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Jazz Articles about Tommy Flanagan
Wes Montgomery: The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery
by Chris May
Ask a dozen jazz guitar fans for their all-time top guitar albums and The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery is likely to be high on every list. If it isn't, chances are Montgomery's live set Full House (Riverside, 1962), recorded two years later, will be. With these discs, Indianapolis-born Montgomery (1923-68) gave the guitar its biggest quantum leaps forward, both stylistically and in terms of listener acceptance, since Charlie Christian in the late 1930s/early 1940s and Johnny Smith in ...
Continue ReadingGene Ammons: Boss Tenor
by Douglas Payne
This relaxed, swinging quintet session from 1960 isn't the landmark that many of the other releases in this series are. But it is among the finest, most rewarding music tenor great Gene Ammons (1925-74) ever made. Boss Tenor -- easily confused with Boss Tenors , the 1961 Verve record Ammons cut with Sonny Stitt -- is probably included here due to Ammons's enduring and unprecedented affiliation with Prestige. Ammons recorded over 50 albums for the label from 1950, around the ...
Continue ReadingTommy Flanagan: Sunset and the Mockingbird
by Jack Bowers
First, a confession. There are a handful of contemporary Jazz pianists I could listen to all night without the least trace of boredom or fatigue. Oscar Peterson, of course. Kenny Barron. Barry Harris. Oliver Jones. Billy Taylor. And Tommy Flanagan — which should give the reader an inkling of how I feel about Tommy’s Blue Note debut, Sunset and the Mocking Bird, recorded on his 67th birthday at New York City’s Village Vanguard. This is a trio session, and what ...
Continue ReadingTommy Flanagan Trio: Sea Changes
by Chris M. Slawecki
Sea Changes is an honest-to-god jazzconcept albumfrom composer / pianist Tommy Flanagan. Born in 1930 Detroit, but known more resonantly as a ‘Big Apple’ jazzman, where by the mid-1950s he had moved to groove alongside the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis and Oscar Pettiford. Flanagan was frequently Bud Powell’s replacement at Birdland, and has also worked extensively with vocalists Tony Bennett and for nearly a dozen years (off and on) with Ella Fitzgerald. For the past two decades he ...
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