Jazz Articles about Tom Richards

About Tom Richards

Album Review

In 2012, Andrew MacKelvie was struck by a drunk driver while cycling through Halifax. He broke his back, shattered his knee, and landed on his saxophone case, which likely kept his head off the pavement. What followed were months of immobility and, eventually, a compositional fixation on that sliver of time when everything might have turned out differently. Many Worlds takes its title from the quantum theory of branching possibilities and its method from chance. The music is ...

Album Review

The Composers Collective Big Band: The Toronto Project

Read "The Toronto Project" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 18, 2023

The term Composers Collective is quite often a thinly veiled phrase that signifies “experimental" or “avant-garde" jazz. Thankfully, that is far from true on the Composers Collective Big Band's irrepressible The Toronto Project, which carries the listener on a buoyant and colorful musical journey through Canada's largest city, capital of the province of Ontario and home to a number of superb jazz musicians. True, there are some moments when the Collective veers from conservative to exploratory, but ...

Album Review

Avi Granite 6: Operator

Read "Operator" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
February 25, 2023

Guitarist Avi Granite--in the company of his brash band Avi Granite 6--opens his Operator with “Crushing Beans," displaying a big bad attitude. The drums are explosive, the horns belt it out, the bass shakes the walls and Granite slashes and burns. The first impression is: “This must be a great live band." And indeed, the studio appointment to record Operator came when the group was fresh from a tour. They brought the bandstand energy with them. “Voracious" is ...

Album Review

The Saskatchewan All Star Big Band: Saskatchewan Suite

Read "Saskatchewan Suite" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 1, 2021

On Saskatchewan Suite, composer/arranger Fred Stride and the twenty-member Saskatchewan All Star Big Band have combined to paint a luminous and colorful portrait of that western Canadian province, canvassing 150 years of its history in eight picturesque movements that describe in musical terms the land itself, its indigenous peoples, newcomers from Europe and elsewhere, its recognition in 1905 as a province, the importance of various sports to Saskatchewan's inhabitants, and the legacy of jazz as an essential part of its ...