Touchstone Album Picks

Touchstone Albums Picks is a column that invites artists to talk about the albums that have moved and inspired them and perhaps in some way informed their own music.

Pernille Bévort: Curious Explorations

by Ian Patterson
June 17, 2024

A veteran of the Danish jazz scene since the '90s, saxophonist/reeds player and composer Pernille Bévort has built an impressive discography as a leader. With the moveable feast that is Radio Bévort, she has demonstrated the depth and range of her musical palette, marrying jazz and tango on Perfect Organisation (Gateway Music, 2011) with bandoneon player Marcelo Nisinman. Bévort 3, her chordless trio with bassist Morten Ankarfeldt and drummer Espen Laub von Lillienskjold has produced a string of fine acoustic ...

Eddie Henderson: Everything Changes

by Ian Patterson
February 8, 2024

Eddie Henderson made his name in Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band in the early 1970s, at the dawn of jazz-fusion--a new frontier. It was undoubtedly a launching pad that saw the New York-born trumpeter go on to play with Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Elvin Jones, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and McCoy Tyner. Yet Henderson has always been his own man. From Realization (Capricorn, 1973) to Witness To History (Smoke Sessions, 2023), Henderson has built an impressive career ...

Francesca Han: Exuding Honesty

by Ian Patterson
February 23, 2023

Pianist and composer Francesca Han's duo album with Ralph Alessi, Exude (Hanji, 2022), is a timely reminder of the Korean's talent as an interpreter, an improvisor and as a creative force. It is a beautiful, conversational album, open to multiple influences. Classically trained, Han discovered jazz while studying in her native Seoul. It was a life-changing turning point that would lead her to New York, where she immersed herself in jazz studies both formal and informal. A number ...

Bill Frisell: Never Ending Revelations

by Ian Patterson
April 28, 2022

Touchstone Albums Picks is a new column from All About Jazz that invites artists to talk about the albums that have moved and inspired them and perhaps in some way informed their own music. In celebration of the publication of Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer (Faber & Faber, 2022), Irish journalist Philip Watson's definitive biography of the Denver guitarist, AAJ invited Bill Frisell to kick off the series. What follows is an extract, largely unedited, of a conversation where ...