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Jeff Lederer: Guilty!!!
by Mark Corroto
Note to conservative Republicans: stop reading this review now. Note to self: There cannot be but a handful of folks who are both MAGA and jazz and improvised music listeners. Jeff Lederer's Guilty!!! recalls a time when jazz was at the forefront of the zeitgeist. Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus were creating music about and during the civil rights movement. Elsewhere Neil Young was protesting the four dead at Kent State, while Graham Nash was recruiting ...
Continue ReadingMelinda Rose & Frenchy Romero: I'm On My Way
by Dan Bilawsky
A co-led date from vocalist Melinda Rose and pianist Frenchy Romero seemed to be preordained. The two grew up mere blocks away from each other in Miami, connected as teens and bonded immediately over a love for jazz, and developed a strong rapport at a weekly jam session. As their lives moved forward, they stayed in touch and played out during breaks in their undergraduate days, kept the gigging going when they were each in graduate school in Illinois, and ...
Continue ReadingMatt Wilson: Good Trouble
by Jerome Wilson
Drummer Matt Wilson continues his tradition of recording humorous and humanistic jazz here with the debut of a new quintet, Good Trouble, which includes both old and new associates. This group has a two-saxophone front line with Wilson's long-time colleague, Jeff Lederer on tenor sax, and Tia Fuller on alto sax. They complement each other well as they blow through the strutting rapture of “Albert's Alley" and the dancing shuffle beat of Ornette Coleman's “Feet Music." The group's ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Panoply
by Dan McClenaghan
There was a Steinway in the Zeitlin household in the outskirts of Chicago in the early 1940s. During this time Denny Zeitlin would find his way to the piano playing parental laps and sit at the keyboard, where he, he says: “I would put my little hands on their hands and go along for the ride...and I was just very intrigued by the entire panoply of sounds that were possible with that instrument." (from the 2010 AAJ interview with the ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Panoply
by Pierre Giroux
Denny Zeitlin's Panoply is a diverse array collection of unreleased performances comprising solo piano recordings at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, California, trio sessions with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Matt Wilson captured at Mezzrow Jazz Club in New York City, and duo pieces with drummer/percussionist George Marsh collected over a decade of home recordings at Zeitlin's Double Helix Studio. The album opens with a trio performance of George Gershwin's “I Was Doing All Right." ...
Continue ReadingJeff Lederer, Mary LaRose: Schoenberg on the Beach
by Alberto Bazzurro
La copertina, scarna ed evocativa, con quel virato seppia che le dà tutto il fascino delle cose d'antan, dice già molto circa la tipologia e il tono del lavoro, firmato da Jeff Lederer in combutta con sua moglie, la cantante Mary LaRose, la quale attraversa il disco come una sorta di presenza parallela, districandosi--quando chiamata al centro delle operazioni--attraverso testi di autori anche molto illustri (Goethe, Nietzsche e Rilke bastano a rendere l'idea?) e musiche non solo del dedicatario dell'opera, ...
Continue ReadingJeff Lederer with Mary LaRose: Schoenberg on the Beach
by Jerome Wilson
Saxophonist Jeff Lederer has used several unexpected inspirations for musical projects over the years, such as Shaker hymns and the writings of Herman Melville. Schoenberg on the Beach may be the most audacious thing he has ever done. It blends the compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and the sounds of Coney Island together into an intriguing song cycle performed by a team of exceptional jazz musicians. Schoenberg lived in Los Angeles in the latter part of ...
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