Jazz Articles about Jon Wikan

About Jon Wikan

Album Review

On Landings, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen convenes a quartet that thrives on speed and alertness. With organist Gary Versace, guitarist Marvin Sewell, and drummer Jon Wikan, she leads a band capable of sharp turns and open-road lyricism in the same breath. The music feels meticulously shaped yet gloriously unbound; an ensemble language forged in deep listening and shared risk. The album starts with a historic moment as 89-year-old tenor legend George Coleman joins in for his own composition “Amsterdam ...

Album Review

Ingrid Jensen: Landings

by Jack Kenny
February 14, 2026

Ingrid Jensen has emerged as a unique trumpet player with a distinctive sound that defines her and proclaims her nonpareil gifts. The album opens with “Handmaiden's Tale," a virtual duet with Gary Versace that clearly demonstrates the beauty of Jensen's tone. The track weaves together many strands of sheer beauty: warmth, lyricism, resonance and the roundness of the notes. It balances space and pace with a barely suppressed melancholy and soft dynamism. There is a fluidity here--refusal to ...

Album Review

Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra: Harbour

Read "Harbour" reviewed by Scott Lichtman

by Scott Lichtman
August 8, 2024

There's something special about Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra's Harbour. Foremost, the album builds on Jensen's acknowledged talent as master composer for over 25 years. She writes songs that stimulate the emotions as well as the intellect, and she arranges them using rich, cross-instrumental blends and fresh, punctuated motifs. While Jensen already has won JUNO awards in Canada for best jazz album, Harbour raises the bar. That is because it is inspired by deeply personal themes and because her ...

Album Review

Schapiro 17: Human Qualities

Read "Human Qualities" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 14, 2021

Following its splendid premiere recording, an exploration of Miles Davis' unrivaled album Kind Of Blue (Capitol Records, 1959), composer/arranger Jon Schapiro's 17-member ensemble broadens its horizons on Human Qualities, pairing seven of the maestro's astute and adventurous charts with the Roberta Flack best-seller, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." This time around, Schapiro proves that he need rely on nothing more than his own considerable experience as a jazz artist to create an album that expresses his point ...

Album Review

Jay Thomas Quartet: Upside

by Paul Rauch
September 11, 2020

Seattle-based musician Jay Thomas may be considered the oddest of ducks in the jazz universe. By that, I am referring to his fierce musicality expressed both on trumpet and saxophone, as well as most members of the brass and woodwind families. Inspired early in his career by the like minded veteran Ira Sullivan, Thomas in a single night will drift from trumpet to tenor, from flugelhorn to alto, and then double back on flute and soprano. He may as well ...

Album Review

Schapiro 17: New Shoes: Kind of Blue at 60

Read "New Shoes: Kind of Blue at 60" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
September 7, 2020

Miles Davis' album Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959) is the best-selling jazz album of all time and has been highly influential for the last 60 years. Most of its five tracks have become jazz standards and have been interpreted time and again. However it is rare to see the entire album reworked to the extent that Jon Schapiro and his big band, Schapiro 17, do here. The tracks undergo extensive retooling, expanding into big band arrangements that carry on the ...

Album Review

Schapiro 17: New Shoes: Kind of Blue at 60

Read "New Shoes: Kind of Blue at 60" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 10, 2020

2019 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Miles Davis sextet's acclaimed album, Kind of Blue (Columbia). While the tributes didn't exactly pour in, New York-based composer / arranger Jon Schapiro took it upon himself not only to revisit that classic session but to re-orchestrate it for a large ensemble (the Schapiro 17) and flesh it out with half a dozen compositions of his own and another by pianist Roberta Piket. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, all of ...