Jazz Articles about Joe Lovano

Joe Lovano: Folk Art

by Jeff Stockton
September 2, 2009

Some jazz artists enter a period in their careers where they've said all they have to say yet carry on, eking out a living, resting on laurels and simply playing out the string. Not saxophonist Joe Lovano. Folk Art is his 22nd recording for Blue Note alone, a run that has been marked by artistic consistency and tasteful excellence. This collection, however, is arguably the freshest and richest inside/out session he's delivered in his admirable career, certainly since Trio Fascination ...

Steve Kuhn Trio with Joe Lovano: Mostly Coltrane

by John Kelman
June 30, 2009

Although he's spent most of his career focusing on interpreting the music of others, pianist Steve Kuhn's albums for the ECM label have largely been about his small but significant repertoire of original music. Which makes Mostly Coltrane a real anomaly by comparison to earlier works like those reissued in the three-CD box set Life's Backward Glances -Solo and Quartet (ECM, 2009). Still, Kuhn has a perhaps little-known connection that makes this set of, well, mostly material either composed or ...

Joe Lovano Us Five: Folk Art

by Troy Collins
May 13, 2009

Folk Art is saxophonist Joe Lovano's 22nd album as a leader for the esteemed Blue Note label, and surprisingly, his first of all original compositions. Folk Art is unusual not only in its choice of material, but in personnel as well. Pianist James Weidman is the only veteran, rising bass star Esperanza Spalding and percussionists Otis Brown III and Francisco Mela are new faces on the scene.

Inspired by the vigor of his young line-up, Lovano's open-ended approach ...

Joe Lovano: Symphonica

by Chris May
August 25, 2008

Sumptuous and cinematic, a retrospective with a spin, Symphonica is the first album saxophonist Joe Lovano has recorded in its entirety with a full symphony orchestra. Playing mainly tenor, he revisits six of his favorite original compositions (and Charles Mingus' “Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love"), written over the last 20 years, with the massed strings, woodwinds and brass of Cologne's WDR Radio Big Band and Orchestra.

By turns caressed and buoyed along by Michael Abene's gorgeous arrangements, Lovano ...

Saxophone Summit: Seraphic Light

by AAJ Italy Staff
June 30, 2008

Cambia l'organico (la dolorosa scomparsa di Michael Becker ha portato all'inserimento del più giovane Ravi Coltrane), ma non la formula del Saxophone Summit, nucleo di strumentisti di eccelsa qualità che propone un post-bop contemporaneo di ottima fattura. Certo, qualche perplessità c'è. Ci si chiede, ad esempio, se sia proprio necessario riunire tre dei maggiori sassofonisti al mondo (non bastava il solo Lovano? O il solo Coltrane? O il solo Liebman?) per suonare in modo piuttosto tradizionale una musica che viene ...

McCoy Tyner: Quartet

by Jeff Stockton
January 12, 2008

It seems grossly unfair that the debonair, elegant elder statesman on the cover of Quartet, a document of the concerts McCoy Tyner and his band gave on Dec. 30th-31st, 2006 at Yoshi's in Oakland, would still be trying to live up to the reputation for excellence he established with the John Coltrane Quartet some forty-plus years ago. Perhaps tellingly, three of the seven selections come from The Real McCoy, the first solo album Tyner made for Blue Note in 1965. ...

Joe Lovano and Hank Jones: Kids: Duets Live at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola

by Paul Moots
November 27, 2007

Early jazz is often music of joy and playfulness--it's no wonder the great cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s are often backed by a classic jazz soundtrack. Now that jazz has become “art and “music of significance, joy and playfulness are too often missing from performances. It is a pleasure, then, that Kids: Duets Live at Dizzy's, a collaboration between Joe Lovano on tenor and soprano sax and Hank Jones on piano, revives the waning art of joyful jazz.

Kids ...