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Christian McBride & Inside Straight: Live at the Village Vanguard
by Mike Jurkovic
You may feel a whole lot better about things after checking out Live at the Village Vanguard. Now, without argument or scholarly discourse, that can be said for any of the time honored performances captured under that heady title, but here it's Christian McBride and Inside Straight and seriously, this one has fun written all over it. An instant Top Tenner for 2021. Bassist/educator/advocate, McBride needs no further introduction save to say he has heightened fun into an ...
Continue ReadingRenee Rosnes: Kinds of Love
by Mike Jurkovic
Still riding high on the energy generated by her superwoman jazz group Artemis—Anat Cohen, Melissa Aldana, Ingrid Jensen, Noriko Ueda and Allison Miller— pianist Renee Rosnes, undaunted by the string of world crises but just as ruminative as the rest of us, elicits some of the most emotive and enthralling music of her career on Kinds of Love. Drummer Carl Allen and percussionist and vocalist Rogério Boccato set “Silk" into shadowy, tribal motion from which Rosnes and the ...
Continue ReadingJim Rotondi: Dark Blue
by C. Andrew Hovan
Back in 1997 when Introducing Jim Rotondi announced that a major new trumpeter star was on the ascent, few could have predicted how important and prolific Rotondi would become to the mainstream landscape. A foremost stylist in the lineage of Freddie Hubbard and Wood Shaw, Rotondi quickly proved he had absorbed the legacy, only to jettison imitation in favor of innovation. Working regularly with his own groups and the hard bop ensemble One For All, Rotondi was a major force ...
Continue ReadingCarl Allen / Rodney Whitaker: Get Ready
by Donald Elfman
What cool yet sassy straight-ahead jazz--and it offers music by Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye, not to mention well thought-out originals by the leaders. Drummer Carl Allen and bassist Rodney Whitaker are an in-sync pair, making composed yet newly emergent sounds. Let's start at the very beginning: it's Allen's original “La Shea's Walk, and it surely slides ahead in the groove of “Fever." It's a solid gas all the way through, with Allen and Whitaker setting the ...
Continue ReadingCarl Allen & Rodney Whitaker: Get Ready
by John Barron
Drummer Carl Allen and bassist Rodney Whitaker have a lot in common. They're both from the Midwest-- Allen's from Milwaukee, Whitaker's from Detroit. Both grew up in homes filled with the sounds of gospel and R&B, and for the last twenty years or so both have achieved high ranking as two of the most heavy swinging sidemen in jazz. Get Ready, the muscular debut for the rhythm duo on Mack Avenue Records, is a collaborative effort of prolific achievement supported ...
Continue ReadingBenny Golson: One Day, Forever
by AAJ Staff
Benny Golson’s latest Arkadia release, One Day, Forever, arose from a taping of some of Golson’s previous band members from the Jazztet: Art Farmer and Curtis Fuller. At the end of a European tour, they were so rushed they that they didn’t record long enough to fill an entire CD. Arkadia owner Bob Karcy kept the tape in the can, and he and Golson kept that recording in mind, in the intervening five years, during which Farmer passed. After Golson ...
Continue ReadingVarious: Thank You, Joe!
by AAJ Staff
Arkadia has a good thing going for it: tribute albums. Interestingly, Thank You, Joe! is Arkadia's first CD of appreciation extended to a living jazz legend. Previous honorees have included John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Gerry Mulligan.Thank goodness that Arkadia had the insight to honor Henderson. Such a tribute raises the question, however, of how many other living jazz innovators should be honored: Lucky Thompson, Ray Brown, Dave Brubeck, Jon Hendricks, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Horace Silver, Roy ...
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