Jazz Articles

like 297

Digital Primitives: Hum Crackle & Pop

by Jeff Stockton
October 7, 2009

Cooper-Moore remains a fringe figure in contemporary jazz, even in the circles traveled by players of improvised music, by definition the fringe itself. Adding insult to the injury done to his potential for fame is the fact that he seems incapable of making an uninteresting record. Hum Crackle & Pop is the second release by Digital Primitives, with saxophonist Assif Tsahar and drummer Chad Taylor. Cooper-Moore long ago established himself as a master pianist but seems to ...

like 237

October 2009: New Photo Gallery Launches

by Michael Ricci
October 6, 2009

Dear fellow AAJ contributor,

We're excited to announce the launch of our new Photo Gallery. This was a major undertaking and we couldn't be happier with the results. For the latest... New & Much Improved Photo Gallery Launches!

It's here! We just launched the AAJ Photo Gallery and would like to ask you to upload all future article photos to the gallery. As an added convenience, we've included a feature where ...

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Matthias Bublath: Getting Organized

by Alan Bryson
October 6, 2009

At the turn of the decade, German-born pianist Matthias Bublath got organized at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA. After a free-wheeling stint in Linz, Austria, his musical education began in earnest, but it was also at Berklee that he took up the Hammond B3 organ. Since then the young pianist has become an enthusiastic organ specialist, using both instruments to develop his musical ideas. Although he's a thoroughly proficient player, the range ...

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Ben Allison: Think Free

by Troy Collins
October 6, 2009

Gradually moving away from the chamber music-like aesthetic of his Medicine Wheel and Peace Pipe ensembles of the nineties, bassist Ben Allison has begun embracing his formative influences, leaning towards a slightly more rock-oriented sound. Think Free is his third Palmetto album in as many years, thematically following Little Things Run the World (2008) and Cowboy Justice (2006). Looking beyond traditional jazz for inspiration, Allison weaves bittersweet pop melodies, folksy Americana, and subtle rock music flourishes into an evocative sonic ...

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Stan Getz: Apasionado

by Chris May
October 6, 2009

Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz's neo-big band album Apasionado has been consigned to minor league status since its original release in 1990. It does, indeed, look unpromising: recorded in fall 1989, when Getz was undergoing treatment for the cancer which would kill him less than two years later; with a pair of synthesizers replicating a string section; and with the commercially astute but MOR focused Herb Alpert producing.

But 20 years on and rereleased, Apasionado rises way above expectations. ...

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Guelph Jazz Festival & Colloquium 2009

by Kurt Gottschalk
October 6, 2009

Guelph Jazz Festival & ColloquiumGuelph, OntarioSeptember 9-13, 2009The Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium devoted itself this year to trying to unpack an idea so common that it is at once crucial and cliché: whether the practice of music-making might have world-changing implications. Through presentations on (for example) gang intervention in South Africa through drum circles to “workshops" (in a Charles Mingus-ian “jazz workshop" jam session sense) combining musicians from different backgrounds to play together, the practice of ...

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DJ Spooky: The Secret Song

by Mark Corroto
October 6, 2009

DJ Spooky again proves hip-hop is jazz. Like its grandfather bebop, mixologist/DJ/producer Paul Miller's (aka DJ Spooky) hip-hop is as vibrant and creative as the great revolutionaries in jazz. On The Secret Song he mixes dub, reggae, rock, classical, world, electronic and, well, jazz into a jazz thing.

Spooky's reflections on the financial and world meltdown of the last eight years pulls together a global perspective on the people's culture, be it “Azadi," the Farsi word for “freedom," sung by ...

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Corea, Clarke and White at Toronto's Koerner Hall

by Alain Londes
October 6, 2009

Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny WhiteKoerner HallToronto, ONSeptember 2009

Koerner Hall, the sumptuous and spiffy new concert hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, celebrated the second day of its grand opening festival with a sold-out jazz program to demonstrate the organizers' willingness to provide different musical genres to the vast metropolitan community. Audience members of all ages admired the new performance center.Some of the jazz-rock fusion legends making up ...

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David Gibson: A Little Somethin'

by Woodrow Wilkins
October 6, 2009

To read or listen to some of the commentary about jazz and hear that this genre of music is dying; to read with cynicism that artists are either playing music that is 50 years old or they are playing something so “catchy" and “mainstream," that it is a “stretch of the imagination" to even call it jazz. This is all over the place. One listen to trombonist David Gibson's A Little Somethin' serves as proof that the people who share ...

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Heloisa Fernandes: Candeias

by Raul d'Gama Rose
October 6, 2009

The pursuit of art is ceaseless, firstly because the artist is--to use the Latin from whence it came and it reads thus: poeta nascitur non fit. Art is, as well, an exposition of life as it tumbles upon the world, this way and that. However, for the artist there is another raison d'être. The impulse to adorn, to make art--poetry, music, painting, and even architecture--is first revealed in the soul. Its nature is especially innate in the artist, so amorphous ...