Jazz Articles about John Clayton

About John Clayton

Live Review

Jazz at Lincoln Center JALC Jazz Congress 2025

by Katchie Cartwright
January 31, 2025

Jazz at Lincoln Center JALC Jazz Congress 2025 New York, NYJanuary 8-9, 2025 In Frederick P. Rose Hall, the gorgeous home of Jazz at Lincoln Center overlooking Columbus Circle in New York City, the JALC Jazz Congress brought artists and industry professionals together for two days of panels and presentations by prominent community members. In a full schedule of 21 sessions, many of which overlapped, participants explored diverse themes and visions of the ...

Album Review

Ryan Truesdell: Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions

Read "Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
October 21, 2024

«L'idea di Synthesis--dice Ryan Truesdell presentando il progetto--è nata dalla consapevolezza che molti compositori di jazz traggono ispirazione dalla scrittura per quartetto d'archi di eminenti compositori classici come Bartok, Brahms e Ravel, e dalla necessità di trovare un modo realistico e al tempo stesso stimolante per creare musica insieme». Il giovane orchestratore, divenuto famoso per aver dato vita a inedite partiture di Gil Evans, presenta un progetto di 17 composizioni per quartetto d'archi (alcune in forma di ...

Album Review

Paul Kuhn: The LA Session

Read "The LA Session" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
October 26, 2023

Paul Kuhn (1928-2013) was a German jazz pianist who was well known in his own country, but much less so in the United States. All things considered, given that he spent the formative year of his adolescence in Nazi Germany, he was probably lucky to have survived at all. The Nazis, like most authoritarians, frowned on swing and jazz. They considered it the product of a degraded race and gateway drug of sorts to all sorts of perversions of which ...

Album Review

Roberta Gambarini: Easy To Love

Read "Easy To Love" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
June 27, 2023

In 2007, All About Jazz reviewer Michael Caratti wrote: “This debut outing from Roberta Gambarini sees the Italian-born jazz vocalist pair up with two star-studded rhythm sections and legendary tenor saxophonist James Moody, to present what has to be one of the best vocal jazz albums of the decade. Opening with Cole Porter's classic title track Gambarini's exquisite tone and masterful rhythmic phrasing are immediately on display in the first a capella section. The gradual addition of bass and brushes ...

Jazzin' Around Europe

The Optimal Evolution of Amersfoort World Jazz

by Phillip Woolever
October 11, 2022

A multitude of festivals recently returned from the pandemic wasteland as the world of live music played catch-up from over two years of interruptions, but few comebacks in the busy summer of 2022 were as uniformly strong as the full reopening of the Amersfoort World Jazz Festival. During what is likely now a permanent switch from the previous spring time frame to an early August edition, Amersfoort elevated its status as a multi-venue concert program, showcase-type exhibition series, and marketing ...

Album Review

Doug MacDonald: I'll See You in My Dreams

Read "I'll See You in My Dreams" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 5, 2022

There is at least one constant in guitarist Doug MacDonald's long and rewarding career: he likes to stay busy, whether hosting live gigs or inhabiting a recording studio. MacDonald's latest quartet session, I'll See You in My Dreams, is at least his twenty- ninth as leader of groups of various sizes and shapes. It is also a homecoming of sorts, as MacDonald is reunited here with the co-leaders of one of his earlier employers, the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, namely bassist ...

Album Review

Craig Davis: Tone Paintings

Read "Tone Paintings" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 30, 2022

The subtitle of pianist Craig Davis' second album, Tone Paintings, is “The Music of Dodo Marmarosa." For those who may be inclined to ask, “Dodo who?" the album offers a mini-biography of Pittsburgh-born Michael (Dodo) Marmarosa, an exceptionally talented pianist whose promising early career was cut short by the crushing weight of mental and emotional problems that proved too unbearable for him to overcome. At his peak, in the decade from 1940-50, Marmarosa was a member of big bands led ...