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Kenny Dorham: The Complete ‘Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia – Blue Note 1524
by Marc Davis
I think I have a new favorite hard bop record. For many years, I considered Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers the perfect hard bop band--the Beatles of the bop set. I still do. I don't know how Blakey managed to find the very best up-and-coming jazz musicians in America, year after year, but somehow he did. And somehow the various bands he put together, no matter who was in them, produced superlative 5-star records, year after year. ...
Continue ReadingKenny Dorham: Una Mas
by Greg Simmons
Trumpeter Kenny Dorham's Una Mas was one of 1963's best records. The thought of hearing it reissued on ultra-high quality vinyl by the good folks at Music Matters should make jazz heads swoon. With its melding of hard-bop, bossa nova, and the blues, Una Mas is a prime example of the memorable vamps that Blue Note favored at the time, finding ultimate success later that year with Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder. Dorham was a prolific recording artist for ...
Continue ReadingKenny Dorham: Kenny Dorham - The Flamboyan, Queens, NY, 1963 - featuring Joe Henderson
by Francis Lo Kee
Kenny Dorham's big splash in the bebop business was taking over the trumpet chair in Charlie Parker's Quintet. He then became one of the most productive members of the Blue Note community, and his composition “Blue Bossa" has since become a jazz standard. This excellent live set is another wonderful and important issue from Uptown Records. The copious notes describe how the young (and not-yet-well-known) tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson began his productive musical relationship with Dorham, and why this live ...
Continue ReadingKenny Dorham: 'Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia
by Matt Marshall
There's a thickness to the sound of this 1956 Kenny Dorham set as reissued by Music Matters on two 45-rpm records--a density that blows from the speakers and settles in the room like smoke. Which is to say the fidelity of the Music Matters product proves itself as strong on live recordings as it has on their Blue Note studio reissues. Here, the club acoustics are palpable, requiring only the cracking of a favorite beverage to complete the scene.
Not ...
Continue ReadingKenny Dorham: Kenny Dorham: Jazz Contrasts
by Samuel Chell
In the new liner notes included with this addition to the Keepnews Collection on Riverside, the producer expresses his satisfaction with this 1957 “blowing" album, showcasing the trumpeter whom, after Clifford Brown, he considers second to none. Recorded approximately a year following Brown's passing, the date demonstrates Dorham's gifts as a balladeer, composer and, above all, as a pyrotechnician--the kind of player who can take apart a song's chord structure and reconstruct it with surgical precision, even while operating at ...
Continue ReadingKenny Dorham: Jazz Contrasts
by David Rickert
Producer Orrin Keepnews was never one to indulge much in blowing sessions, but this 1957 recording from trumpeter Kenny Dorham comes pretty close. With a lineup featuring Sonny Rollins, Oscar Pettiford, Hank Jones, and Max Roach, why not just give the guys a few standards and turn them loose? Dorham had been recruited for Riverside from a successful stint at Blue Note and Rollins had just completed Saxophone Colossus (Prestige, 1956), so both were eager and ready. The rhythm section ...
Continue ReadingKenny Dorham: Kenny Dorham with Jackie McLean Complete Recordings
by Hrayr Attarian
As jazz lovers we should be thankful for the presence of the Spanish record labels. Lonehill, Fresh Sound and Gambit, to name a few, have reissued and made available at reasonable prices a multitude of long-lost jazz gems. One of the recent reissues consists of two outstanding albums by trumpeter Kenny Dorham--Inta Something and Matador. Both have been reissued on CD in the past individually as well as together under the title Matador/Inta Something by Blue Note records but they've ...
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