Jazz Articles about Ben Street

About Ben Street

Album Review

Eric McPherson: Double Bass Quartet - Live

Read "Double Bass Quartet - Live" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
September 1, 2025

Drummer Eric McPherson has long been recognized as a musician who combines rhythmic ingenuity and structural awareness in any project he undertakes. With Double Bass Quartet, recorded before a quietly appreciative New York audience, McPherson has assembled an unconventional line-up of Cuban pianist David Virelles along with bassists John Hébert and Ben Street, that challenges and redefines the traditional quartet format. The ensemble's two-bass configuration immediately invites comparisons to the more exploratory aspects of jazz history, yet this is no ...

Album Review

Jaleel Shaw: Painter Of The Invisible

Read "Painter Of The Invisible" reviewed by Carl Medsker

by Carl Medsker
July 30, 2025

For twenty years, Jaleel Shaw has steadily built a robust career that includes a lengthy apprenticeship with Roy Haynes, steady work as an in-demand sideman and mentoring the next generation at the Manhattan School of Music. Painter Of The Invisible caps two years of significant events: Dave Holland enlisted him in his 2024 quartet along with Kris Davis and Nasheet Waits, after which he fronted a band at the 2024 Newport Jazz Festival for the first time. Then, in March ...

Album Review

Kurt Rosenwinkel: The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls, 1996)

Read "The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls, 1996)" reviewed by Vic Albani

by Vic Albani
April 15, 2025

Nel lontano 2001 la Verve pubblicò The Next Step, vale a dire il quarto album di Kurt Rosenwinkel in qualità di leader. Il disco del celebrato chitarrista di Filadelfia venne poi votato dalla rivista Jazz Times come “il disco jazz più importante e influente del XXI secolo," poiché, si legge “The Next Step ha mandato onde d'urto in una comunità musicale esigente e ossessionata dall'innovazione e ha definito un nuovo movimento e una nuova direzione per un'intera generazione di aspiranti ...

Album Review

Billy Hart: Just

by Jack Kenny
March 22, 2025

"Just" is an elegant album calculated to please. More than any earlier releases on ECM, it is Billy Hart's album, The quartet has been working together for over twenty years and has rightly morphed from a collective to the one steered by Hart. The drummer has supplied his sinewy rhythmic mastery to albums across the years with Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner and Stan Getz. Here, Hart is both the strongest voice, the innovator and the driver ...

Liner Notes

Lage Lund: Idlewild

by C. Andrew Hovan
December 29, 2023

An open and revealing format for any artist, the jazz trio offers rewards on many levels. Left in veracious hands, there is a spacious pocket that can be filled by any number of rhythmic and harmonic ideas, not to mention a freedom in melodic phrases which don't have to be constrained by strict chordal structures. On the other hand, it is the mere vulnerability of the format that can challenge all but the most seasoned musicians. With its ...

Liner Notes

Lage Lund: Idlewild

by C. Andrew Hovan
August 19, 2023

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Lonely Man and His Fish

Read "Lonely Man and His Fish" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
May 3, 2023

After a run of emotionally expansive albums, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff once again pivots without losing her center. Reinvention has become part of her artistic language, and here it arrives with a new cast and a story told in patient detail. Kirk Knuffke appears on cornet, Masaru Koga on a flute modified with a shakuhachi mouthpiece, Ben Street on double and electric bass, and Eric Harland on drums and percussion. Together they inhabit a two-disc narrative that follows the ...