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Jazz Articles about Clark Sommers

10
Album Review

PlainsPeak: Someone to Someone

Read "Someone to Someone" reviewed by Glenn Astarita


Jon Irabagon's PlainsPeak delivers a soulful homecoming via a love letter to Chicago with its debut, Someone to Someone. Ditching the tech-heavy sprawl of his earlier work like Server Farm (Irabbagast, 2025), the leader returns to Chicago's gritty roots with a lean acoustic quartet that is all heart and sly wit. Irabagon, a Chicago-born saxophonist and winner of the Thelonious Monk Competition, leads with his alto's warm expressive tone. He is joined by trumpeter Russ Johnson, a longtime ...

10
Album Review

Jon Irabagon / PlainsPeak: Someone to Someone

Read "Someone to Someone" reviewed by Jack Kenny


Jon Irabagon is a musician whose complexity is both exhilarating and daunting. His restless energy, deep self-reflection, remarkable achievements and sharp intellect combine to create a figure who constantly provokes questions--about music, originality and the very nature of artistic expression. In 2011, Irabagon undertook a bold experiment: With Mostly Other People Do The Killing, he recorded Blue (Hot Cup, 2014), a note-for-note recreation of Miles Davis's iconic Kind of Blue (Columbia Records, 1959). This endeavor recalls Gus Van ...

7
Album Review

Jimmy Farace: Hours Fly, Flowers Die

Read "Hours Fly, Flowers Die" reviewed by Jerome Wilson


There have been many recordings of saxophones backed by string sections since Charlie Parker experimented with the idea many years ago. The majority of those have featured tenor or alto sax players. However, on his debut album, Jimmy Farace demonstrates how the baritone sax can excel beautifully in this format. The full instrumental lineup on this set has Farace in front of a quintet, which also includes guitar and piano, meeting up with the KAIA String Quartet. The ...

30
Album Review

Chris Varga: Breathe

Read "Breathe" reviewed by Jack Bowers


It is always refreshing to hear a talented vibraphonist seducing the mallets while leading a band, as is true on Breathe, Chris Varga's second recording, and the first in the U.S., following 2023's Vichara on South Korea's Mung Music label. Varga, who has been living and performing in Seoul for more than two decades, returned “home" to Chicago in 2024 and recruited four able-bodied sidemen to record eight of his largely hermetic yet lavishly bedecked compositions and arrangements.

7
Album Review

Chris Varga: Breathe

Read "Breathe" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


Setting up shop as a jazz artist in Seoul, South Korea, is probably not the recommended way of raising the profile in the United States. But vibraphonist Chris Varga, who worked the jazz scene in Chicago during the '90s, made that trans-Pacific move and set himself up as a busy and prolific player in Korea's vibrant jazz scene. Coming back stateside for an extended stay in 2024, Varga took advantage of the opportunity to put together a quintet ...

8
Album Review

Julia Danielle: Julia Danielle

Read "Julia Danielle" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


Julia Danielle is a young Chicago-based singer whose debut album shows considerable promise. Aside from a limpid contralto voice, good time, and a dead-on resemblance in profile to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (it cannot hurt), she is the epitome of effortlessness and good taste in her approach to the Great American Songbook. One ultimately suspects she will find her métier singing in the intimate setting of a small room backed precisely by the sympathetic support of the small band she ...

2
Album Review

Julia Danielle: Julia Danielle

Read "Julia Danielle" reviewed by Katchie Cartwright


Julia Danielle has been working hard on her craft. She grew up in the Chicago area, singing in the Campanella Children's Choir, winning the International Ella Fitzgerald Jazz Vocal Competition in 2022 and earning an undergraduate degree from DePaul University in 2023. She is on track to graduate with a master's in jazz studies from Juilliard in 2026. On Julia Danielle, her self-titled debut, she reveals her skills as a budding singer and arranger in a set of familiar standards, ...


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