Jazz Articles about Carl Allen

About Carl Allen

Album Review

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 ...

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Album Review

Carl Allen / Rodney Whitaker: Get Ready

Read "Get Ready" reviewed by Donald Elfman

by Donald Elfman
January 9, 2008

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 ...

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Album Review

Carl Allen & Rodney Whitaker: Get Ready

Read "Get Ready" reviewed by John Barron

by John Barron
June 2, 2007

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 ...

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Album Review

Benny Golson: One Day, Forever

Read "One Day, Forever" reviewed by AAJ Staff

by AAJ Staff
May 1, 2001

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 ...

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Album Review

Various: Thank You, Joe!

Read "Thank You, Joe!" reviewed by AAJ Staff

by AAJ Staff
August 1, 2000

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 ...