Jazz Articles about Greg Ward

About Greg Ward

Album Review

When it comes to making memorable entrances, Ethan Philion is on a par with Seinfeld's Kramer. The Chicago bassist burst into the scene with Meditations on Mingus (Sunnyside Records, 2022), an audacious debut recording on which he arranged familiar selections and deep cuts from the towering jazz bassist Charles Mingus. On Gnosis, the forces are smaller and perhaps so is the ambition of Philion's concept. Yet from the very first notes of “The Boot," which begins with a shriek from ...

Album Review

Buselli / Wallarab Jazz Orchestra: The Gennett Suite

Read "The Gennett Suite" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
June 6, 2023

This is where music for mass consumption--recorded music--started, in Richmond, Indiana, in the 1920s, in a piano factory by the railroad tracks in a glacier-carved gorge. Established in 1887, in the beginning Starr Pianos' bread and butter was pianos, but they branched out to selling other instruments and eventually photographs and records--their own records, recorded in the piano factory, taking breaks in the process when a train came by. At first, they called their recording side of the business Starr ...

Album Review

Paul Marinaro: Not Quite Yet

Read "Not Quite Yet" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
January 3, 2023

Singer Paul Marinaro issued his acclaimed debut album Without A Song (122 Myrtle Records) in 2013. Seven years after the release of his follow-up, “One Night In Chicago" (122 Myrtle Records), and with almost a decade of performing from coast to coast at top-end clubs, including New York's Birdland, he has released Not Quite Yet, which is devoted to exploring timeless themes, such as life, love and the search for lasting connections. Accompanying Marinaro are longtime band members guitarist Mike ...

Album Review

Paul Marinaro: Not Quite Yet

Read "Not Quite Yet" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
December 26, 2022

The cover of the album is vaguely noir, with the urban greenish cast of tungsten film. A sole figure leans slightly against a building, downcast, staring into his soul, and waiting out a lit cigarette when it was still hip to smoke. The guy is Frank Sinatra and the album was In The Wee Small Hours. The year is 1955. It is difficult to believe that Chicago-based vocalist Paul Marinaro has even been born, but clearly, Sinatra will make an ...

Album Review

Hinda Hoffman Meets Soul Message: People

by Jack Bowers
December 16, 2022

When preparing a meal, the balance of ingredients matters. A little too much here, not quite enough there, and any recipe can fall short of expectations. On the album People, Hinda Hoffman, one of Chicago's finest jazz singers, is paired with the splendid quartet Soul Message, a blend which one might expect to produce a tasty and tantalizing feast for the ears and heart. Instead, Hoffman sounds rather like a fish out of water, laboring to lend ...

Album Review

Hinda Hoffman meets Soul Message: People

Read "People" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
July 6, 2022

Da alcuni anni la scena musicale di Chicago è tornata sotto i riflettori grazie all'innovativo impulso di musicisti come Makaya McCraven, Tomeka Reid, Junius Paul, Jeff Parker, Jaimie Branch, Angel Bat Dawid, il collettivo Irreversible Entanglements e al ruolo propulsivo dell'etichetta International Anthem. Anche se poco conosciuti oltre la metropoli dell'Illinois, la cantante Hinda Hoffman e la Soul Message Band incarnano invece il cuore caldo della tradizione coi suoi stretti legami col blues e il soul. Legami ...

Album Review

Matt Ulery's Delicate Charms: Live at the Green Mill

Read "Live at the Green Mill" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
January 22, 2022

One of the central figures of Chicago's thriving jazz scene, bassist Matt Ulery has cultivated fruitful relationships with a core of compatriots who embody the grit and beauty of the music coming out of the Windy City. He maintains a host of projects, one of the foremost being Delicate Charms, a group that released its self-titled debut in 2019 on Woolgathering Records; alto saxophonist Greg Ward, pianist Rob Clearfield, drummer Quin Kirchner and violinist Zach Brock assist Ulery in creating ...