Jazz Articles
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Vivian Buczek: Le Grand Michel
by Neil Duggan
The title of this album, Le Grand Michel, refers to French composer, pianist and arranger, Michel Legrand. In a glittering career, he wrote hundreds of film and television scores. He won three Oscars (from 13 nominations) with “The Windmills of Your Mind," featured in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), perhaps his best- known work. This song had English lyrics written by Marilyn Bergman and Alan Bergman, the couple formed a long-lasting songwriting relationship with Legrand, also winning three Oscars.
Continue ReadingVidya: Adi Shakti
by Kyle Simpler
Anyone who ever studied philosophy or literature has probably encountered the term dualism. Dualism represents two different aspects of one thing, much like two sides of one coin. Although the concept is generally associated with academics, it certainly applies to many different areas, and music is no exception. For example, the performance process is one form of expression, while the songwriting process is a different form of expression. Whenever these two are combined, it often brings ...
Continue ReadingGeorg Riedel: Dance Music: Georg Riedel Meets Ekdahl/Bagge Big Band
by Jack Bowers
Czech-born, Swedish-bred bassist Georg Riedel, best known as a composer of ten or more film scores, returns to his first love, big-band jazz, to conduct an evening of Dance Music with Sweden's world-class Ekdahl/Bagge Big Band, recorded in June 2019 at Fasching Jazz Club in Stockholm. Before arriving at “Dance Music," the hour-long concert opens with Riedel's three-part “Song for Nobody," also suitable for dancing and well-received by the audience at Fasching. Part 3, a lovely ballad, ...
Continue ReadingFlorian Ross: Architexture
by Jerome Wilson
Writing about music has been compared to dancing about architecture, in that it is a supposedly useless task. Writing music about architecture is a worthwhile proposition, though, as shown by this release from German pianist Florian Ross, composing music for his quartet and the Event Wind Ensemble which is inspired by famous architects and buildings he has encountered in his travels. This music plays like an updating of the Third Stream genre, combining classical formality and jazz fluidity. ...
Continue ReadingConte Candoli: Sincerely, Conte
by Richard J Salvucci
On the old Tonight Show (as in Carson, not Leno, much less Parr), I once remember “Conte Candoli unwinding a great solo on “King Porter Stomp." No surprise, I guess, for a guy who cut his teeth with the big bands of the late 1940s. But as he went into his second chorus, he quoted “Epistrophy," whose juxtaposition, as I recall, killed me. “Where did that come from?" But I guess it made sense, because Candoli was a bopper at ...
Continue ReadingSteven Mayer: Louis Moreau Gottschalk: A Night in the Tropics / Solo Piano Music
by C. Michael Bailey
New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829--1969) was the first important American composer and pianist. The son of a Jewish business man and a Creole mother, Gottschalk was urbane and cosmopolitan is a way not typical for the period. He composed and played on a Chickering piano as big as a house and heavy as a battleship with a showman's personality to match. He forged his reputation by fusing the European classical tradition with American musical elements like folk music, ...
Continue ReadingBuffalo Philharmonic Orchestra / Jo Ann Falletta: Duke Ellington: Black, Brown, and Beige
by C. Michael Bailey
Naxos Records' American Classics imprint was intended to highlight the domestic classical repertoire. This includes reaching from John Philip Sousa wind works and John Adams operas to Charles Ives songs and Leonard Bernstein Broadway shows. Jazz made a claim with the imprint, and the America Classics eventually included recordings of Scott Joplin rags, Art Tatum piano improvisations, George Gershwin extended concert pieces and William Grant Still symphonies. Oddly absent has been Edward Kennedy “Duke" Ellington...until now. The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, ...
Continue ReadingBill Evans: The Sesjun Radio Shows
by Dan McClenaghan
Bill EvansThe Sesjun Radio ShowsOut Of The Blue/Naxos2011 (1973-79) Pianist Bill Evans (b. 1929, d. 1980) changed the way of the piano trio, beginning with a handful of brilliant studio recording for Riverside Records in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A pair of live recordings for the label, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, both released in 1961, cemented his reputation as a genius and agent of ...
Continue ReadingArt Blakey & The Jazz Messengers: The Sesjun Radio Shows
by Dan McClenaghan
The old and irksome “but is it jazz" argument has probably never been brought into play when it comes to drummer/bandleader Art Blakey (1919-1990) and his ever-changing line-up of Jazz Messengers. The music Blakey and his usually young players made was most certainly jazz, of the hard bop, hard-charging variety--brash and brightly hued, and joyously swinging. The Jazz Messengers, active from the early 1950s until the mid-'80s, was an on-the-job Jazz university, graduating such luminaries as Clifford Brown, ...
Continue ReadingBuffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta: Marcel Tyberg: Symphony No. 3, Piano Trio
by C. Michael Bailey
Often, the story behind the music makes it that much more compelling. Marcel Tyberg was an Austrian composer of certain repute, his Symphony No. 2 being premiered by friend Rafael Kubelik in the early 1930s. But not much else was heard from this composer. Tyberg was a Jew, in danger of Gestapo deportment in 1943, who entrusted his music manuscripts to his close friend, Italian physician Milan Mihich. Tyberg is thought to have perished in Auschwitz within sight of the ...
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