Jazz Articles about Rod McGaha

About Rod McGaha

Album Review

On Growth, his eighth album as a leader, it is said that Nashville-based saxophonist Don Aliquo “pushes past his established comfort zone and into more precarious and challenging improvisational territory." While that may well be true, another truism is that the harmonic vocabulary of contemporary jazz has remained essentially unchanged for more than eight decades, and Aliquo does nothing to alter the blueprint. He simply approaches improvisation in his own way while embracing time-honored parameters. In other ...

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Album Review

Rod McGaha: Preacherman

by AAJ Staff
May 1, 1999

This is old. Mutes, shouts, rumbling rhythms and gospel piano. The tunes are familiar (“This Here”, “Anthropology”), and the originals seem like old friends. But this is no veteran: Rod’s first album looked to hip-hop – this goes back to early ‘Sixties soul jazz. Max Roach calls him “an important new and original voice”, which sounds funny at first. But think: when young lions talk of “tradition”, they often mean bop or Ellington. This corner of jazz past is not ...