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Jazz Articles about Manuel Dunkel
Espoo Big Band: Blood Red
by Jack Bowers
If the music on Blood Red, the eleventh album by Finland's world-class Espoo Big Band, sounds more Middle Eastern than Scandinavian, there's a reason for that. It was inspired, writes composer/arranger Mikko Hassinen, by 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's book, My Name Is Red, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul. The music “doesn't describe or explain the story or the characters," Hassinen writes. “Rather, it is a reflection of the different feelings evoked by the novel," and its lyric influences are largely ...
Continue ReadingGeorge Kontrafouris: Little Daddy's Blues
by Glenn Astarita
Born in Greece, Hammond B-3 denizen George Kontrafouris' organ combo fare sounds purely American in scope and attack. In a nutshell, he has it all down to a science. And with testimonials by fellow B-3 great Tony Monaco cited within the liners, the music iterated here features a Texas roadhouse type gala, spiced up with snappy pulses and tenor saxophonist Manuel Dunkel's edgy choruses. However, it's Kontrafouris' cagey right-hand voicings and broad comprehension and implementations of the jazz vernacular that ...
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