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Steve Swallow Interview
by Mike Brannon
From the 1995-2003 archive: This article first appeared at All About Jazz in January 2001. Steve Swallow may not be a household name, at least in most households, but if you've listened to contemporary jazz over the last thirty years, you've likely heard him on one side of the studio glass or the other. Swallow's not just a great and very unique electric jazz bassist but also a trusted producer of sessions which have included the likes jazz ...
Continue ReadingMeet Steve Swallow
by Craig Jolley
From the 1995-2003 archive: This article first appeared at All About Jazz in October 2000. Touring this summer As is often the case I've been touring Europe during the dreaded festivals. I did the July circuit with a band of [drummer] Bobby Previte's called Bump the Rennaissance which also contains [trombonist] Ray Anderson, [reed player] Marty Ehrlich, and [keyboardist] Wayne Horvitz. This is a band I've worked with on a couple of occasions in the past and have ...
Continue ReadingJohn Scofield: Swallow Tales
by Ian Patterson
It was Gary Burton who brought Steve Swallow--with electric bass in tow--into the teaching ranks of the Berklee College of Music in the early 1970s. Burton had already introduced Swallow's songs to the students, one of whom, a fresh-faced John Scofield, would go on to play and record with both men. Scofield and Swallow's musical partnership has proven the more durable, having begun in the late 1970s. Here, the former teacher and student pick up where they left on the ...
Continue ReadingCarla Bley: Life Goes On
by Mike Jurkovic
After decades of illuminating and revealing work, reveling in and breaking free of shadows, it is those same shadows that still inspire and inform Carla Bley. Which perhaps explains why the title track of Life Goes On rolls in on the 12-bar like a music obsessed, post-bop cigarette girl absorbing Count Basie at Birdland in the 1950s. So let's take a brief moment to be thankful for the odd, out of time quirks that have brought us to this same ...
Continue ReadingCarla Bley / Andy Sheppard / Steve Swallow: Life Goes On
by Karl Ackermann
Coming off a recent illness, the legendary composer-pianist Carla Bley has her sense of humor and political instincts intact on Life Goes On. The trio album with saxophonist Andy Sheppard and bassist Steve Swallow completes a trilogy which began with Trios in 2013 but the three have been recording together since 1994 with their first album Songs With Legs (WATT/ECM, 1995). In a 2019 interview with German magazine Kaput Bley spoke about the synergy that makes her trio work so ...
Continue ReadingCarla Bley: Life Goes On
by Dan McClenaghan
Pianist / composer Carla Bley is an inspiring woman. Pianist Paul Bley was inspired to marry her, and record a full album of her compositions: Barrage (ESP-Disk, 1965), in addition to including four of her originals on Open, To Love (ECM Records, 1973). George Russell included her “Bent Eagle" on his Stratusfunk (Riverside Records, 1960). Jimmy Giuffre presented his version of her “Ictus" on his album Thesis (Verve, 1961). And if these examples date the influence of Carla Bley, consider ...
Continue ReadingCharlie Haden / Liberation Music Orchestra: Time/Life:Songs For The Whales And Other Beings
by Ian Patterson
Formed by bassist Charlie Haden in 1969 to protest America's war in Vietnam/Indochina, the Liberation Music Orchestra has reconvened roughly every ten years to record musical protest in the face of major injustices. Time/Life: Song for the Whales and Other Beings was inspired by concern at global ecological destruction, and to that end the music has a pervasive melancholy colored by the LMO's signature lyricism, and broken up by stirring collective and individual passages. The LMO's personnel has ...
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