Jazz Articles about Steve Kuhn

Steve Kuhn: Mostly Coltrane

by Stuart Broomer
July 8, 2009

When John Coltrane left Miles Davis' band at the end of 1959, the first working quartet he formed had Steve Kuhn on piano for gigs at the Jazz Gallery over the first three months of 1960. Here Kuhn pays deeply affecting tribute to Coltrane and his music with Joe Lovano on tenor and tarogato and Kuhn's regular trio members, bassist David Finck and drummer Joey Baron. Kuhn and Lovano have both been shaped in part by Coltrane's ...

Steve Kuhn: Shimmering Beauty

by Maxwell Chandler
July 7, 2009

This interview was originally published on All About Jazz on March 2, 2009. Whether it is in his trio, collaborating with vocalists or accompanying an orchestra, pianist Steve Kuhn has always managed to effortlessly defy and combine genres. Whether it is an older recording or one of his newer albums, an inherent ability to create melodic-based beauty makes his playing and compositions instantly identifiable. Studies All About Jazz: In your early years you studied under Madame ...

Steve Kuhn Trio with Joe Lovano: Mostly Coltrane

by John Kelman
June 30, 2009

Although he's spent most of his career focusing on interpreting the music of others, pianist Steve Kuhn's albums for the ECM label have largely been about his small but significant repertoire of original music. Which makes Mostly Coltrane a real anomaly by comparison to earlier works like those reissued in the three-CD box set Life's Backward Glances -Solo and Quartet (ECM, 2009). Still, Kuhn has a perhaps little-known connection that makes this set of, well, mostly material either composed or ...

Life's Backward Glances - Solo and Quartet

by John Kelman
January 13, 2009

With an inestimable career largely spent in the service of interpreting the material of others, it's easy to forget pianist Steve Kuhn's equally valuable contributions as a composer. That he's turned almost exclusively to the venerable ECM label when either the spirit moves him to focus once again on his own writing, or when the label's head and primary producer Manfred Eicher feels it's time that the pianist consider doing so, the result has been a small but significant discography. ...

Steve Kuhn Steve Swallow: Two by 2

by Stuart Broomer
March 15, 2008

Few musicians possess anything like the lyrical capacity of Steve Kuhn and Steve Swallow, whether as composers or performers and this album of duets recorded in 1995 achieves an ideal of empathy. With the compositions roughly divided between the two, there's as much emphasis on the construction of durable melodic material as spontaneous interaction. Kuhn's opening “Gentle Thoughts" immediately achieves a limpid beauty, a vaguely Oriental theme that suggests light shimmering on water, while his “Two by ...

Steve Kuhn: Pastorale

by Brandt Reiter
September 9, 2007

Though he's been an inimitable sideman for jazz legends like John Coltrane, Stan Getz and Arts Farmer and Blakey and though he's been leading his own first-rate groups for decades, Steve Kuhn has never become a household name. Like his frequent (and equally idiosyncratic) collaborator Sheila Jordan, he's better known abroad than here, both in Europe and Japan--which is where this new disc comes in. For Pastorale, actually, is not new--it's the overdue American release of a superb trio session ...

Steve Kuhn Trio: Live at Birdland

by Larry Taylor
July 22, 2007

It's been said that “Jazz is the sound of surprise. Surprise is what you get with pianist Steve Kuhn's Trio on Live at Birdland. Like a face in a Picasso abstract, parts of a whole come at you from all angles, hardly recognizable. What the artist is showing is, however, crystal clear.

Kuhn ingeniously de-constructs standards, making the delightfully creative way in which he does so encourage appreciating the original all the more.

With the impeccably assured assistance of bassist ...