Jazz Articles

like 340

Jon Mayer: Nightscape

by Bruce Lindsay
October 17, 2009

New York-born, Los Angeles-based pianist Jon Mayer began his musical career in the New York jazz scene of the 1950s and 1960s. He has a long and distinguished pedigree, including work with Jackie McLean and John Coltrane, but his first recording as leader came as late as 1996, with Round Up The Usual Suspects (Pullen Music). Nightscape is Mayer's eighth album as leader and it's an engaging, beautifully performed, collection of tunes. As with Mayer's previous albums ...

like 365

Davey Graham: The Complete Guitarist

by David Rickert
October 17, 2009

Davey Graham never found a style of guitar playing that he didn't want to master. In fact, he was such a perfectionist that he recorded infrequently, preferring not to commit any tunes to wax until he had thoroughly explored all the avenues that each tune had to offer. From ragas to ragtime, Graham did it all, but frustratingly a lot of his work is difficult to find.

The Complete Guitarist, originally released in 1977 and now available on ...

like 540

Nguyen Le: Saiyuki

by John Kelman
October 16, 2009

He's not the first guitarist to explore the nexus of east and west--the legendary John McLaughlin is, at the very least, the first well-known six-stringer to do so--but, over the past couple decades, Nguyên Lê has been finding his own junctures. McLaughlin may have dug deep into the place where western harmony and Indian linearity meet, but Lê has set his sights even more expansively. Of Vietnamese descent, he's explored the music of his own heritage on Tales from Vietnam ...

like 732

John Coltrane: Side Steps

by Chris May
October 16, 2009

John Coltrane Side Steps Prestige Records 2009 The 5-CD Side Steps follows two other Prestige box sets--the 6-CD Fearless Leader (2006) and 5-CD Interplay (2007)--which together catalogue saxophonist John Coltrane's recordings for the label 1956-58. The three boxes, each packed with extraordinary music, chronicle on parallel paths the years during which Coltrane's revolutionary style began to emerge, but before he achieved iconic status first, from 1959, on Atlantic, and then, from ...

like 411

Overtone Quartet on Display at Kennedy Center

by Franz A. Matzner
October 16, 2009

Overtone QuartetOctober 10, 2009Washington, D.C. The Overtone Quarter played together as a group for the first time in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater Saturday. The four musicians--Dave Holland, Jason Moran, Chris Potter, and Eric Harland--each took the stage as a master of his art, and the quartet featured musical compositions by each.

Assuming the role of the senior musician, Dave Holland introduced his colleagues at the ...

like 307

Diallo House / Stacy Dillard / Ismail Lawal: Night at the Eclipse

by Warren Allen
October 16, 2009

Every time a group of sax, bass and drums step to the stage on their own, it amounts to a high-wire balancing act for three. Luckily, these guys have the skills to cross safely to that other end of the tightrope, and keep doing it better and better. They've been establishing themselves in New York for years, playing clubs like Small's and Fat Cat, and they've jammed in Union Square before. Hearing them play together evokes a certain sound of ...

like 358

Whit Dickey / Daniel Carter / Eri Yamamoto: Emergence

by John Sharpe
October 16, 2009

When the collective of drummer Whit Dickey, pianist Eri Yamamoto, and horn player Daniel Carter held sway at the Vision Festival in June 2009 they built tension to unbearable levels that built up to a cathartic resolution. On their first disc together, recorded in the studio four months prior to their Festival triumph, they program eight group improvisations in a much more relaxed vein, sometimes resolving sometimes not, but always coherent.

Dickey is still best known for his four-year tenure ...

like 691

Incus Records

by Kurt Gottschalk
October 16, 2009

Record labels are, in essence, an outlet, a means for production. They are not the paint or the painter but merely the paint factory. They aren't the music, just the medium of delivery. But the good ones are more than that. They engender emotional attachment. They come to represent their times. The orange and black of Impulse! and the sleek designs of Blue Note helped to define the innovations of American jazz in the '50s-60s. And in a ...

like 143

Josh Berman: Old Idea

by Jerry D'Souza
October 16, 2009

Cornetist Josh Berman is no stranger to the improvised music scene. He not only leads his own bands--Josh Berman's Old Idea and Josh Berman and His Gang--he has played with some major improvisers including Bill Dixon, Ken Vandermark and Ab Baars. Berman goes beyond performance in his involvement as co- founder of the Umbrella Music Group and the co-curator and vice president of the Emerging Improvisers Organization.

Berman is a thinker, an approach that pays rich dividends in ...

like 356

No "Vanity" Here: Jackie Ryan, Denise Donatelli, Lisa Sokolov, Kat Edmonson

by J Hunter
October 15, 2009

One of the whinier columns ever to appear in a major jazz publication concerned “Vanity Projects"--that is, sessions bankrolled by rich men for their marginally talented spouses/girlfriends/siblings/whatever. Unfortunately, those kind of recordings do exist, and in far greater numbers than desirable. However, the author's implication was that most female vocal projects could be categorized in this manner, and that does a major disservice to the singers who are making seriously great music for the 21st century. Here are four cases ...