Jazz Articles about Raul Agraz

About Raul Agraz

Album Review

Trombocalist Big Band: The Vigil and the Sleeping Giant

Read "The Vigil and the Sleeping Giant" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 18, 2026

Even those whose batting averages are high are not immune from life's unforeseen and often disastrous curve balls. Low-brass multi-instrumentalist Ron Wilkins, riding the wave as a successful musician and bandleader, learned that the hard way when he was struck by Covid in 2020 and spent more than a month in a medically induced coma with the outcome clearly in doubt. As it turns out, fortune smiled on Wilkins, and after relearning such basics as breathing normally, walking, ...

Album Review

The Birdland Big Band: Storybook: The Music of Mark Miller

Read "Storybook: The Music of Mark Miller" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 7, 2025

Storybook, the third recording by the New York City-based Birdland Big Band, is subtitled “the music of Mark Miller" and is designed to showcase compositions and arrangements by that multi-talented artist who doubles (triples) as the band's lead trombonist. Miller wrote or co-wrote half of the album's 10 colorful and impressive numbers (11 if one counts Joaquin Rodrigo's brief “Concerto de Aranjuez," which serves as an introduction to Chick Corea's “Spain") and arranged all of them. Miller's ...

Album Review

Raul Agraz: Between Brothers

Read "Between Brothers" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 29, 2016

Venezuelan-born and classically trained trumpeter Raul Agraz makes an impressive North American debut with Between Brothers, a vibrant album of Latin-oriented jazz whose harmonic and rhythmic quotients are about as strong and steady as one could wish. As is the case in other contexts these days, the term “brothers" is presumably used in a metaphorical sense, as there appear to be no biological brothers among Agraz's ever-changing group of sidemen that includes a guest appearance on the title song by ...