Jazz Articles about Hamir Atwal

About Hamir Atwal

Album Review

The New York quartet ContraPunctus eases into the third track on its 2026 self-titled debut with about 15 seconds of musical suggestion. Bassist Gui Duvignau and drummer Hamir Atwal respond to pianist Carmen Staaf's gentle Fender Rhodes melody with a tempo that starts at a comfortable clip. Staaf eloquently establishes the melody in the next few seconds--Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington's “Caravan"--that clarinetist Mike McGinnis picks up and continues. McGinnis and Staaf trade the tune's theme as the quartet establishes an elastic, rollicking synergy. ...

Album Review

Carmen Staaf: Sounding Line

Read "Sounding Line" reviewed by Vic Albani

by Vic Albani
December 16, 2025

Carmen Staaf è una forza emergente della scena musicale di New York e, più in generale, del panorama jazz internazionale. Pianista originaria di Seattle--allieva di Danilo Perez--ha suonato e registrato con alcuni dei musicisti più influenti della nostra epoca. È stata ascoltata al Village Vanguard, al Blue Note, allo SFJAZZ e in numerosi festival di primo piano in tutto il mondo, tra cui Newport, Monterey, Montreux e il North Sea Jazz Festival, pur rimanendo per lungo tempo poco citata da ...

Album Review

Carmen Staaf: Sounding Line

Read "Sounding Line" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 22, 2025

Thelonious Monk (1917 -1982) was often grouped with the bebop pianists of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But he was not bop. He was a pianistic world unto itself. Quirky, dissonant, often playful. Mary Lou Williams (1910 -1981) did not fit the bop category either. She came in before bop's advent. Her music was stylistically closer to Duke Ellington's eloquence, sass and swing. Bop aside, pianist Carmen Staaf heard a musical kinship between these two 20th-century contemporaries. ...