Jazz Articles about Bobby Timmons

Mandatory Merriment

by Patrick Burnette
December 22, 2022

It's that holiday season once again, and Santa Mike insists we cover a slate of season-appropriate releases. Are they jazz appropriate as well? Not really, but two are jazz adjacent and one at least features an ex-Messenger, so there's that. There's also, er, Swamp Dogg. Pop matters travels from Sufjan Stephens to late eighties England to the soothing, ambient sounds of the Zamboni, nature's Andreas Vollenweider. Bobby Timmons: Holiday Soul; Swamp Dogg: An Awful Christmas and a Lousy New Year; ...

Don Patterson/Bobby Timmons: Holiday Soul

by C. Andrew Hovan
August 16, 2004

With December ushering in the holiday season, it seemed logical to allow this month's column to address two items that fall under the category of jazzy Christmas fare. Although the repertoire in this area is really quite limited, some of the more memorable holiday jazz sides include works by Ella Fitzgerald and Jimmy Smith. For my money however, among the best sets is a pair of 1964 sides cut for Prestige by Bobby Timmons and Don Patterson. The idea for ...

Bobby Timmons: The Prestige Trio Sessions

by Jerry D'Souza
July 25, 2003

Some music never dies. It just sleeps for a while and then comes back in reissues. While some of it could well have stayed buried, this merging of two Timmons recordings is well deserving of attention. Timmons made some fine music, soul jazz if you will, the blues deeply shaded for sure. And even if he is best remembered as the composer of “Moanin’” and “This Here,” this record should put his accomplishments in better perspective.

The first six tracks, ...

Bobby Timmons: The Prestige Trio Sessions

by C. Michael Bailey
April 9, 2003

Late 2003 will see a changing of the guard at the famous Philadelphia Orchestra. Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch will turn over his baton to his younger protégé Christoph Eschenbach, providing the orchestra only its seventh conductor in its century-plus history. During a recent interview in the Paris of the West, Eshenbach pointed out that there does not exist a New York Sound or a Chicago Sound like there exists the Philadelphia Sound.

How true this is in jazz as ...

Bobby Timmons: Quartet and Orchestra

by C. Michael Bailey
August 1, 2001

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

 It would be so easy to dismiss this release as a collection of the painfully anemic efforts of a jazz giant trying to make the best of the late '60s jazz nadir using the vastly inferior popular music of the day as “the new standard". This seems to be true so far as “vastly inferior popular music" goes. Quartet and Orchestra, Milestone's most recent repackaging of pianist Bobby Timmons' work, contains many such ...

Bobby Timmons (Riverside: From the Bottom

by C. Andrew Hovan
January 1, 2000

Although he's largely remembered for his “soul-jazz" hits such as “Dat Dere" and “Moanin'," pianist Bobby Timmons was an accomplished enough musician that the range of his abilities far exceeded his commercial successes. As a result, over the course of a half dozen trio dates he led for Riverside in the early '60s Timmons put on tape some of the best performances of his career; records that also demonstrated how diverse his talents really were.

The recently reissued From the ...

Bobby Timmons Trio: Down In the Bottom

by Derek Taylor
January 1, 2000

Unbeknownst to many, Bobby Timmons was much more than the heavy funk hitman his compositions and playing made him out to be during his lengthy tenure with Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. His memorable tunes such as “Moanin’” and ‘Dat Dere” were so infectiously soulful that many among the jazz listening public simply assumed finely crafted groove music was the width and breadth of his muse. Contrary to these contentions Timmons’ talents and interests regularly moved outside this style and he used ...