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Album Review

Rich Halley: The Shape Of Things

Read "The Shape Of Things" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
January 3, 2021

Accomplished saxophonist Rich Halley has an easily recognizable style which is marked with his brassy, rough-hewn tone, innovative ideas and simmering passion. After starting his own Pine Eagle label, in 2010, Halley added eleven stimulating albums to his discography, featuring bassist Clyde Reed and his son, drummer Carson Halley. In 2019 Halley started fronting the equally distinctive Matthew Shipp Trio. The fiery and captivating The Shape of Things is the quartet's second collaboration and expands on the themes explored on ...

Album Review

Rich Halley: The Shape Of Things

Read "The Shape Of Things" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
December 13, 2020

One thing is certain when approaching a Rich Halley recording: it's likely that you will hear the history of the saxophone in his playing. He's as capable of filling the room with fractured sound as he is in gently ruminating over a haunting phrase, and bop licks are as common as noisy abstraction on his albums; indeed, one might find all of these traits within the same piece. On his latest, The Shape of Things, he's fortunate to have the ...

Album Review

Rich Halley, Matthew Shipp, Michael Bisio, Newman Taylor Baker: The Shape Of Things

Read "The Shape Of Things" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
December 11, 2020

In 2019, with almost two-dozen albums as a leader, Rich Halley broke his twenty-year streak of recording without a pianist as part of his various formations. It was Matthew Shipp who altered the saxophonist's course on Terra Incognita (Pine Eagle Records) which featured Shipp's trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. That successful project leads to The Shape of Things, which picks up and moves forward from where that stimulating and satisfying album left off.

Album Review

Rich Halley: The Shape Of Things

Read "The Shape Of Things" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
November 26, 2020

Nobody rips it up like Portland, Oregon-based tenor saxophonist Rich Halley. Whether he is playing with his West Coast crews on sets like The Literature (Pine Eagle Records, 2018) or The Outlier (Pine Eagle Records, 2016), or recording with his New York City compatriots on Terra Incognita (Pine Eagle Record, 2019). And now we have--with, again, the New Yorkers--The Shape of Things, where Halley continues to prove he can be counted on to shake the walls and rattle the windows ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp: The Unidentifiable

Read "The Unidentifiable" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
September 28, 2020

We can talk about a Bud Powell school of the piano trio, or a Bill Evans school of the piano trio, but maybe it is time to start talking about Mathew Shipp's trio school, with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. Shipp has been around the jazz scene for three decades. He has developed a distinctive voice. He sounds like no-one else. If you can't start your own school under those circumstances, then when can you?

Album Review

Matthew Shipp Trio: The Unidentifiable

Read "The Unidentifiable" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
September 1, 2020

With each successive project, the prolific Matthew Shipp takes the art form to seemingly unstainable heights and then persists in pushing the bar further along. Shipp began his recording career with a trio project, Circular Temple (Quinton Records, 1992) featuring William Parker and Whit Dickey, two artists that have retained close professional ties to the pianist/composer. Shipp has recorded a dozen trio albums with seven personnel line ups. His thirteenth project in that format, The Unidentifiable, features bassist Michael Bisio ...

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Album Review

Carl Grubbs 4tet: Stepping Around the Giant

Read "Stepping Around the Giant" reviewed by Derek Taylor

by Derek Taylor
February 25, 2003

Carl Grubbs is living, breathing proof of the adage “live isn’t fair.” Like so many of his peers, he’s largely fallen through the cracks over the years- a casualty of the public ambivalence that usually signals the lot of creative improvising musicians. But it wasn’t always so; back in the early Seventies with his brother Earl he made a valiant push for the big time through a contract on the Muse label. Three records later the debilitating weight of commerical ...