Jazz Articles about Tommy Flanagan

About Tommy Flanagan

Album Review

A solo piano outing is the perfect opportunity to experience the style of a pianist in its purest form. Without the interaction with other musicians, there is only the instrument and the artist, and every musical trace and train of thought can be followed. Unfortunately, it is also rare sometimes to experience such musical soliloquys. While great pianists like Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk have often explored the medium, others are far more reluctant about playing piano alone and recording ...

Album Review

Miles Davis: Miles '56: The Prestige Recordings

Read "Miles '56: The Prestige Recordings" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 29, 2026

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus never met Miles Davis, but his famous observation, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man," seems tailor-made for the trumpeter. Few artists transformed themselves as completely or as often as Davis. Listeners encountering his music today can struggle to reconcile the cool, lyrical trumpeter of the bebop era with the architect of jazz-rock fusion, the creator of On the Corner (Columbia, ...

Album Review

Miles Davis: Miles '56: The Prestige Recordings

Read "Miles '56: The Prestige Recordings" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
June 19, 2026

Let us imagine for the moment that it is a day or two after the Big Spirit Beyond Wonder has separated the wheat from the chafe. The terrible, unwanted wars have ceased. Global climate change is no longer a threat. Autocracy is in the dustbin of history where it rightfully belongs. Illness has passed. The world, as it was in the beginning, is free of the subterfuge and manipulations of humankind. Now the Big Spirit turns their attention ...

Radio & Podcasts

John Zorn’s Masada, Tommy Flanagan, Jeff Parker

by David Brown
February 27, 2024

This week a trio of works featuring guitarist Jeff Parker, we then work our way tough a pile of recently acquired '80s LPs featuring lots of Tommy Flanagan, some Mulgrew Miller and Ronnie Mathews; and finally, we revisit John Zorn's Masada Quartet--leaders of the Radical Jewish Cultural movement of the '90s--who made their first recordings 30 years ago this week in 1994. Welcome friends and neighbors to The Jazz Continuum. Old, new, in, out... wherever the music takes us. Each ...

Album Review

Joe Henderson: The Complete Joe Henderson Blue Note Studio Sessions

Read "The Complete Joe Henderson Blue Note Studio Sessions" reviewed by Scott Gudell

by Scott Gudell
November 22, 2021

If an artist stamps his jazz passport with any one of these labels--Blue Note, Verve, Milestone--it's pretty much a guarantee that you've arrived in style. Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson has traveled with all three and more. The 2021 reissue from the prestigious Mosaic Records focuses on Henderson's 1960s tenure with Blue Note offers a new opportunity to experience an abundance of rich and creative jazz from the decade. Big band and bop were duking it out in the ...

Album Review

John Coltrane: Giant Steps: Remastered & Super Deluxe Editions

Read "Giant Steps: Remastered & Super Deluxe Editions" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
September 4, 2020

A date for your diary... 18 September 2020. That is when Atlantic / Rhino releases two cracking new editions of John Coltrane's first landmark album, Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1960). The main event is enhanced audio quality, which has noticeably more presence than any previous reissue. The double CD and vinyl Remastered Edition and digital-only Super Deluxe Edition consist of material which has been newly remastered by John Webber at Air Studios in London. The Remastered Edition includes ...

Album Review

Gene Ammons: Boss Tenor

Read "Boss Tenor" reviewed by Matthew Aquiline

by Matthew Aquiline
July 20, 2016

Tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons' tone can be best described using the qualities of an ideally brewed cup of joe: rounded, bold, smooth, and exhilarating after first taste. Widely regarded as an original founder of the “Chicago school of tenor sax," Ammons' nonchalant, yet indelible sound--echoing the soft, breathy tone of Lester Young--drove him to a great deal of fame within the post- World War II jazz crowds of the '50s. Ammons, famously nicknamed “Jug," had an inherent ability ...