Jazz Articles about Jacob Garchik

About Jacob Garchik

Album Review

Is Idiom, from composer, saxophonist, and flutist Anna Webber, new classical music or jazz? Yes. Is the music scored or improvised? Again, yes. Last question: Is it demanding or easy on the ears? Both. On the heels of two stellar releases, the septet Clockwise (Pi Recordings, 2019) and the Webber/Morris Big Band recording Both Are True (Greenleaf Music, 2020), Webber was commissioned to present Idiom VI at John Zorn's Stone series. She expanded the material from one track heard on ...

Album Review

Jacob Garchik: Clear Line

Read "Clear Line" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
January 14, 2021

As strange as it may sound, sometimes the best way to break free is to simply box yourself in. Limitations obviously cut off certain possibilities entirely, but they open the mind to so many others in the process. Composer (and trombonist) Jacob Garchik has long subscribed to that line of thinking and he takes it to bold heights on this, the most original, least derivative big band recording to arrive in ages. Basically throwing out the rule ...

Album Review

Jacob Garchik: Ye Olde

by Troy Collins
October 16, 2015

Ye Olde, the self-titled debut of Jacob Garchik's latest ensemble, has been described by the eclectic trombonist--who serves as in-house arranger for the Kronos Quartet, co-leads the Mexican brass band Banda de los Muertos, and is responsible for the Atheist Gospel Trombone Choir--thusly: “Imagine a 2015 cover of the soundtrack to a 1970's remake of a 1930's movie about the Middle Ages." Truth be told, Garchik's summarization is perfect; though nostalgic, this diverse effort (based on a whimsical tale involving ...

Album Review

Jacob Garchik: Ye Olde

Read "Ye Olde" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
October 7, 2015

In Ye Olde, trombonist Jacob Garchik uses progressive rock, jazz and plenty of imagination to create what might be a mashup of Game of Thrones and 21st century music. He's performed with Henry Threadgill and Lee Konitz and produced the outstanding 2012 solo project The Heavens: The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album (Yestereve Records). These proclivities continue in his fourth date as a leader about an imagined faux-Gothic Flatbush/ Brooklyn architecture brought to fruition by a forward thinking band who handle ...

Album Review

40Twenty: Jacob Garchik - Jacob Sacks - David Ambrosio - Vinnie Sperrazza: 40Twenty

by AAJ Italy Staff
February 1, 2013

40 Twenty è un quartetto, composto da alcuni tra i più interessanti musicisti residenti a Brooklyn, il cui nome rimanda alla pratica in voga nei night-club degli anni cinquanta quando i jazzisti suonavano set di quaranta minuti ciascuno con intervalli di venti minuti tra un'esibizione e l'altra. Ma la musica contenuta nell'omonimo disco è assai distante dalle immagini di sax che battagliano tra tintinnii di bicchieri o di sezioni ritmiche che ruggiscono come motori impazziti tra il vociare e i ...

Album Review

Jacob Garchik: The Heavens: The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album

by AAJ Italy Staff
October 12, 2012

Non fatevi ingannare dalle polifonie che emergono da The Heavens: the Athesit Gospel Trombone Album. Nessuna reincarnazione della Lester Bowie's Brass Band, semplicemente un album registrato in solitaria nel proprio studio domestico da Jacob Garchick. Che utilizzando la tecnica della sovra-incisione di parti per trombone, sousaphone, corno baritono, corno contralto e tromba a coulisse arriva a produrre una massa sonora di tredici strumenti contemporaneamente. Il risultato è impressionante, una mini-suite di nemmeno mezz'ora nella quale Garchik riversa con ricchezza espressiva ...

Album Review

Jacob Garchik: The Heavens (The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album)

by Mark F. Turner
October 10, 2012

Brooklyn-based Jacob Garchik's The Heavens (The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album) recalls the prose of author James Weldon Johnson's famous 1927 book of poetry, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. where Garchik's stunning trombone work is likened to the poem's protagonist: a charismatic preacher with the ability to deliver awestruck messages. Garchik's trombone is the messenger, yielding powerful orations that are spirited and persuasive, like a sentence taken from Weldon's book that reads:“He intoned, he moaned, he pleaded-he ...