Jazz Articles about Mario Pavone

Mario Pavone Sextet: Deez to Blues

by AAJ Italy Staff
September 7, 2006

Mario Pavone ha ben quattro decenni di carriera - cominciata con Paul Bley - alle spalle e sempre più creativo che mai, da accompagnatore a forte leader. Il contrabbassista statunitense ha incontrato ed inciso con tanti musicisti, da Bill Dixon e Anthony Braxton al famoso trio con Tom Chapin, eppure non si stanca mai di inventare nuove cose e di scrivere, come qui, composizioni impegnative, arrangiate dal fenomeno della tromba Steven Bernstein. Deez to Blues costituisce un lavoro che, se ...

Mario Pavone

by Peter Madsen
May 30, 2006

Greetings, Wide Open Jazz and Beyond fans. It's that time of year again when musicians pray they've saved enough quarters in their piggy banks from the end of the year party gigs to get through the cold and often gigless winter months. I was fortunate this January to get a call from Mario Pavone, one of my favorite bass players on the New York scene, to play four nights down at the Knitting Factory with his sextet. The first night ...

Mario Pavone: Deez To Blues

by Matthew Miller
April 15, 2006

Throughout his forty-year career as a professional musician and on seventeen recordings under his leadership, bassist Mario Pavone has shown himself to be a musical maverick whose only concern is pushing himself and his contemporaries. On Deez To Blues, a sextet featuring acerbic trumpeter Steven Bernstein, violinist Charles Burnham and the consummate reed/tuba doubler Howard Johnson, showcases Pavone's quirky, angular pieces in all their idiosyncratic beauty.

The tunes run the gamut from improvisational foray to emotional ballad, and each musician ...

Mario Pavone Sextet: Deez to Blues

by Jerry D'Souza
March 15, 2006

If Mario Pavone were to be greeted with a fanfare of trumpets in celebration of the forty years he has been moulding music into inventive and challenging celebrations, he would probably look for bass and drums to ring the brass. Pavone is known to get the rhythm section out in front, and he continues to do so on Deez to Blues. That idea has more than its share of thrills, but his music continues to be the driving force. It ...

Mario Pavone Sextet: Deez to Blues

by Troy Collins
March 14, 2006

Bassist, composer and bandleader Mario Pavone leads a new all-star sextet on Deez to Blues, his seventeenth recording as a leader. Pavone's swinging, multi-layered compositions push the tradition forward while always looking back. Like his stylistic forefather, Charles Mingus, Pavone's notion of the jazz tradition is playful yet reverent. By placing the rhythm section at the fore while relegating the horns to support roles, Pavone's groups trigger structural innovation quite literally from the inside out.

The bassist's contrapuntal ...

Mario Pavone: Boom

by Sean Patrick Fitzell
May 6, 2005

Bassist/composer Mario Pavone split his previous CD between trio and quintet groupings. On Boom he takes the mean, leading an adventurous quartet with longtime collaborator pianist Peter Madsen, omnipresent drummer Matt Wilson, and the industrious Tony Malaby, Pavone's most recent saxophone foil. The quartet deftly navigates Pavone's charts with tightly knit, rhythmically charged ensemble heads and spacious solo sections. Pavone also rearranges two compositions by the late saxophonist Thomas Chapin--Pavone's closest musical ally for nearly twenty years. They honor Chapin's ...

Mario Pavone: Boom

by John Kelman
September 7, 2004

Some artists determinedly eschew all obvious sense of tradition in their music; others use it as a building block to something new. One of the things that differentiate so-called creative music from free jazz is its apparent lack of ties to the American jazz tradition. While free jazz can be as extreme in its exploration, there is always a sense of history. Bassist Mario Pavone knows all about this distinction, having worked on both sides of the fence, but his ...