Jazz Articles about Bill Carrothers

Bill Carrothers: Shine Ball

by AAJ Italy Staff
February 19, 2007

Il CD targato Fresh Sound New Talent che non ti aspetti. L'etichetta spagnola ci aveva abituato a produzioni aperte ai linguaggi contemporanei, ma tutto sommato solidamente inserite nella tradizione. Shine Ball è invece un album interamente costituito da improvvisazioni estemporanee. Nulla di scritto, la musica che si sviluppa interamente nel momento. E quindi, ampio spazio ad introduzioni tumultuose, nelle quali il trio cerca una via maestra, una possibile direzione di sviluppo. Che a volte può essere un ostinato pedale od ...

High and Outside

by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
June 21, 2006

Prior to 1920, during the Deadball Era of professional baseball, a pitcher was not only allowed to alter a new baseball when it came into play, but was expected to do so. A variety of techniques and substances were used to change the appearance or trajectory of the ball, from roughing it up with an emery board to just plain spitting on it. The shine ball used paraffin wax to create a glossy sheen on one side of the ball, ...

Bill Carrothers: Shine Ball

by John Kelman
December 19, 2005

2005 seems to be pianist Bill Carrothers' year. He's already released I Love Paris (Pirouet), a mainstream look at songs from the 1920's through the 1940s, and Civil War Diaries: Solo Piano (Illusions Music), where he took even greater liberties with American Civil War songs previously covered on The Blues and the Greys (Bridgeboy, 1997). The key to their success was Carrothers' liberal approach to the tunes--many of which may not be known by name, but feel familiar on an ...

Bill Carrothers: Civil War Diaries: Solo Piano

by John Kelman
November 1, 2005

If pianist Bill Carrothers hadn't found his way to music, he might have been a historian. Fortunately, Carrothers has found a unique way to combine both interests. Armistice 1918 (Sketch, 2004) was a remarkably broad-scoped concept piece that brought together his own thought-provoking compositions with imaginative reworkings of popular songs from the First World War. But that wasn't the first time Carrothers mined archival wartime music. The Blues and the Greys (Bridgeboy, 1997), the first release under his own name, ...

Bill Carrothers: I Love Paris

by John Kelman
April 19, 2005

One great thing about jazz is that an artist is more likely to be measured by his or her career arc, rather than the success or failure of a single release. It also means that, when an artist releases a career-defining record, subsequent releases are less likely to measured against it. Instead, they are seen within the broader context of the artist's larger body of work.

Take pianist Bill Carrothers, whose Armistice 1918 found its way onto many a reviewer's ...

Bill Carrothers: Armistice 1918

by Chris May
January 19, 2005

As we approach the hundredth anniversary of the start of “the war to end all wars," international conflict blights the planet like never before, and unilateral might-is-right aggression is increasingly replacing diplomacy and consensus. Bad karma rules and history sometimes seems, like the poet said, to be “one fucking thing after another." So Bill Carrothers' Armistice 1918--a deeply affecting creative jazz suite about the horror and waste of the First World War, and by extension any war, performed ...

Bill Carrothers: Armistice 1918

by John Kelman
October 25, 2004

It has been written that if pianist Bill Carrothers hadn't found his way to music, he'd have likely become a historian, something that is clear from an earlier record, The Blues and the Greys , and now even more so with his new release, Armistice 1918 , an ambitious two-CD set which, over the course of two hours, presents a look at the First World War in a deeply personal way, telling the story of a man and woman who ...