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Album Review

Joe Block: There is Always Hope

Read "There is Always Hope" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
October 25, 2026

Joe Block's There Is Always Hope is an unusually personal debut, but what is most interesting is not the autobiographical material behind these 12 compositions. Rather, it is how Block has gradually learned to turn experience into musical structure. Written over many years, these pieces reveal a composer still testing the boundaries of his language, sometimes successfully, sometimes deliberately leaving the edges unresolved. He is a bandleader increasingly comfortable with letting the music exist beyond his own intentions.

Album Review

Carlos Henriquez: Monk Con Clave

Read "Monk Con Clave" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
June 6, 2026

Carlos Henriquez has long understood that rhythm tells stories long before words arrive. On Monk Con Clave, he takes Thelonious Monk's angular brilliance and brings it back to the streets, dance halls, and other crowded spaces across New York's Afro-Caribbean neighbourhoods. The result is not merely a tribute album but a living dialogue between Monk's genius and Henriquez's Nuyorican identity. Leading his self-named big band, Henriquez has assembled a remarkable multigenerational ensemble featuring musicians from the Jazz at ...

Album Review

Domo Branch: Hand of Gifts

Read "Hand of Gifts" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 26, 2025

Even though Oregon-bred Domo Branch is traversing an enviable path as a drummer and composer, he hasn't forgotten how he got where he is and those to whose wisdom and guidance he owes a large measure of his success. On Hand of Gifts, his second recording as leader of his own group, Branch salutes his high school band director, Thara Memory, not only by performing one of his compositions, “Our Man Bogle," but by writing one of his own, “A ...