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Harold Mabern: Mabern Plays Coltrane
by Mike Jurkovic
As is too often the case, we gain more and more respect and insight into an artist after he or she has passed away. Harold Mabern may have been overshadowed by many of his peers but he remained true to himself: bringing to the music a Memphis-bred hard bop blues and flourishing as both sought after sideman and impish, emphatic leader. Mabern never let you forget that, by all accounts, he was a generous, joyous man who reveled ...
Continue ReadingMike LeDonne: It's All Your Fault
by Jack Bowers
Even though listed on only four tracks, organist Mike LeDonne's superlative Groover Quartet performs on every one of the nine selections on LeDonne's admirable new recording, It's All Your Fault--and that's a good thing, as each member of the quartet (LeDonne, tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, guitarist Peter Bernstein, drummer Joe Farnsworth) is an accomplished soloist and ardent team player. On the album's remaining tracks, the quartet is assimilated into LeDonne's seventeen- member big band, a taut and high-powered unit that ...
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 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 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 ...
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