Jazz Articles about Ian Buss

About Ian Buss

Album Review

New England Jazz Collaborative: Tributaries

Read "Tributaries" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 25, 2026

Tributaries is the debut recording by the seventeen-member New England Jazz Collaborative whose origin and purpose are summed up as follows: “an artist-led non-profit collective dedicated to commissioning, presenting and documenting new music and expanding the audience for what remains a thrilling and vital musical form." The album consists of half a dozen fresh compositions by a quartet of talented composers and arrangers: NEJC founder Jeremy Cohen, Matan Rubinstein, Darryl Harper and Sam Spear, with the ensemble ably ...

Album Review

Mike Thompson: 6th Avenue

Read "6th Avenue" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 30, 2025

Composer and arranger Mike Thompson was in his mid-twenties when 6th Avenue, his debut album as leader of a big band, was recorded (in the mid-2020s) at Q Division Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enlisting for the most part veteran Boston-area musicians whom Thompson had met and befriended while studying at the Berklee School of Music, from which he was graduated in 2021. Although Thompson names Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and Igor Stravinsky as role models, you would be ...

Album Review

Seulah Noh Jazz Orchestra: NOhMAD

by Jack Bowers
December 10, 2023

On her debut album, NohMAD, South Korea-born, New England-educated Seulah Noh is listed as composer, arranger and conductor. She could be described as “painter" too, as she uses her seventeen-piece orchestra (enlarged to twenty-one by strings on three numbers) as a palette on which to render sophisticated--and sometimes daring--portraits in sound that are generally progessive but seldom boring. Several impart an East Asian flavor, especially the three-movement Traveler's Suite, which presumably depicts Noh's long journey from Korea ...

Album Review

Henry Godfrey Jazz Orchestra: Attitude & Gratitude

Read "Attitude & Gratitude" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 24, 2023

There are five songs on Attitude & Gratitude, drummer Henry Godfrey's Boston-based Jazz Orchestra's second album, and each one is a tribute to people, places or circumstances that have helped Godfrey grow as a musician and as a person. In order, they are “For McCoy" (honoring pianist McCoy Tyner and other jazz legends who have passed on); “Mad Max" (for the city [Washington, DC] in which Godfrey grew up); “Forgetting What Will Never Be" (for lost love and ...