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Jazz Articles about Mikel Patrick Avery

About Mikel Patrick Avery

Album Review

Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra: Dimensional Stardust

Read "Dimensional Stardust" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
December 10, 2020

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist Rob Mazurek has made his Exploding Star Orchestra the centerpiece of his larger groups. In this formation, he finds ample room to channel his disparate influences such as Sun Ra and Bill Dixon, and the distinctions he's absorbed as a global citizen. On Dimensional Stardust Mazurek and a dozen collaborators present an energetic, always changeable, genre-less mélange of styles held together by imagination and daring. The imposing Exploding Star Orchestra includes flautist Nicole ...

Album Review

Juan Vinuesa Jazz Quartet: Blue Shots From Chicago

Read "Blue Shots From Chicago" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 10, 2020

Chicago, a city of big shoulders, continues to present proof of poet Carl Sandburg's words from the poem of the same name... “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning." Why is this? Because Chicago in 2020 remains the same as evoked in these words from 1914, “fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action." It is a city that welcomes all comers who can bring ...