Jazz Articles about Bill Stewart

About Bill Stewart

Album Review

John Scofield: Uncle John's Band

Read "Uncle John's Band" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
October 31, 2023

John Scofield's entire oeuvre can be roughly divided into groove-based or straight-ahead recordings. Yet even in maximum groove propulsion, as on A Go Go (Verve, 1998), to cite one stellar example, Scofield's grounding in straight-ahead jazz is never far from the surface. On the flip side, his most conventional jazz is always rhythmically vital. Uncle John's Band, the guitarist's third ECM album as leader, following Swallow Tales (2020) and John Scofield (2022), falls squarely in the latter category. And it ...

Album Review

John Scofield: Uncle John's Band

Read "Uncle John's Band" reviewed by Neil Duggan

by Neil Duggan
October 24, 2023

Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead's bassist for over 30 years, claimed their basic inspiration came from the musical unions he saw in the Miles Davis Quartet along with the John Coltrane Quartet from the early 1960s. John Scofield and Lesh have played together on many occasions. So perhaps it is no surprise that the Grateful Dead anthem, “Uncle John's Band," written by guitarist Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter, originally released on their album, Workingman's Dead (Warner Bros. 1970), should serve ...

Liner Notes

Lage Lund: Idlewild

by C. Andrew Hovan
August 19, 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 ...

Album Review

Vicente Archer: Short Stories

Read "Short Stories" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
July 3, 2023

Bassist Vicente Archer may be a Grammy winner with a long grand vintage (Nicholas Payton, John Scofield, Kenny Garrett, Norah Jones) but he has not revealed his own particular harvest as he does on the amicable and resilient Short Stories. Accompanied on what is technically his debut, fellow Scofield and Payton alum, drummer Bill Stewart and ever curious pianist Gerald Clayton bring to these stories a captivating, unified narrative. The soft, insistent tannins of “Mirai" opens Short Stories ...

Liner Notes

Seamus Blake: Bellwether

by C. Andrew Hovan
February 20, 2023

The music speaks for itself. This timeworn axiom has often served as a suggestion that there's an intangible aspect to music's universal language that is somehow beyond mere words. In some cases this may be true, but on the other hand, this outlook has occasionally in the past served as a viable excuse for justifying music of a somewhat dubious nature.In recently talking with saxophonist Seamus Blake by phone from Vancouver, it occurred to me that his “less ...

Album Review

Brian Charette: Jackpot

Read "Jackpot" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
July 23, 2022

In the tradition of some great Hammond organ players of the past, such as Jack McDuff, Melvin Rhyne, Don Patterson, Larry Young and Jimmy Smith, one leading practitioner on this instrument, Brian Charette, wanted to write some swinging and soulful bebop tunes which would honor the memory of these past greats. The musicians Charette chose to travel on this journey were steeped in this genre, tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds, funky guitarist Ed Cherry and the swinging drummer Bill Stewart. To ...

Album Review

Larry Goldings/Peter Bernstein/Bill Stewart: Perpetual Pendulum

Read "Perpetual Pendulum" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
June 6, 2022

Keyboardist Larry Goldings, guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart have some history. It extends back to performing in clubs in the late Eighties and then, via decidedly circuitous routes, recording together as a threesome in the Nineties. It's a confluence of circumstance and talent that would continue through the three's appearances on a pair of the keyboardist's solo albums, Whatever It Takes (Warner Brothers, 1995) and Big Stuff (Warner Brothers, 1996), before Toy Tunes (Pirouette, 2017) overtly continued the ...