Jazz Articles about Sheldon Brown

About Sheldon Brown

Album Review

Daggerboard: The Skipper and Mike Clark

Read "The Skipper and Mike Clark" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 31, 2026

The rhythm section--more specifically, bassist Henry “The Skipper" Franklin and drummer Mike Clark--is front and center on the fourth recording by San Francisco Bay-area Daggerboard, the brainchild of trumpeter Erik Jekabson and percussionist Gregory Howe, who have enlisted a large array of supporting actors to help refine and sharpen their unique musical vision. That includes a four-member string section on three of the album's ten numbers, two of which ("Tanzanian Skies," the closing “Ruaha Daybreak") were written by ...

Album Review

Taj Mahal: Savoy

by Steve Yip
June 10, 2023

Folk/blues practitioner Taj Mahal's Savoy is to be savored. As one of the custodians of the blues, Mahal has long been a legend in his own time. This collection traverses a cultural-musical continuum in an indispensable residency in the annals of Black American music. The namesake of this album--the Savoy on Lenox Avenue in Harlem--was known as The World's Finest Ballroom and Home Of Happy Feet. In the pre-Civil Rights era, the North claimed formal equality, but segregation ...

Album Review

Taj Mahal: Savoy

by Dave Linn
May 3, 2023

Savoy, from Taj Mahal, is the latest entrant in the crowded field of pop music artists trying their hand at the fertile songbook of old big-band, swing-era standards. Unlike most, Mahal's roots show he's well suited to the task. He was born in Harlem in 1942. He grew up in a musical family, and his parents were both involved in the arts. His father was a jazz pianist and arranger, working with Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Fletcher Henderson among ...

Album Review

Bob Weir: Ace - 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (2CD)

Read "Ace - 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (2CD)" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
January 29, 2023

Befitting its heady milestone date, the title of Bob Weir's initial solo album, Ace, carries multiple meanings. First of all, it was the Grateful Dead guitarist, vocalist & songwriter's nickname at the time of its gestation and completion (his bawdy persona as such mirrored in the ultra-suave pose on the inside photo as well as the risque cover art). More importantly, the album's name is also a reflection of the gambling lore so prevalent in songs of the ...

Album Review

Ian Carey Quintet + 1: Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite

Read "Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
April 28, 2020

Trumpeter Ian Carey's Fire In My Head: The Anxiety Suite opens on a somber note, not with the sense of agitation that the album title suggests. The initial moments of the tune, “Signs And Symptoms," Part 1 of the suite, may initially be addressing the fatigue common to the malady, before his Carey's Quintet + 1 gradually turns up of the momentum in the direction of that anxiety, in manifestations from the leader's horn, followed by an on-edge turn by ...