Jazz Articles about Keith Balla

About Keith Balla

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
October 29, 2026

There is something deeply satisfying about hearing music that has sat quietly in the shadows for decades, finally given a chance to be heard. That is the pleasure offered by alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia's The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!, the second release from his acclaimed octet. More than a nostalgic return to an important period in jazz history, it also explores fresh musical territory. The cool-jazz sensibility and West Coast refinement are certainly present, but they share the ...

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 25, 2026

After his recording of The Brubeck Octet Project earned widespread approval and acclaim in 2024, saxophonist and jazz historian Jon De Lucia did not rest on those laurels; instead, he delved even more deeply into the original octet's archives and unearthed eleven little-known arrangements that form the basis of a second blockbuster album, The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again! And what a strike it is--every inch as perceptive and impressive as De Lucia's earlier survey of the Dave Brubeck Octet, ...

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 19, 2024

Having formed his jazz octet in 2016 for a project at City College of New York, where he was then teaching, Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia had to find new music to keep it going--a search that led him to the archives at Mills College, which housed many of Dave Brubeck's original handwritten charts among the papers of the octet's tenor saxophonist and arranger, Dave Van Kriedt. Eight years later, after extensive research, much hard work ...

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
June 28, 2024

Synchronicity is a wondrous thing. Item: At around the same time that Albert Ayler was developing his sound in the U.S.A., the Ethiopian tenor saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya was forging a strikingly similar one in Addis Ababa. Neither player had heard the other, and Mekurya had never heard any jazz at all. Feel the Force? Rewind a decade or so and we encounter another space/time portal, this one connecting the U.S.A.'s East Coast and West Coast. In New ...

Album Review

Alexander Brott: The Aesthetic Attitude

Read "The Aesthetic Attitude" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 7, 2022

For guitarist Alexander Brott, the coronavirus pandemic that arrived in 2020 and led to the closing of most indoor venues, jazz and otherwise, was not all bad. With gigs almost non-existent, it gave the Swedish-born, Canadian-based and former New York City mainstay a chance to kick back, relax and start writing. He did so from his rooftop while listening to favorite composers such as Tadd Dameron, Duke Ellington, Elmo Hope, Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk and others. After only a ...