Jazz Articles about Rob Clearfield

About Rob Clearfield

Album Review

Nuovo album del contrabbassista chicagoano Matt Ulery, che riunisce in quintetto alcuni suoi frequenti collaboratori per realizzare un lavoro di brillante e articolato jazz moderno. La formazione vede il leader affiancato dal pianista Rob Clearfield e dal batterista Quin Kirchner, mentre la front line è composta dal sax contralto di Greg Ward e dal violino di Zach Brock, che con Ulery ha recentemente pubblicato l'ottimo Wonderment. L'ora abbondante di musica, tutta del contrabbassista, si suddivide in sette brani ...

Album Review

Leslie Beukelman: Golden Daffodil

Read "Golden Daffodil" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
September 26, 2020

Leslie Beukelman is a singer from Chicago with an endearingly small and youthful lilt to her voice that sets the tone for the gentle, heartfelt feel of her music. On this release she performs a mixture of standards and original songs that shows how well she can handle both jazz and soft rock singing. There is a folkish fragility to Beukelman's original songs. On “Days Of Gray" and “Dear Alice," Beukelman's voice is small and whispery as it ...

Album Review

Quin Kirchner: The Shadows and The Light

Read "The Shadows and The Light" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
August 1, 2020

Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam war film, Apocalypse Now, was released in 1979. After sitting for 2 and ½ hours, a viewer might have hoped for theater management to stand at the exits to hand out pamphlets explaining what had just gone down. The conflict had ended 4 years prior, and most war movies, pre- Vietnam, were straight-forward, America-saves-the-world affairs. Goodnight. In between a surf crazed Robert Duval, Playboy Bunnies, and the insane Colonel Kurtz played by Marlon Brando, the movie ...

Album Review

Quin Kirchner: The Shadows and The Light

Read "The Shadows and The Light" reviewed by Kevin Press

by Kevin Press
July 31, 2020

Add Chicago's Quin Kirchner to the growing list of young jazz artists who've dropped impressive multi-disc releases in recent years. It has become a kind of rite of passage for a new breed of heavy hitters, these double-and triple-album sets. They are not vanity projects. Not the good ones, anyway. They come from deep pools of creativity. The kind a very few young artists have accessible to them in the early prime of their careers. Kirchner's follow-up to ...

Album Review

Matt Ulery: Delicate Charms

Read "Delicate Charms" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
December 27, 2019

Bassist Matt Ulery works in several groups with differing approaches to jazz and art music. Delicate Charms features a quintet which mixes the romantic lightness of European classical music, the slippery unpredictability of jazz and the thrusting rhythms of progressive rock through a singular combination of alto sax, violin and piano. The CD's opening track, “Coping" lays out the band's agenda. It starts with a slow, dignified theme played by saxophonist Greg Ward and violinist Zach Brock, over ...

Album Review

Matt Ulery: Delicate Charms

Read "Delicate Charms" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
December 11, 2019

Coming on the heels of 2019's outstanding trio outing Wonderment (Woolgathering Records) with violinist Zach Brock and drummer John Deitemyer, Delicate Charms is a four and a half star recording if ever one was. And it begins with a classical air, an almost chambered hush into which rush those last minute arrivals, each their own player in the “Coping" suite that emblematically ushers in bassist Matt Ulery's particularly distinctive work. Equal parts Charles Mingus ("Taciturn"), Paul Chambers, (his sense of ...

Album Review

Ashley Daneman: People Are Fragile

Read "People Are Fragile" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
March 1, 2019

While solidity and vulnerability are at opposite ends of the strength spectrum, they also exist as two sides of the same coin. All that is broken can be put back together, much of what's whole isn't without interstitial breaks, and the human experience is built around the fluid bonds between the two representative emotional extremes connected to these states. It's this very notion that serves as the foundation for vocalist Ashley Daneman's work. With Beauty Indestructible (Self ...