Jazz Articles about Chelsea McBride

About Chelsea McBride

Album Review

Chelsea McBride's Socialist Night School: Aftermath

Read "Aftermath" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 12, 2019

Aftermath is the second album by composer / arranger / tenor saxophonist Chelsea McBride's Toronto-based Socialist Night School. It's a bright-eyed ensemble, comprised for the most part of young musicians who are fully on board with McBride's contemporary approach to big-band jazz (think Muhal Richard Abrams, Julius Hemphill, Darcy James Argue or Charles Mingus with a touch more accord and a tad less dissonance). McBride's music is largely thematic and, as the group's title implies, broadly insurgent. ...

Album Review

Chelsea McBride's Socialist Night School: Aftermath

Read "Aftermath" reviewed by Franz A. Matzner

by Franz A. Matzner
November 28, 2019

Carve out an hour to listen to Socialist Night School's Aftermath because the combination of big-band music and progressive, challenging lyrics demands it. There's no way to let either simply wash over the ears. The music is too blunt, the lyrics too developed and too integral to absorb passively. The follow up to the equally ambitious The Twilight Fall (Browntasaurus Records, 2017), Aftermath is once again the brainchild of tenor saxophonist, conductor, and composer Chelsea McBride. With its ...

Album Review

Chelsea McBride's Socialist Night School: The Twilight Fall

Read "The Twilight Fall" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 9, 2017

As is the case with her largely anomalous music, composer / arranger Chelsea McBride's Toronto-based Socialist Night School is less a brick-and-mortar academy than a malleable concept, open to almost whatever definition the viewer (or listener) has in mind. McBride doesn't simply “write" music, she “sees" it, much as a painter visualizes what is to adorn a canvas; thus the Night School's second album, The Twilight Fall, represents, in the words of Daniel Jamieson's liner notes, “an aural expedition through ...