Jazz Articles about Craig Handy

About Craig Handy

Album Review

Not much is really new on veteran drummer Mike Clark's 2026 album, Kuon Ganjo (Time Without Beginning), which encompasses a series of nine hard-bop themes performed by Clark's able quintet. Having said that, the most reasonable question is, do they do it well? And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. Clark, who has been around the block more than a few times during his decades-long career as a jazz/funk timekeeper and is perhaps best known for ...

Album Review

Richard Baratta: Another Kind of Bird

Read "Another Kind of Bird" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
June 22, 2026

Charlie Parker's music has withstood every conceivable tribute. It has been copied, analyzed, celebrated, and occasionally embalmed by its own importance. Imagine the surprise at the release of drummer-percussionist Richard Baratta's Another Kind of Bird, which is not another museum-piece salute to Bird. Baratta and pianist-arranger Bill O'Connell treat Parker's compositions as living, breathing works capable of absorbing new colours, rhythms, and fresh perspectives without sacrificing their lineage. Baratta expands his customary sextet into a formidable, horn-driven ensemble ...

Album Review

Richard Baratta: Another Kind of Bird

Read "Another Kind of Bird" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 14, 2026

Even today, more than seventy years after his death at the young age of thirty-four, the legendary alto saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird" Parker remains incomparable, as a player and composer who almost singlehandedly changed the vocabulary of jazz, introducing revisions and concepts that have never worn thin or gone out of style. Simply put, no one had ever heard jazz played the way that Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and a handful of others approached it in the early ...

Album Review

Mike Clark: Itai Doshin

Read "Itai Doshin" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 14, 2025

Itai Doshin is a Buddhist term that, translated from Japanese, refers to a state of harmony wherein individuals share a common goal and purpose, or “many in body, one in mind." That is the level California-based drum legend Mike Clark's quintet strives for on Clark's second album on Gregory Howe's Wide Hive label. Is the mission accomplished? That is for the listener to decide. What can be said is that everyone gives it his (or her) best ...

Album Review

Brian Lynch: 7X7BY7

by Jack Bowers
December 13, 2024

The number seven, which for reasons shrouded in mystery, has long been considered a symbol of good luck, lies at the core of trumpeter Brian Lynch's latest album, 7X7BY7, which consists of seven themes performed by seven musicians with each number clocking in at precisely six seconds past seven minutes. Furthermore, it is said, “the...process [of creating the album] was designed to facilitate the smooth reassembly of elements...into new pieces. Shaped by these attributes along with their constraints, the music ...

Album Review

The Headhunters: The Stunt Man

Read "The Stunt Man" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
October 11, 2024

With the half-century anniversaries of Herbie Hancock's work with the Headhunters having passed in roughly the last year--Head Hunters (Columbia, 1973) and Thrust (Columbia, 1974)--it is appropriate the current configuration of the group has continued regular activity. In fact, under the fitting tutelage of drummer Mike Clark and percussionist Bill Summers, the band has issued two albums of new material in this span of time. Speakers in the House (Ropeadope, 2022) is an album of dashing panache and ...

Album Review

Bill O'Connell: Live In Montauk

Read "Live In Montauk" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
August 19, 2023

A rhythm section which includes Santi Debriano and Billy Hart is nothing if not part of a potential dream band. In Craig Handy, one finds a post-bop saxophonist who played with virtually everyone worth hearing over the last third of the twentieth century. For a variety of reasons pianist Bill O'Connell may be a little less well known outside the New York City metropolitan area, but his signal contributions to Latin jazz with Dave Valentin, Jerry Gonzalez and Mongo Santamaria ...