Jazz Articles about John Webber

About John Webber

Album Review

Ian Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown

Read "The Lowdown" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 16, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Ian Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown

Read "The Lowdown" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
November 6, 2020

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), ...

Album Review

Harold Mabern: Mabern Plays Mabern

Read "Mabern Plays Mabern" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
March 18, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Eric Alexander: With Strings

Read "With Strings" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 9, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Harold Mabern: The Iron Man: Live At Smoke

Read "The Iron Man: Live At Smoke" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
January 14, 2019

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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Album Review

Horace Silver: Jazz Has A Sense Of Humor

Read "Jazz Has A Sense Of Humor" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
November 1, 1999

Listening to any new release by Horace Silver is a lot like hearing your favourite comedian tell a joke for the umpteenth time—you know the punch line, but you laugh anyway! Since he left Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1956, Silver has written and produced a number of classic tunes that have become jazz standards. Over the years his famous quintets have always featured dynamite trumpet/tenor tandems—Blue Mitchell /Junior Cook, Woody Shaw/Joe Henderson and the Brecker Brothers—and this album is ...