Jazz Articles about Hilton Ruiz

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Hilton Ruiz: Enchantment

by Russ Musto
November 23, 2003

The term Latin jazz is too confining a label to describe the multifaceted music created by Hilton Ruiz on this just released recording from November of 2000. The New Yorker towers over most other musicians of his generation in both talent and tuition, with an imposing two handed pianistic technique and impressive knowledge of music history, garnered in no small part through his early studies with jazz matriarch Mary Lou Williams. As a member of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Vibration Society, ...

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Hilton Ruiz: Enchantment

by AAJ Staff
August 25, 2003

If there's one thing associated with Caribbean music, it's rhythm. After all, the islands (and the continental areas surrounding them) were among the first New World colonies to adopt the styles of Africa. Pianist Hilton Ruiz may have grown up in Manhattan, but the 49-year old keeps a stockpile of island rhythms at his fingertips.

Having a Panamanian percussionist (Renato Thoms) and a Venezuelan drummer (Marlon Simon) on Enchantment certainly doesn't hurt when it comes to keeping time. ...

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Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Compliments of the Mysterious Phantom

by C. Michael Bailey
May 2, 2003

If Sun Ra was jazz music's Timothy Leary, then Rahsaan Roland Kirk was its Elijah.Kirk, jazz music's most iconoclastic character, was also one of its most gifted. Once dismissed as a circus sideshow, he has seen his popularity, as well as his influence, steadily increase over the past twenty years. Kirk has been called many things'shaman, sage, charlatan, sideshow barker. But Rahsaan Roland Kirk represents the free spirit of jazz. He was a fearless improviser who invented his ...