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Steve Davis at the Attucks Jazz Club
by Mark Robbins
Jackie McLean nicknamed trombonist Steve Davis Stevie-D. McLean got him his first major gig in jny:New York with Art Blakey and Davis hasn't slowed down yet. With 20 albums as leader and over 100 as sideman to such giants as Chick Corea, Horace Silver, Jackie McLean, Freddie Hubbard, and too many more to mention, his performance at jny:Norfolk, Virginia's Attucks Jazz Club was welcomed by a sold out house eager to hear this great player. Backed by the John Toomey ...
read moreChristian McBride: The Movement Revisited
by Chris May
The spring 2020 release of The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait Of Four Icons is the latest chapter in Christian McBride's inspirational salute to the African American civil rights movement and to four of its heroes: Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Embracing big band jazz, small group jazz, gospel, funk and chorale musics, together with spoken word passages, the suite employs an eighteen-piece band, the ten-piece Voices Of The Flame gospel choir, two lead ...
read moreHarold Mabern: Mabern Plays Mabern
by Mike Jurkovic
A tad more subdued than the barn-burning The Iron Man: Live At Smoke (Smoke Sessions Records, 2019), Mabern Plays Mabern still manages to jump full throttle from where that defining recording left us, with a lush, lyrical intensity and a vital, legacy-culling energy which plays as an exquisite coda to the pianist's long, outstanding career. Alive with the same stylist's intuition and unbridled spirit which found him cutting through the ranks with such contemporaries as Charles Lloyd and ...
read moreIn The Moment
by David A. Orthmann
The trail of splendid hard bop influenced recordings extends well beyond the genre's heyday of the 1950s and '60s. A case in point is trumpeter John Swana's appropriately titled In The Moment. The 1996 release on the Criss Cross Jazz imprint merits the exalted status of its celebrated predecessors. Captured in a one-day studio session, despite the familiar stylistic lineage it sounds fresh, spontaneous and unsullied. A sextet of intrepid, strong-willed individuals fully commit themselves to a program of compelling ...
read moreSteve Davis: Correlations
by Peter J. Hoetjes
Exploration and innovation may be the aspiration of modern jazz, but trombonist Steve Davis' Correlations exemplifies the fact that nothing proves more compelling than the timeless art of gathering a group of musicians who work remarkably well together. A veteran of The Jazz Messengers, One For All, and The Jazztet, Davis has a wealth of experience sharing the stage with multiple horns, essential to this album's sextet. His “get out of the way and let it happen" approach to band ...
read moreSteve Davis: Think Ahead
by C. Andrew Hovan
Composer and trombonist Steve Davis found a home for his muse starting in the late '90s with Criss Cross Jazz. Over the course of seven dates as a leader and many times more as a sideman, he established his voice as a writer and performer. For the past ten years, his releases elsewhere have been few and far between. It is with much fanfare then that fans should greet his second date for Smoke Sessions, a label that ...
read moreSteve Davis: Think Ahead
by Geannine Reid
Trombonist and composer Steve Davis has released his new album on Smoke Sessions Records, entitled, Think Ahead. The inspiration for the title comes from the art of reacting to the unpredictable, but thinking ahead can aid in preparing for whatever the future may bring. The trombonist is joined by saxophonist Jimmy Greene, pianist Larry Willis, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash, each are well-known in the jazz world, but this is not a session of strangers, Davis has a ...
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