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Jazz Articles about Joe Farnsworth
Sonny Rollins & Dave Brubeck
by Joe Dimino
From another legend during the pandemic putting out quality new music, we start the 678th Episode of Neon Jazz with Drummer Joe Farnsworth. He has a great new album out called Time to Swing with a stellar line up and that sets the tone for the hour of music. There have been a host of new albums that are live to counteract the world of jazz that has fallen silent. One such recent release is Sonny Rollins in Holland from ...
Continue ReadingIan Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown
by Jack Bowers
American alto saxophonist Ian Hendrickson-Smith and Canadian tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds had been gigging together for almost two decades, mostly in Canada, but hadn't preserved any of their encounters on record until Hendrickson-Smith invited his companion to join him for a studio date in November 2019 at the renowned Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. The album was planned as a tribute to drummer Lawrence Leathers who died in June of that year, age thirty-seven. Leathers' nickname was ...
Continue ReadingPeter Bernstein: What Comes Next
by Paul Rauch
In a world defined by uncertainty, the global jazz community saw an impressive number of important new recordings released during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Most were recorded before the shutdown, and released thereafter. Guitarist Peter Bernstein hit Sear Studios in New York in June 2020, months after the onset of the pandemic, looking for inspiration. He had a hunch that things could work out. Just before the stay-at-home order hit, Bernstein had played with pianist Sullivan Fortner and drummer ...
Continue ReadingIan Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown
by Pierre Giroux
Those who thought that the re-emergence of vinyl records might be a passing fad as a saleable medium in this era of CDs, streaming and MP3 downloads, are proving to be wrong. The latest sales figures produced by RIAA for the first half of this year show vinyl sales at $232 million compared to CD sales at $130 million. This is the the first time in 34 years that this happened.So with the wind in his sales (sic), ...
Continue ReadingJoe Farnsworth: Friends In High Places
by R.J. DeLuke
Joe Farnsworth is one of the top jazz drummers working today, with a resume that includes some of the absolute greats. His muscular swing and precise timekeeping have been attractive to employers like Wynton Marsalis, Diana Krall, McCoy Tyner, George Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Eric Alexander, Benny Golson and many more. He likes to say he has friends in high places. True enough. It also helps to have monster chops and a great sense of time and swing, garnered ...
Continue ReadingHarold Mabern: Mabern Plays Mabern
by Mike Jurkovic
A tad more subdued than the barn-burning The Iron Man: Live At Smoke (Smoke Sessions Records, 2019), Mabern Plays Mabern still manages to jump full throttle from where that defining recording left us, with a lush, lyrical intensity and a vital, legacy-culling energy which plays as an exquisite coda to the pianist's long, outstanding career. Alive with the same stylist's intuition and unbridled spirit which found him cutting through the ranks with such contemporaries as Charles Lloyd and ...
Continue ReadingEric Alexander: With Strings
by Jack Bowers
To paraphrase Cole Porter: “Bird did it, Chet did it... even many vocalists I bet did it..." And now tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander did it--recorded an album with strings, that is. This represents quite a departure for Alexander who is widely known as one of the more emotive and resourceful improvisers on the scene; but so it was too for Charlie Parker, the foremost architect and unquestioned sovereign of the bop movement who was the first post-Swing Era superstar to ...
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