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Javon Jackson & Nikki Giovanni: Javon & Nikki go to the movies
by Pierre Giroux
Javon & Nikki go to the movies is a charming and soulful collaboration that brings together the poetic eloquence of Nikki Giovanni and the masterful tenor saxophone stylings of Javon Jackson. The album is a delightful journey through some of the standards of the Great American Songbook, featuring songs famously associated with classic Hollywood movies. The repertoire also draws from a broader range of sources, including three Jackson originals and one from the pen of Sonny Rollins. Jackson is accompanied ...
Continue ReadingJavon Jackson: The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni
by Angelo Leonardi
Nikki Giovanni è una delle scrittrici afro-americane più note al mondo. Emersa alla fine degli anni sessanta come innovativa poetessa della Black Revolution entro il Black Arts Movement (c'erano anche Amiri Baraka e Ishmael Reed) ha pubblicato numerose raccolte di poesie e opere su questioni sociali, insegnando al contempo in varie università statunitensi. Giunta alla soglia degli ottant'anni ha un enorme curriculum di riconoscimenti prestigiosi. L'idea d'incidere quest'album col gruppo del sassofonista Javon Jackson nasce nel ...
Continue ReadingJeremy Manasia Trio: Metamorphosis
by Jack Bowers
The Jeremy Manasia Trio: new names one and all in this neighborhood save for the gentleman who makes the trio a quartet, guitarist Peter Bernstein. As it turns out, pianist Manasia, a native of Staten Island, has been a mainstay on the New York jazz scene since he returned from Europe in 1997, and Metamorphosis is his sixth recording as leader of his own groups. While bassist Barak Mori and drummer Charles Ruggiero round out the trio, Bernstein appears on ...
Continue ReadingJeremy Manasia: Pixel Queen
by Dan Bilawsky
Pixel Queen is the third record to document the musical relationship that pianist Jeremy Manasia has with bassist Barak Mori and drummer Charles Ruggiero. Manasia's debut leader date--Witchery (Cellar Live, 2007)--featured a different rhythm crew, but this bass-and-drums team came aboard for After Dark (Posi-Tone, 2009), a pleasing trio-with-guests outing, and stayed for Green Dream (Cellar Live, 2012), an all-originals trio date. On this release, Manasia's fourth overall and first on the Blujazz imprint, this trio tackles six of the ...
Continue ReadingJeremy Manasia: After Dark
by Terrell Kent Holmes
Pianist, composer and arranger Jeremy Manasia is the driving force behind After Dark, an excellent group of originals and standards rendered by Manasia, drummer Charles Ruggiero and bassist Barak Mori. Manasia wrote most of the songs with classic jazz as his guiding principle. Up-tempo tunes like “Ruggburn" or the cool mid-tempo blues “Arch Eyes" are straight from the hard bop lexicon. In the spirited “Jake's Dilemma" one can hear whispers of Bud Powell's “Oblivion." There are subtle ...
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