Jazz Articles about Nasheet Waits

Jason Moran: Ten

by William Carey
June 16, 2010

Jason MoranTenBlue Note Records2010

Ten celebrates the ten year life of the Bandwagon, pianist Jason Moran's trio with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits. The piano trio is a mainstay in the jazz tradition, and here the Bandwagon does a characteristically great job of being firmly in that tradition while also blazing a new trail.

“Blue Blocks" starts with a descending motif, planing chords in a gravitational freefall, the hint of ...

Jason Moran: Ten

by David Adler
June 12, 2010

Pianist Jason Moran offers Ten, to mark a decade with the Bandwagon, his trio with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, and it's an anniversary worth celebrating. But Ten is also Moran's first release since Artist In Residence (Blue Note, 2006), so it affords him the opportunity to include pieces from long-form commissioned works he's written since then. The loping, gospel-tinged “Blue Blocks" is from a multimedia suite inspired by the quilt makers of Gee's Bend, Alabama. “RFK in ...

Komeda Project: Requiem

by Chris May
November 28, 2009

Despite the snowballing emergence of European jazz musicians on the world stage, relatively few European jazz composers have, in 2009, made it into the global repertory, which continues to be dominated by American voices. Perhaps it always will be, and perhaps local singularities--Italian or British or Scandinavian or whatever--are in any case better treasured, rather than absorbed into a single, universal body of work. But the fact remains that a cornucopia of great “foreign" compositions remains neglected in jazz's birth ...

Komeda Project: Requiem

by Budd Kopman
November 6, 2009

With the magnificent Requiem, pianist Andrzej Winnicki and saxophonist Krzysztof Medyna solidify and enhance their reputations as the prime promoters of the essential music of the Polish pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda (1931-1969). Komeda is widely recognized as the founder of modern Polish, and in a wider sense, European modern jazz. That he worked in Poland under Communist oppression is important. At its heart, jazz refuses to be pigeonholed, and it both allows and demands that its practitioners be utterly ...

Komeda Project: Requiem

by Jakob Baekgaard
November 4, 2009

There's an awareness which is located deep within human nature that we're subject to both positive feelings as well as destructive impulses: Love and death, Eros and Thanatos, exist side by side. All great art is a mirror of the human condition and nobody understood better than the Polish composer and pianist Krzysztof Komeda that life as well as music is composed of light and darkness.

The dual nature of Komeda's music is captured perfectly in one of his masterpieces, ...

Jason Moran: Same Mother

by Mark Sabbatini
February 12, 2005

Jason Moran is among a handful of modern pianists whose work often demands a listen as soon as it's released, since most other players will be trying to imitate it tomorrow. He doesn't quite meet those expectations on Same Mother, an album heavy on blues and soundtrack elements that represents his sixth project as a leader. Partially this is his emphasis on a classic down-home Texas feel, but there's also a sense of a highly tuned engine coasting at a ...

Jason Moran: Same Mother

by John Kelman
February 11, 2005

Contrary to popular opinion, the blues transcends structured musical form. Rather, it is a feeling that imbues, a deep and dark sense of despair that pervades. Regardless of the context, there was always something distinctly blue about the way Miles Davis approached every phrase. Similarly, while his music in no way relates to conventional blues form, Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's work has a certain melancholy that gives it a distinctly blue feeling. All that just goes to show that, contrary ...