Jazz Articles

like 213

Niels Lyhne Lokkegaard: The Scale of Grey. The Tone of Black

by Jakob Baekgaard
May 14, 2010

Some painters like to work with a wide canvas, filling out every space with details where figures emerge out of a wealth of colors and shapes. Likewise, there are jazz musicians who are busy focusing on technicalities, displaying an impressive wealth of rhythmic complexity and melodic variation. In both cases, the danger seems to be a sort of horror vacui, where the nervous extravaganza of basic craft stands in the way of artistic thought and contemplation. For ...

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One Big Soul Party: Baltics & Beyond

by Chris M. Slawecki
May 14, 2010

Rhett Frazier, Inc. Escape from Dee-Troyt Digi-Soul Records 2010

At first, singer-songwriter Rhett Frazier and producer-drummer Donny Gruender “incorporated" this joint retro-futuristic soul side project just to play around, nothing more than a diversion from their Los Angeles studio session work (Gruender, for example, rocks beats for the Motown house band, the Funk Brothers). But their Escape quickly evolved into its own full-blown monster: Two modernists using hip-hop cut and paste methods to recombine ...

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Alex Machacek: 24 Tales

by John Kelman
May 14, 2010

It's not the first time guitarist Alex Machacek has composed around drum improvisation--he did that with three tracks on [sic], his 2006 breakout record and first for Abstract Logix--but he's taken the concept even farther on 24 Tales. It's also not the only release to use, as its basis, a 51-minute drum improvisation by Marco Minneman--Machacek's band mate in keyboardist/violinist Eddie Jobson's UKZ, which debuted in 2009 with the Radiation (Globe Music) EP. Guitarist Mike Keneally, touch guitarist Trey Gunn, ...

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Hans Backenroth: Bassic Instinct

by Chris Mosey
May 14, 2010

Attempts to free the double-bass from its role as purely a rhythm instrument began in 1939, when Jimmy Blanton, a young bassist from St. Louis, joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra. For the next two years, until Blanton's tragic death from tuberculosis, he and Duke did things with the instrument that had never been done before. The sound of Blanton playing “Jack The Bear," accompanied by the Ellington band instead of vice versa, took the jazz world by storm.

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Ralph Bowen: Due Reverence

by John Patten
May 14, 2010

Saxophonist Ralph Bowen's Due Reverence is a too-short set of tributes to horn players who've made an impression on Bowen. The five tunes were written in the styles of players Ted Dunbar, Bob Mintzer, James Scott, Phil Nimmons and Robert Dick.Bowen gets backing from a strong quartet--Sean Jones on trumpet, Adam Rogers on guitar, John Patitucci on bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums. The combination of competently-crafted tunes from Bowen (director of jazz ensembles at Rutgers), played by ...

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Garaj Mahal: More Mr. Nice Guy

by Woodrow Wilkins
May 14, 2010

There is different, and there is distinct. Either can describe More Mr. Nice Guy by Garaj Mahal, although the latter is probably more telling. Several genres of music are mixed, matched and pushed around in this effort. Garaj Mahal features guitar and sitar virtuoso Fareed Haque, bass master and educator Kai Eckhardt, gospel-inspired keyboardist Eric Levy and drummer Sean Rickman. The group blends jazz with rock, Middle-Eastern sounds and funk. The members have associated with a number of ...

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Vinson Valega: Biophilia

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
May 14, 2010

Vinson Valega is a devoted environmental and progressive activist who seems engaged with his craft on an aesthetic level but also, it seems, in a profoundly logical, moral way. The drummer's compositions sound significant, as if every note were saying something, down to the slightest tap of the drumstick. This is not to say his records are wholly serious products: Valega demonstrates that quirk and laughter have their place alongside order and gravitas. The strength of Biophilia ...

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John King: 10 Mysteries

by Wilbur MacKenzie
May 14, 2010

The point where composition and improvisation meet is often a quite perforated boundary. For a composer looking to engage performers as both interpreters of composed music and also as improvisers, the question of notation becomes of great importance. Composers have long looked to implement systems that determine certain aspects of a performer's behavior but leave other issues up to chance. This leads to a different gray area: the often equally ambiguous boundary between improvisation and indeterminacy. This distinction usually has ...

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Nnenna Freelom: Homefree

by Fred Bouchard
May 14, 2010

Nnenna Freelon can be spotted miles off, like neon or a rainbow. The tall, rawboned, outspoken gal from Cambridge, MA via North Carolina owns a musical persona as unique as her name. She nails her ancient/modern, genre-jumping repertoire, embraces it, inhabits it organically and belts it with a hearty, emphatic attack. You can tell her from a phrase--even a note--as she goes merrily variegating vowels, taffy-pulling syllables, signifying scat sounds (gong-gong), sing-songing exit vamps; check her risqué ...

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Jim Rotondi at The Turning Point Cafe

by David A. Orthmann
May 14, 2010

Jim Rotondi The Turning Point Café Piermont, NY April 11, 2010When the words “Bye, Bye" sounded from outside The Turning Point Cafe in the middle of Jim Rotondi's “Angel Eyes" cadenza, he didn't hesitate to imitate the singsong tone of the woman's voice. A journeyman whose credits include the Ray Charles Band, the collective One For All, as well as several discs as a leader on the Posi-Tone, Criss Cross and Sharp Nine labels, the ...