Jazz Articles

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Dexter Payne Quintet: Jazz for All (Jazz Forró)

by Chris M. Slawecki
May 15, 2018

Dexter Payne plays clarinet with an easy, warm and conversational style. It never sounds like he's pushing or stretching toward the next note, but more like he kind of just lets the next note flow out from this one. On Jazz For All, Payne and his quintet flow through Brazilian choro from a unique, multi-cultured and multicolored perspective: As a mainstay for Thinking Plague and Hamster Theater, accordion player Dave Willey boasts impressive avant-experimental credentials; pianist Victor Mestas Pérez has ...

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Dexter Payne: Pra Vocé

by Chris M. Slawecki
May 26, 2014

Pra Vocé is clarinetist Dexter Payne's homage to the late Thiago de Mello, the composer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist whose life and music reflected the panoramic beauty of his native Brazil and with whom Payne recorded several beautifully reflective pieces of music, including and especially their self-produced 2007 duet Another Feeling (2006, Dexofon). Take time to stroll around and enjoy the beauty of its pathways and gardens, and sit in its contemplative shade, and you'll quickly learn that the quietly brilliant ...

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Thiago de Mello & Dexter Payne: Another Feeling

by Chris M. Slawecki
January 18, 2007

Have you ever walked alone through a quiet beautiful woodland and stepped into an open space full of nothing but warm and growing brightness, and felt like nature was a cathedral and you were seated in its front row? Another Feeling sounds just like that: completely, naturally, immaculate and beautiful.

Dexter Payne on clarinet and alto saxophone creates this Feeling with writer/ arranger Thiago de Mello on acoustic piano, guitar and “organic percussion, handmade instruments personally crafted from ...