Jazz Articles about Steve Davis
About Steve Davis
Instrument: Trombone
Article Coverage | Calendar | Albums | Photos | Similar ArtistsJoe Chambers: Moving Pictures Orchestra: Live at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola
by John Kelman
It's one thing to have an established `place in the jazz pantheon, another to continue redefining that position, long after others might be content to rest on their laurels. Joe Chambers' work behind the drum kit with artists including Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Mingus, and McCoy Tyner has already ensured a prominent place in jazz history. His output as a leader may be small, but he's delivered two outstanding Savant recordings in 2006's The Outlaw ...
read moreSteve Davis: Correlations
by C. Andrew Hovan
Surely it must be considered a milestone to chalk up Correlations as Steve Davis' 20th session as a leader. Just contemplate how much the world has changed since the trombonist started turning heads as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers back at the start of the '90s. The record business in particular occupies a vastly different landscape than was once the norm, a fact that figures all the more prominently in the precarious nature of recorded jazz. As such, ...
read moreSteve Davis: Systems Blue
by C. Andrew Hovan
From Kid Ory to Roswell Rudd, the role of the trombone has changed dramatically over the brief span of jazz history, as we know it. Whether it be keeping a beat via the style of “tailgating," exploring a multitude of textural possibilities through the challenges of the avant-garde, or working somewhere in that middle ground that we call mainstream jazz, the instrument has remained a highly expressive vehicle for communication within the idiom. It's somewhat surprising then that a fairly ...
read moreAdam Shulman Septet: West Meets East
by C. Andrew Hovan
Quiet as it's kept, too many of today's finest jazz artists are given short shrift by an industry that seems to value product of a fleeting nature over true craft and a reverence for the jazz legacy. This makes it particularly challenging for a talent like Adam Shulman to break through to a wider audience. A fixture on the Bay Area scene since 2002, the pianist has a knack for accompanying singers such as Paula West and often performs as ...
read moreHarold Mabern: Mabern Plays Coltrane
by Mike Jurkovic
As is too often the case, we gain more and more respect and insight into an artist after he or she has passed away. Harold Mabern may have been overshadowed by many of his peers but he remained true to himself: bringing to the music a Memphis-bred hard bop blues and flourishing as both sought after sideman and impish, emphatic leader. Mabern never let you forget that, by all accounts, he was a generous, joyous man who reveled ...
read moreMike LeDonne: It's All Your Fault
by Jack Bowers
Even though listed on only four tracks, organist Mike LeDonne's superlative Groover Quartet performs on every one of the nine selections on LeDonne's admirable new recording, It's All Your Fault--and that's a good thing, as each member of the quartet (LeDonne, tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, guitarist Peter Bernstein, drummer Joe Farnsworth) is an accomplished soloist and ardent team player. On the album's remaining tracks, the quartet is assimilated into LeDonne's seventeen- member big band, a taut and high-powered unit that ...
read moreJohn Hasselback III: Entrance
by Jack Bowers
Entrance, New York-based trumpeter John Hasselback III's debut recording, is basically a quintet date on which Hasselback shares the front line on four tracks each with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery or trombonist Steve Davis. If one is known by the company he keeps, that's a rather persuasive frame of reference. Hasselback wrote every number save one, the standard “Body and Soul," showing from start to finish a keen ear for enticing bop-inspired melodies and rhythms. He plays as he writes, laying ...
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