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Jazz Articles about Joe Farnsworth
Joe 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 ...
Continue ReadingHarold Mabern: The Iron Man: Live At Smoke
by Mike Jurkovic
Hard-bopping pianist Harold Mabern may have made his recording debut in 1959 with drummer Walter Perkins' quintet and led his first session in 1968 for Blue Note on the soulful A Few Miles From Memphis but here he is, at 82, playing with straight-ahead, youthful joie de vivre on the story telling, life affirming, two-disc set The Iron Man: Live at Smoke. Working as hard as ever with his long standing trio of tenor saxophonist and former student ...
Continue ReadingDavid Hazeltine and Mike Kaplan: Two Perspectives On Cedar Walton
by David A. Orthmann
Years ago, I often went to a club in which a guest soloist was coupled with the house rhythm section. At one point in nearly every opening set, in an effort to find some common ground, the leader called Cedar Walton's “Bolivia." Sitting and waiting in anticipation for the theme to be played became an important part of witnessing each performance. Regardless of who was on the bandstand, “Bolivia" never failed to bring out the best in everyone.
Continue ReadingCedar Walton: One Flight Down
by Joel Roberts
Cedar Walton has been a first-call hard bop pianist for almost as long as there's been hard-bop. In a splendid, though often underappreciated, career spanning six decades, he's had notable stints in the bands of giants like JJ Johnson, Lee Morgan, Art Farmer and Art Blakey, while also leading well-respected groups of his own. Now, at seventy-two, he's one of the elder statesmen of the hard-bop genre and one of the true living legends of jazz piano. ...
Continue ReadingAnthony Wonsey: The Thang
by Mark F. Turner
Anthony Wonsey's latest disc finds the pianist coming into his own creative voice. Wonsey has been at the center of some very notable works over the past few years, including recordings by trumpeter Nicholas Payton, songstress Carmen Lundy and others. The Thang, his fifth disc as a leader, continues in the straight-ahead format of his label, Sharp Nine Records. While others artists his age are dabbling in freer modes, make no mistake that Wonsey is a skilled artisan who plays ...
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