Jazz Articles about Alex Wintz

About Alex Wintz

Album Review

Let's just get thing one out into the open right away: Disparate Parts has plenty of balls to spare. Saxophonist Roxy Coss' acute, teasingly biting tone and rich, no boundaries disposition to composing and jamming has placed her high in the generational echelon of new and challenging players. She willingly and unapologetically blends and blurs the lines to suit any and all missives, and the fourteen fireballs heard loud and clear on Disparate Parts broach nothing less. Commandeering ...

Album Review

Steven Feifke Big Band: Kinetic

by Jack Bowers
April 10, 2021

Jazz connoisseurs who lean toward big bands that swing as earnestly and often as the renowned architects of the epic big-band era should find plenty to cheer about on Kinetic, the debut recording by New York-based pianist, composer and arranger Steven Feifke's audacious and fiery ensemble. This is a band that fires on all cylinders—but it couldn't even leave the garage unless Feifke supplied the fuel. With one exception (noted below), Feifke's intense and high-powered charts neatly pave the way, ...

Album Review

Steven Feifke Big Band: Kinetic

Read "Kinetic" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
April 8, 2021

Assimilare la tradizione per poi creare cose originali. È questo il percorso che hanno seguito e continuano a seguire i musicisti jazz, in forme e approfondimenti diversi. A 30 anni esatti il pianista Steven Feifke è ancora al primo passo ma in questo scintillante debutto orchestrale dimostra di avere tutte le carte in regola per sviluppare percorsi originali. Kinetic è infatti un esempio del miglior modern mainstream orchestrale, elaborato sulle lezioni di Thad Jones e Mel Lewis, ...

Album Review

Alex Wintz Trio: Live To Tape

Read "Live To Tape" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
December 20, 2020

Back in the day (the 1960s), when guitarist Grant Green stepped into the studio to record for Blue Note Records, they rolled the tape. Literally. Pushed a button and the spools began to spin, the left circle feeding the right. On Live To Tape, that is how guitarist Alex Wintz rolls, too, taking his modern sound back to bygone recording mode, catching his sounds directly to tape. All that, of course, don't mean a thing if it ain't ...

Album Review

Nick Finzer: Cast Of Characters

Read "Cast Of Characters" reviewed by Friedrich Kunzmann

by Friedrich Kunzmann
March 27, 2020

Trombonist Nick Finzer's fifth album as a leader is a strong testament to his musical influences expressed by through-designed compositions and lively interplay. On Cast of Characters , the New York-based musician, composer and label owner has gathered all of his forces together to deliver a concentrated, conceptual exercise in arrangement and instrumentation, which lives off of the impeccable performances of the individual musicians as much as it does off of the compositional material at hand. Traditional swing-and ...

Album Review

Nick Finzer: Cast Of Characters

Read "Cast Of Characters" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
February 20, 2020

A cryptic element lurks beneath trombonist Nick Finzer's Cast Of Characters. The theme of the album is artistic influences. But who are they... “We laugh, we cry, we celebrate, we learn, and we forge our own path on the shoulders of those who came before us. We are both the sum of our experience and the product of our influence. We are who we choose to embrace." This is from the spread out trifecta of liner notes in ...

Album Review

Alex Wintz: LifeCycle

Read "LifeCycle" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
April 23, 2017

Life cycles mark and determine how we develop, where we travel, and why we arrive and thrive in different places, figuratively and literally, at any given time. That's the point that guitarist Alex Wintz's music makes here, as this project takes its cues from the larger natural theme while growing specifically from his own personal and musical evolution of late. It's a work that couldn't be made at any other moment, as it specifically reflects Wintz as he is today, ...