place [he] ever heard live jazz in New York." That was in 1983--nearly four decades ago--but that memory and those that followed were enough to inspire Gordon's latest album, appropriately titled 7th Ave South.
Continue ReadingShelly Berg: Alegria
by Pierre Giroux
Shelly Berg's Alegria is a journey through the landscapes of love, joy and reflection. Joined by longtime collaborators bassist Carlitos Del Puerto and drummer Dafnis Prieto, along with tenor saxophonist Melvin Butler on a couple of tracks, Berg creates a sound that is bustling and approachable. The eleven tracks release are predominately Berg originals, with two reinterpretations of classics from Leonard Bernstein and The Beatles, each designed to offer a narrative that reflects Berg's connection to ...
Continue ReadingJon Gordon: 7th Ave South
by Pierre Giroux
Jon Gordon, an alto and soprano saxophonist, steps into the limelight with his latest release 7th Ave South, a melodic memoir of a transformative place for jazz history in the early 1980s. This journey is a testament to the fascination of discovery and the allure of artistic camaraderie four decades later. In this ten-track outing of primarily original compositions (with two exceptions), Gordon, a music professor at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, is accompanied by fellow faculty members or ...
Continue ReadingJon Gordon: Stranger Than Fiction
by Hrayr Attarian
Saxophonist Jon Gordon's superb 13th release as a leader, Stranger Than Fiction, consists of 10 cinematic and captivating originals. Gordon leads a large ensemble of mostly Canadian musicians through his vibrantly textured compositions. The focus is more on dynamic interplay of different band members and orchestral segments than on individual expressions. There are, however, brilliantly virtuosic soloists who seamlessly emerge out of these vividly ebullient works making them even more electrifyingly alive. Opening with delightfully dissonant staccato woodwinds ...
Continue ReadingAndy Farber and His Orchestra: Early Blue Evening
by Jack Bowers
Saxophonist Andy Farber's New York-based orchestra came together and cut its teeth as the onstage band for three hundred performances of After Midnight, a Broadway revue that paid tribute to Jazz Age nightclub luminaries from Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie to Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. As one might presume from the orchestra's provenance, echoes of Ellington and Basie can readily be discerned on its first recording since After Midnight closed in 2014--but Farber, who wrote ...
Continue ReadingJon Gordon: Stranger Than Fiction
by Jack Bowers
New York-bred alto saxophonist Jon Gordon has come a long way since he was hailed as something of a prodigy in the mid-1980s and earned first place in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 1996. The music performed by Gordon's nonet on Stranger Than Fiction, we are told, “reflects [his] realization that reality takes twists and turns [that are] far more unpredictable than any author would dare write." There are indeed many twists and turns—most ...
Continue ReadingMaria Schneider: Data Lords
by Pat Youngspiel
Well someone doesn't seem too happy with the digital world. But that's nothing new for Maria Schneider. The Grammy-award winning composer and bandleader has been an outspoken critic of copyright abuses in the digital and streaming world of music for the biggest part of the last decade. On her newest effort, she sets her justified quarrels with the industry to music by juxtaposing the cold world of ones and zeroes, comprised on the first CD titled “The Digital World," in ...
Continue ReadingMaria Schneider Orchestra: Data Lords
by Jerome Wilson
Composer Maria Schneider has long been writing and speaking about the dangers of the omnipresent digital universe, intellectual property theft, gathering and manipulation of personal data by big tech companies, the unchecked proliferation of false and misleading material, and so on. Those concerns form the basis of her latest musical project, Data Lords, a 2 CD set examining the conflicting realities of the digital and real worlds. The two CDs are labeled “The Digital World" and “Our Natural ...
Continue ReadingMaria Schneider: Data Lords
by Doug Hall
Maria Schneider, jazz pianist, orchestral composer and 2019 NEA Jazz Master, has just released a new double-album, Data Lords (artistShare, 2020), which creates poignant musical imagery about our data-driven world. Schneider, who has been an active advocate for musicians' rights and copyright, has followed-on this impact, citing “big data" companies as manipulators of music, culture and privacy. This collection of uniquely and emotionally rendered original compositions addresses the conflicting relationships between the digital and natural worlds, featuring Schneider's orchestra of ...
Continue ReadingDave Pietro: Hypersphere
by Paul Rauch
You may not know the name Dave Pietro offhand, but it is likely, if you are a jazz fan of any sort, that you have heard him play. As a saxophone/woodwind artist, composer, educator, sideman, and bandleader, he has performed across a broad spectrum of projects since his becoming a mainstay on the New York scene in 1987. That aspect of his career has enabled a sizable skill set that transfers over into his personal projects. His compositional ...
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