Jazz Articles about Carl Allen

About Carl Allen

Album Review

Save for a pair of co-led albums with bassist Rodney Whitaker, it's been more than two decades since master drummer Carl Allen released an album under his own name. Rectifying the situation, he delivers this high-appeal, in-the-pocket trio program with bassist Christian McBride and tenor saxophonist Chris Potter. When choosing the personnel for Tippin', McBride was the obvious bass choice from the beginning. There's tremendous shared history here--McBride appears on more of the drummer's recordings than any ...

Album Review

George Freeman: The Good Life

Read "The Good Life" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 16, 2023

For guitarist George Freeman, The Good Life has also been a long life. He was a nimble-fingered ninety-five-year-old plectrist when this splendid album was recorded in May and June 2022, which makes it all the more grievous to know it would be organ maestro Joey DeFrancesco's last recording date; he died of a heart attack some three months later at the relatively young age of fifty-one. Freeman leads two trios here, the first with DeFrancesco on organ ...

Album Review

Mike Allen: To a Star

Read "To a Star" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 1, 2023

If you're a tenor saxophonist leading a piano-less trio, much of the group's melodic and harmonic components rest squarely on your shoulders. In spite of that--or perhaps because of it--Canadian tenor Mike Allen says he prefers working within that framework, as he has been doing for many years. If that is one's choice, he may as well recruit as comrades in arms the best bassist and drummer available. On To a Star, Allen has done precisely that, ...

Album Review

Christian McBride: Live at the Village Vanguard

Read "Live at the Village Vanguard" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
February 20, 2022

Bassist Christian McBride records his first live album with his highly-acclaimed quintet known as the Inside Straight, documenting an incredible evening of music on Live At The Village Vanguard. The album showcases outstanding performances from every member of the band. It is McBride's twelfth release on Mack Avenue and it was the Inside Straight quintet that began the bassist's collaboration with Mack Avenue in 2009. After a week-long sold-out debut appearance by the group at New York's jazz club in ...

Album Review

Renee Rosnes: Kinds of Love

Read "Kinds of Love" reviewed by C. Andrew Hovan

by C. Andrew Hovan
December 11, 2021

When Canadian pianist Renee Rosnes decided to make her mark in the jazz world, she wasted no time, making an auspicious start as a member of Joe Henderson's all-female quartet in 1986. Fast forward thirty-five years and her career continues to advance on an upward trajectory. Her third offering for Smoke Sessions, Kinds of Love, is yet another brilliant showcase for Rosnes, both as a pianist and composer. The top tier ensemble assures sublime renditions of the composer's originals, with ...

Album Review

Christian McBride & Inside Straight: Live at the Village Vanguard

Read "Live at the Village Vanguard" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
December 5, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Renee Rosnes: Kinds of Love

Read "Kinds of Love" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
September 22, 2021

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 ...