Jazz Articles about Anthony Coleman

Fay Victor / Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way

by Jerome Wilson
May 25, 2024

The jazz world overlooked pianist and composer Herbie Nichols in his lifetime, but musicians such as Roswell Rudd, Misha Mengelberg, and Ted Nash have tried to keep his music in circulation over the years in various projects. Vocalist Fay Victor has been entranced by his music for a long time, and in 2013, she put together a group, Herbie Nichols SUNG, to perform his tunes. This is that group's first recording together and it is excellent. In most ...

Anthony Coleman and Brian Chase: Arcades

by Troy Dostert
May 21, 2022

An interesting cross-generational pairing, Arcades features veteran pianist Anthony Coleman alongside relative upstart, drummer Brian Chase. A key exponent of the jazz avant-garde, Coleman's body of work extends back to the 1980s with John Zorn, plus a host of recordings since then with folks like Wadada Leo Smith and Marc Ribot, not to mention a substantial series of his own releases, including a solo disc from 2019, Catenary Oath (NoBusiness). Chase's dominant claim to fame has been his tenure with ...

Anthony Coleman: Catenary Oath

by John Sharpe
May 27, 2020

Catenary Oath presents a 2018 solo recital by pianist and composer Anthony Coleman, recorded at Jordan Hall in the New England Conservatory in Boston where he also teaches. The album, available as a limited edition LP or digitally, contains a mix of originals and standards all given deeply personalized interpretations by the pianist. Coleman's profile has lessened since the 1990s when he was a regular on the downtown scene alongside John Zorn, Dave Douglas and Marc Ribot, but he still ...

Anthony Coleman: Freakish

by Warren Allen
October 19, 2009

Great composers put heavy demands on the people who play their music. No matter how long ago they wrote the tunes that continue inspire after they are gone, their presence continues to hover over the music, almost haunting the pianos that would crank out their concertos and rags. It takes work to deal with these ghosts. Perhaps this is why it took Anthony Coleman five years to complete his special tribute of the music of Jelly Roll Morton.

Coleman is ...

Anthony Coleman: Lapidation

by Kurt Gottschalk
May 7, 2008

After a recording career given over in large part to shtick and nostalgia, the last few years have seen a well-deserved spike for Anthony Coleman. His last two records for Tzadik showed him (on 2006's Pushy Blueness) as a strong composer and (also 2006, Shmutisige Magnaen: Coleman Plays Geburtig) a remarkable interpreter. Lapidation continues the documentation of the pianist as a strong composer. The five pieces included were written over the span of the last decade, ranging ...

Frank London: Hazónos

by AAJ Italy Staff
March 12, 2007

Autore fra i più prolifici e ispirati della Radical Jewish Culture, Frank London prosegue con Hazónos la sua personale ricognizione della tradizione cantoriale, perfettamente coerente allo stile cui da anni ci ha abituati. Nella musica di London coabitano il profondo rispetto per un patrimonio culturale che è suo preciso intento diffondere al di là dei confini della quotidianità del suo popolo e il tentativo di aggiornarne coraggiosamente la forma per riavvicinare la comunità alla propria storia. Evocazione del sentimento e ...

Anthony Coleman: Pushy Blueness

by Kurt Gottschalk
November 24, 2006

Anthony Coleman is such a dictionary of style and genre that he has been an invaluable sideman in the Downtown chronology for more than 25 years. His ability to adapt, reference and mimic gave breadth to the wide-eyed, nascent scene--and has also informed his own genre-busting projects. But anyone who has listened closely has surely thought that there's not just an interpreter in him, but a composer as well, and potentially a pretty great one. And in ...