Jazz Articles about Pete McCann

About Pete McCann

Album Review

This album is saxophonist Ben Kono's tribute to his family's history, dating back to his grandfather's migration from Japan to the United States in 1911, performed by a combination of small jazz group and string quartet, The first half of the work concerns with his family's transition into life in the United States, and the second half celebrates four generations of Kono's lineage, going from his grandparents all the way through to his own children. The strings are ...

Album Review

Christopher Zuar Orchestra: Exuberance

Read "Exuberance" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
December 30, 2024

È decisamente un periodo d'oro per l'orchestrazione jazz. Ai molti bandleader e arrangiatori emersi nel nuovo millennio, si aggiunge decisamente Christopher Zuar, che firma il secondo album confermando le doti espresse in Musings (Sunnyside), il debutto di otto anni fa. Con un diploma al New England Conservatory e un master alla Manhattan School of Music, Zuar aggiunge una spiccata fantasia nell'arricchire il modern mainstream orchestrale di nuove suggestioni. Questo progetto è stato concepito tra il 2017 e ...

Album Review

Christopher Zuar Orchestra: Exuberance

Read "Exuberance" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 23, 2024

Composer/arranger Christopher Zuar's second album, Exuberance, recounts in musical terms a twisting yet picturesque journey that began seven years earlier, in 2017, when Zuar first met his now-wife, the animator Anne Beal, at MacDowell, the famed artists' residency in New Hampshire. While the relationship “blooms" in winter, there are “moments between" and other inescapable detours until “certainty" erases any lingering doubts, “exuberance" carries the day and Zuar and Beal are united as one. Yes, the music is ...

Album Review

Christopher Zuar Orchestra: Exuberance

Read "Exuberance" reviewed by Katchie Cartwright

by Katchie Cartwright
May 13, 2024

Exuberance is part of a “long-form tonal conversation" between composer Christopher Zuar and animator Anne Beal. Zuar, a Long Island New Yorker, describes the work as “a journey of personal growth," which began in 2017 when he and Beal met as fellows at the MacDowell Colony in the woods of New Hampshire. He explains that the album is a “collaborative project that charts the last seven years of our lives." “In Winter Blooms," the opening track, grew out ...

Album Review

Dan Pugach Big Band: Bianca

by Jack Bowers
April 5, 2024

Dan Pugach is an Israeli-born, New York-based drummer who doubles (quite well) as composer and arranger on Bianca, his second recording for Outside In Music. Pugach anchors a splendid big band comprised of some of the New York area's finest musicians on an album whose subtitle is “Music for Paws and Persistence." The “paws" were those of the Pugach family's rescue pit-bull, Bianca, who passed away in 2019 and left a gaping hole in their lives, as ...

Album Review

John Lang: Earotica

by Jack Bowers
December 13, 2023

There's something special about a nonet: small enough to have its own personality, yet large enough to sound at times akin to a full-size big band. Bassist John Lang leads a first-class nonet on Earotica, his fourth album as leader. Having given Lang's last disc a rather lukewarm appraisal almost two years ago, it is a pleasure to note that his new album is superior in every respect. Gone are the desultory funk and rock beats, replaced ...

Album Review

Anthony Branker & Imagine: What Place Can Be for Us? - A Suite in Ten Movements

Read "What Place Can Be for Us? - A Suite in Ten Movements" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
October 9, 2023

L'avventuroso post-bop del compositore Anthony Branker, ben espresso dall'album Beauty Within del quintetto Imagine, trova nuovi e più articolati sviluppi in questo What Place Can Be for Us?. Il gruppo conferma il chitarrista Pete McCann e la coppia Fabian Almazan e Linda May Han Oh ampliandosi fino a un medio organico con alcuni dei massimi giovani strumentisti di New York: il trombettista Philip Dizack, i sassofonisti Walter Smith III e Remy Le Boeuf, il batterista Donald Edwards e la vocalist ...