Jazz Articles about Thomas Chapin

Thomas Chapin Trio: Ride

by Jerry D'Souza
August 18, 2006

Thomas Chapin cast a giant shadow on this concert recorded at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1995. Chapin brought bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Michael Sarin along--a stellar cast which delivered a stellar performance. Chapin, who passed away in 1998, had the imagination that took his compositions into different realms. He never let freedom get into the way of expressing a delectable melody. He could complement one with the other to create a exhilarating and seamless whole. ...

Thomas Chapin Trio: Ride

by Chris May
July 9, 2006

Whooooah! To keep up with saxophonist/flautist Thomas Chapin on this one, you're going to need some of those monkey adrenal glands Hunter S. Thompson wrote about, or at the very least a seat belt and a note from your mom. Ride--and if ever an album deserved an exclamation mark at the end of its title, this is one--is a 72-minute recording of a 1995 North Sea Jazz Festival performance of near-constant, broiling and searing emotional heat. It's magnificent, monumental and ...

Thomas Chapin: Ride

by Troy Collins
June 21, 2006

Recorded live at the Netherlands' North Sea Jazz Festival in 1995, Ride captures Thomas Chapin's legendary trio at the height of its powers. Sharing the bill with such notable masters as Jackie Mclean, Roy Haynes, David Murray, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille inspired the trio to play with extra enthusiasm. This seven-track program, consisting of the late NYC multi-instrumentalist's most memorable tunes, features some of the trio's most energetic performances, making it one of their most engaging live recordings.

Thomas Chapin

by Peter Madsen
May 30, 2006

As I sit on my hotel balcony overlooking the beautiful German City of Lindau that rests quietly on the sailboat-covered Lake Constance, the grand snowy Alps Mountains rise up in the distance. The water is calm, the mountains majestic and peaceful. The contrast between this postcard-view and the destruction I witnessed yesterday riding on the train from Vienna is overwhelming. Torrential rains and the melting of the winter snows have literally flooded Austria. Bridges have been knocked down, train tracks ...

Borah Bergman & Thomas Chapin: Toronto 1997: A Suite for Thomas Chapin

by Javier AQ Ortiz
February 1, 2004

Death creeps upon us all. Thomas Chapin knew that rather well when in 1997 he appeared at Toronto's Du Maurier Downtown Jazz Festival with Borah Bergman. Dying on stage of leukemia, Chapin exhaled massively fractious and powerful liveliness from reeds and flute nonetheless. There are numerous struggles, limitations and even some clear misses in his performance; even so, those instances simply meld beyond recognition, as Bergman is a veritable musical pararescue trooper. He can carry both to the end of ...

Thomas Chapin Trio: Night Bird Song

by David Adler
October 1, 1999

Saxophonist/flautist Thomas Chapin died of leukemia in February 1998 at the age of 40. Night Bird Song is a posthumous release of a 1992 recording session, and it’s beautiful, confirming Chapin’s stature as an immortal jazz artist. With Chapin on alto and sopranino saxophones, flute, and alto flute, Mario Pavone on bass, and Michael Sarin on drums and percussion, Night Bird Song memorializes Chapin the man as it documents musical creativity of the highest order.While Chapin’s music can ...

Thomas Chapin Trio: Night Bird Song

by Glenn Astarita
August 1, 1999

A few weeks after his soon to be – critically acclaimed – “Sky Piece” was released in 1998, saxophonist-composer Thomas Chapin passed away, following his yearlong bout with Leukemia. After several years of journeyman status with the likes of notables such as Lionel Hampton, Anthony Braxton and Chico Hamilton, Chapin finally attained widespread recognition with his profoundly original 1996 Knitting Factory release, “Haywire”.

While recorded in 1992, Thomas Chapin intentionally deferred the final production and release of Night Bird Song ...