Jazz Articles about Cory Weeds

About Cory Weeds

Album Review

Cory Weeds Quartet: Just Coolin'

Read "Just Coolin'" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
April 25, 2022

Owner of the Cellar Music Group label, Canadian music producer and veteran jazz saxophonist Cory Weeds unveils another superb session of hard bop with the exceptionally bright Just Coolin', featuring a host of sizzling standards as well as a couple of low temperature classics for balance. The album became more a labor of love than a profitable musical proposition for Weeds; after assuming the presidency of The Fraser MacPherson Jazz Fund, his major challenge was to replenish the organization's depleted ...

Album Review

Cory Weeds With Strings: What Is There To Say?

Read "What Is There To Say?" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
December 12, 2021

Tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds continues to search for new ways to explore and expand his personal musical horizons. In the release What Is There To Say?, Weeds looks to the expression “everything old is new again" and delivers an album backed by a fulsome string section reminiscent of sessions that both Charlie Parker and Bobby Hackett undertook in the 1950s. With sumptuous arrangements from pianist Phil Dwyer, Weeds is provided with a framework with which to explore the four corners ...

Album Review

Steve Maddock: The Blues Project

Read "The Blues Project" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
September 7, 2021

In the mid 1960's, there was a Greenwich Village, NYC pop band called The Blues Project which was primarily informed by folk, rhythm & blues, jazz and pop music of the day. One of their early success was entitled “Flute Thing," a tune from the group's 1966 album Projections (Verve / Folkways). Keyboardist / vocalist Al Kooper, a founding member of The Blues Project, wrote “Flute Thing." He went on, in 1967, to found the pop-rock band Blood, Sweat & ...

Album Review

Nightcrawlers: Do You Know A Good Thing?

Read "Do You Know A Good Thing?" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
August 29, 2021

A nightcrawler is defined as a member of a fictional subspecies who are born with superhuman abilities. It is hard to imagine this is the definition tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds had in mind when he brought this band back together for a recording session. Possibly, he might have been thinking about the funky organ-based recordings exemplified by the Blue Note (1963) recording entitled Never Let Me Go with organist Shirley Scott, along with tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, conguero Ray Barretto, ...

Album Review

Cory Weeds: O Sole Mio! Music From The Motherland

Read "O Sole Mio! Music From The Motherland" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 22, 2021

O Sole Mio!, the latest in a series of splendid albums by Canadian-bred saxophonist/entrepreneur Cory Weeds, is subtitled “Music from the Motherland"-- in other words, Italy, which, presumably, is Woods' ancestral home. Whatever the case, Woods' blue-chip quintet focuses for the most part on music born in Italy or written by Italian-Americans including Henry Mancini, Nino Rota, Pat Martino, Chick Corea and Dodo Marmarosa. To allay any doubt that all would go well, Weeds invited the superlative tenor saxophonist Eric ...

Album Review

Cory Weeds: O Sole Mio! Music From The Motherland

Read "O Sole Mio! Music From The Motherland" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
February 8, 2021

Even in these trying and uncertain times, there are some professional creative artists who recognize the need to “carry on" and make the best of a bad situation. Saxophonist Cory Weeds is one of those individuals. He is releasing O Sole Mio! Music From The Motherland on his own label, CellarMusic. Weeds has merged his talents as an alto saxophonist with Mike LeDonne's Groover Quartet featuring LeDonne on Hammond B3 organ, Eric Alexander on tenor saxophone, Peter Bernstein on guitar ...

Album Review

Ian Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown

Read "The Lowdown" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 16, 2020

American alto saxophonist Ian Hendrickson-Smith and Canadian tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds had been gigging together for almost two decades, mostly in Canada, but hadn't preserved any of their encounters on record until Hendrickson-Smith invited his companion to join him for a studio date in November 2019 at the renowned Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. The album was planned as a tribute to drummer Lawrence Leathers who died in June of that year, age thirty-seven. Leathers' nickname was ...