Jazz Articles about Adam O'Farrill

About Adam O'Farrill

Album Review

One of the reasons jazz is so intriguing is its wide range of styles and unpredictability. It has always been tricky to define. It is a genre that is constantly evolving, picking up influences along the way, and adapting in ways that can blur the lines between styles. While the term jazz often suggests something hard to pin down, labels can provide a useful way to describe the key features of a particular release. Packed with unpredictable forms, formats, rhythms ...

Album Review

Micah Thomas: Mountains

Read "Mountains" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
September 17, 2024

It can never not be exciting and enthralling to listen to a young artist come into his or her own as pianist/composer Micah Thomas does on the very live, very rollicking, very palpable Mountains. Thomas' fourth disc as captain of the ship chronicles four hot sets in June of 2023 commissioned by The Jazz Gallery Residency Fellowship at New York's Jazz Gallery. The pianist and company get right down to it as Thomas delves headlong into ...

Album Review

Patricia Brennan: Breaking Stretch

Read "Breaking Stretch" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
September 7, 2024

On her first two albums, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan worked with a quartet comprised of three percussion instruments, herself on vibes and marimba, joined by percussionist Mauricio Herrera and drummer Marcus Gilmore, with a bassist Kim Cass. Momentum in large part, is the name of the game. For Breaking Stretch she expands her musical universe, adding trumpeter Adam O'Farrill and saxophonists Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon. This proved a good move; her musical universe in this septet setting has an energy ...

Album Review

Patricia Brennan: Breaking Stretch

Read "Breaking Stretch" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
August 30, 2024

Wild-willed vibraphonist Patricia Brennan gets straight down to business without any fanciful mission declaration with the Afro-Cuban, effusively powered, clear-the-dancefloor and blow-the-ceiling-off this joint “Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves)," the opening cut of her third album Breaking Stretch. She does so in a captivatingly, wickedly good way. Brennan--who has added much vitality to music by such other big thinkers as Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Anna Webber, Michael Formanek--began her musical education at 4 years old listening to ...

Album Review

Kevin Sun: The Depths of Memory

Read "The Depths of Memory" reviewed by Vincenzo Roggero

by Vincenzo Roggero
June 3, 2024

Kevin Sun è un ancor giovane sassofonista e compositore newyorkese di origini asiatiche non troppo conosciuto alle nostre latitudini, ma già autore di numerosi lavori che lo hanno segnalato alla critica d'oltreoceano e fatto crescere in considerazione presso i suoi colleghi. Sun è musicista dotato di grande talento ed altrettanta grande ambizione -soprattutto compositiva-come ben illustrato dai due doppi cd The Sustain of Memory (Endectomorph, 2019) e il suo ideale seguito The Depths of Memory, suddiviso come il precedente in ...

Album Review

Anna Webber: Shimmer Wince

Read "Shimmer Wince" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
February 29, 2024

There is often an underlying rigor to the work of Canadian saxophonist and flautist Anna Webber, be that inspiration from the digital world on Binary (Skirl, 2016), her investigation of multiphonic intervals on Idiom (Pi, 2021) or contemporary classical percussion repertoire on Clockwise (Pi, 2020). On Shimmer Wince, she derives her compositions from her study of Just Intonation, a system which many believe offers a more “pure" way of tuning and allows greater timbral and sonic possibilities ...

Album Review

Mary Halvorson: Cloudward

Read "Cloudward" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
January 20, 2024

The title of guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson's Cloudward alludes to the sense of optimism she has stated she felt when writing the bulk of the material in fall of 2022. And while this palpable sense of faith in the future is in marked contrast to the tangible air of eerie foreboding that surfaced so often on this LP's predecessors, the presence of largely the same personnel lineup--the Amaryllis Sextet-- provides a stable link of continuity. The reappearance of prior collaborators recording ...