Jazz Articles about Art DavisTrumpet

About Art DavisTrumpet

Album Review

Pianist Tommy Muellner, a fixture on the Chicago-area jazz scene for many years, has not recorded often--Solitary Moon is only his second album as leader, following 1998's (All) About Time. That is a 28-year span between visits to the studio, more than numerous careers, let alone recording sessions. This is by and large lovely music, and easy on the ear. Nearly half of the album's 15 refreshing numbers were taken from the Great American Songbook, and most of those ...

Album Review

Tommy Muellner: Solitary Moon

Read "Solitary Moon" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
September 15, 2026

Today's hipster jazz musicians do not play standards. Perhaps “poseur" is a better description for artists who deliberately eschew classic compositions. Yet standards and familiar songs serve an important purpose in jazz: they provide a shared musical language, a lingua franca through which musicians communicate and listeners can measure the quality of an interpretation. Maybe, just maybe, the poseurs avoid standards because they don't want to be found out. Chicago pianist Tommy Muellner is no poseur. In fact, ...