Jazz Articles about Kyle Koehler

About Kyle Koehler

Album Review

Alessandro Florio: Controra Avenue

Read "Controra Avenue" reviewed by Don Ball

by Don Ball
September 23, 2026

Jazz organ trios tend toward a funky, nitty-gritty sound, like a night out at a juke joint in Mississippi. Italian guitarist Alessandro Florio presents a different approach, much like lazing away on a warm, sunny day at a Mediterranean beach. Not that he cannot bring the groove when he wants, but Florio's album lives up to its name of an imaginary street in New York City that reflects the time after lunch, “controra" in Italian, when the sun is the ...

Album Review

Anthony E. Nelson Jr.: Swinging Sunset

Read "Swinging Sunset" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
June 11, 2023

The fascination with Hammond B3 organ trios, which were so prevalent in the '50s and '60s, remains undiminished. And rightly so as there were some stellar organists who were plying their trade in that period, including Jimmy Smith, Milt Buckner and Wild Bill Davis. However, the mystique around the clubs in which these performers played may be more idealized than the reality. In large part, the clubs were dingy with little or no decor, had poor sound systems and, possibly, ...

Album Review

Anthony E. Nelson Jr.: Swinging Sunset

Read "Swinging Sunset" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
May 30, 2023

Swinging Sunset, New Jersey-based tenor saxophonist Anthony E. Nelson Jr.'s fifth album on his Musicstand label, is an unpretentious, undemanding and utterly enjoyable celebration of the organ trios of the 1950s and 1960s. From the first bars of the opener, Eddie Heywood's “Canadian Sunset," it feels like we are in for a good time and, over the next hour and a bit, that expectation is a hundred percent delivered. Nelson is accompanied by Hammond B3 organist Kyle ...

Liner Notes

Conrad Herwig: Obligation

by C. Andrew Hovan
April 17, 2023

Jazz fans tend to be fanatical about those artists that most directly speak to their own musical tastes. Over time, a sense of familiarity with the musical personalities of their iconic favorites becomes entrenched, followed by categorization based on style and genre. Those already familiar with Conrad Herwig's musical endeavors over the past 20 years are likely to speak to his great versatility, at home in both jazz and Afro-Cuban musical circles as he is in leading his own varied ...

Liner Notes

Ed Cherry: Are We There Yet?

by Andrew Scott
February 25, 2023

In debates between Kenneth Miller, Richard Dawkins, and the late Stephen Jay Gould, the “stay in your lane" boundaries that separate science from theology/philosophy become particularly porous, revealing the frequency with which individuals intellectually “drift" in order to hold onto seemingly contradictory opinions of truth (empirical, scientific) and belief. Jazz, no less an ideology, has also become “defined" through a series of maxims ("must swing," “must contain the blues," “must prefigure improvisation") that while articulating general truisms perhaps, ...

Album Review

Ed Cherry: Are We There Yet?

Read "Are We There Yet?" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
February 24, 2023

February is appropriately recognized in the United States as Black History Month. The Cellar Music Group has been in the forefront of acknowledging the importance of Black musicians to jazz in America. With the release of Are We There Yet? by guitarist Ed Cherry, Cellar Music Group presents another release that is led by a Black artist. Cherry who has been a stalwart in the New York jazz scene since 1978, has pulled together a tight band including vibraphonist Monte ...

Album Review

Swingadelic: Bluesville

Read "Bluesville" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 29, 2020

If you're partial to music that is sunny and freewheeling and almost commands a smile, you should have no trouble warming to Bluesville, the eighth recording by New Jersey-based Swingadelic, now twenty-two years old and counting. As its name implies, the orchestra (more often than not a mini-big band a dozen or so strong) re-creates an era wherein young fun-lovers (and some older ones as well) listened, danced and grooved to bands whose essential purpose was to make sure everyone ...