Jazz Articles about Jay Anderson

About Jay Anderson

Album Review

Charles Pillow Ensemble: Chamber Jazz

Read "Chamber Jazz" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 29, 2020

Chamber Jazz, alto saxophonist Charles Pillow's eighth recording as leader of his ensemble, is a generally sedate but remarkably engaging series of tone poems that combine contemporary jazz with elements of classical music to produce a hybrid that underlines what is most harmonious and charming in each genre. Chamber Jazz is what it says, and chamber jazz is what it is. For comparison's sake, think of the ensemble as the Modern Jazz Quartet times five. True, there is no John ...

Album Review

Denise Mangiardi: Brown Book

Read "Brown Book" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
April 27, 2020

Denise Mangiardi dwells in two musical worlds, as both a jazz singer and an accomplished classical composer. She puts all her talents to good use on this CD, singing a collection of self-written ballads, folk songs and torch songs, over her own haunting arrangements. Mangiardi's moving string-writing appears on the two brief “Soundscape" instrumentals which bookend the album, as well as on the songs “The Exchange," “Waves," and “My Beauty"--which is really Thelonious Monk's “Ugly Beauty" with lyrics ...

Album Review

Enrique Haneine: Unlayered

Read "Unlayered" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
April 18, 2020

Whether he leads from his drummer's stool or his the piano bench, drummer/composer/multi-instrumentalist Enrique Haneine is a mischievous creator, assembling different blocks to form other different blocks, stacking, unstacking, widening the fall zone with each new release. It's an aesthetic that keeps you jumping hoops but, most importantly, listening hard to the logic employed. But Haneine insists we should not be content to just sit and listen. Haneine will walk point but you have to follow his lead ...

Album Review

Jay Anderson: Deepscape

Read "Deepscape" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
June 9, 2019

Bassist Jay Anderson has been a sideman for many musicians including Michael Brecker, Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler and Maria Schneider, but he hasn't led a recording session since the 90s.' He makes up for lost time here with a varied set of music that sometimes follows standard jazz orthodoxy and sometimes goes its own fascinating way. Two of his treatments are particularly surprising. He turns Morton Feldman's solemn “Rothko Chapel" into haunting exotica. His bowed bass and Billy ...

Album Review

Jay Anderson: Deepscape

Read "Deepscape" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
April 9, 2019

Jay Anderson took up the acoustic bass as a pre-teen, earned a Bachelor's Degree in Performance from CSU and cut his teeth playing with the Woody Herman Orchestra, right out of school. His deep resume includes classical performance with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, alternative music with Frank Zappa and Tom Waits, and pop with David Bowie. Anderson has been a part of multiple Grammy-winning projects, most recently the Maria Schneider/Dawn Upshaw Winter Morning Walks (Artists Share, 2014). ...

Album Review

Jay Anderson: Deepscape

Read "Deepscape" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
April 5, 2019

Bassist Jay Anderson has long been the rock to locks things in place and the harmonic tether to hold it all together. He appears on more than 400 albums, having served as the anchor for everybody from Lynne Arriale to Frank Zappa, and he's one of the most steady and dependable low-end quantities on the scene. Never short on work as a sideman, his own leader discography has suffered a bit for it: Hard as it may be to believe, ...

560

Interview

Jay Anderson: Driving the Bus

by Ian Patterson
April 18, 2011

The term “sideman" really doesn't do justice to bassist Jay Anderson, as his beautifully melodic, lyrical lines and in-the-pocket-grooves lift and shape any music that he is a part of. And while the term “journeyman" holds some truth--Anderson has played with a huge number of people--one glance at his extensive discography reveals that most of the session leaders who have sought out Anderson's rich, warm tone have gone back to him time and time again. Anderson has been the first-call ...