Jazz Articles about Curtis Nowosad

About Curtis Nowosad

Album Review

Virginia MacDonald: In Search Of...

Read "In Search Of..." reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 21, 2026

Perhaps one reason that Virginia MacDonald is so hard to track down is that she is a woman who plays jazz clarinet. Do you know of any others? Here are at least two, both of whom are alive and active: New Orleans' Doreen Ketchens and Israeli-American Anat Cohen. Excellent players but several long strides from becoming household names. MacDonald, who is from Toronto, Canada, has earned that country's JUNO Award (the Canadian version of the Grammys) and won ...

Album Review

David Ecker: How to Rebuild

Read "How to Rebuild" reviewed by Carl Medsker

by Carl Medsker
July 1, 2025

Attempting to enhance jazz with classical music trappings is nothing new and has previously yielded mixed results. Often, the music comes across as saccharine, or the strings serve as mere window dressing to add a faux classical touch. At best, when the two worlds are creatively combined, the emergent results are something new and vibrant. Frequently, though, the jazz component and its companion classical group alternate and support each other, which, although it can be beautiful at times, dodges the ...

Album Review

David Ecker: Respite (Despite)

Read "Respite (Despite)" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
March 9, 2023

The Covid pandemic has been educational. One of its lessons is (to paraphrase a famous movie): music finds a way. If getting together in the studio is a problem, then grab the technology and go the remote recording route. It worked for guitarist Justin Morell and drummer Mark Ferber on 2022's Exit Music For Intelligent Life On Earth (Sonic Frenzy Records), and it works for pianist David Ecker in 2023, with his sophomore outing, Respite (Despite). The recording ...

Album Review

Derrick Gardner & The Big dig! Band: Still I Rise

Read "Still I Rise" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
July 23, 2020

Trumpeter Derrick Gardner, a Chicagoan who has performed around the world with a who's who of jazz luminaries from Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Foster to Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett and Harry Connick Jr., to name only a few, traveled to Winnipeg, Canada, to assemble and record his Big Dig! Band, several sizes removed from Gardner's sextet, The Jazz Prophets, a working group since it was formed in New York City in 1991. Gardner not only shines as trumpet ...

Album Review

Curtis Nowosad: Dialectics

Read "Dialectics" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
February 26, 2015

While it may be tempting to simply call Dialectics a straight-ahead session, Kevin Sun's liner notes set the record straight: According to Sun, “neo-hard bop" is a more accurate term for this music. What's most important to note, however, is that the music is pretty irresistible, regardless of what you call it. On the sophomore album from Curtis Nowosad, the drummer delivers an invigorating program of music with a killer quintet born out of the Winnipeg native's ...