Jazz Articles about Tony Williams

Kenny Dorham: Una Mas

by Greg Simmons
November 22, 2011

Trumpeter Kenny Dorham's Una Mas was one of 1963's best records. The thought of hearing it reissued on ultra-high quality vinyl by the good folks at Music Matters should make jazz heads swoon. With its melding of hard-bop, bossa nova, and the blues, Una Mas is a prime example of the memorable vamps that Blue Note favored at the time, finding ultimate success later that year with Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder. Dorham was a prolific recording artist for ...

Eric Dolphy: Out To Lunch! - 45 rpm Reissue

by Matt Marshall
October 2, 2009

Eric Dolphy Out To Lunch! Blue Note / Music Matters 2009 (1964)

Few jazz fans still need an introduction to reed player Eric Dolphy's 1964 masterpiece, Out to Lunch!. It's an album people tend to come to fairly early on in their love affair with the music (assuming, that is, the affair started after the early 1960s), and serves as a meeting ground for a wide scope of fans, be they stalwarts of bop, ...

Tony Williams: Tony Williams: Mosaic Select 24

by Matthew Miller
May 5, 2007

Blue Note president Alfred Lion knew talent when he saw it and in the early 1960s--a time of unparalleled success for his once fledgling label--he signed an astonishingly virtuosic drummer who had recently emerged with Jackie McLean. We all know the story: a mere eighteen years old and Williams was an unstoppable force at the kit. Beating infectious time over sharp snare hits and the resounding wash of his hi-hat, the youngster added a new dimension to every band he ...

Tony Williams: Mosaic Select 24

by John Kelman
December 11, 2006

Tony WilliamsMosaic Select 24Mosaic Records2006When Tony Williams passed away unexpectedly in 1997, at the age of 51, it was the end to a career that had done much to redefine the drummer's role in jazz. From his earliest days--first with saxophonist Jackie McLean, and shortly afterwards, while still in his teens, as a member of trumpet icon Miles Davis' second great quintet--Williams lifted the kit out of its conventional position as an ...

The Tony Williams Lifetime: Emergency!

by Trevor MacLaren
November 16, 2005

The Tony Williams Lifetime Emergency! Polydor 1969

A few months back I came across a great book written on the last forty years of jazz, Howard Mandel's Future Jazz. The book covered a lot of stylistic ground, including avant-garde, fusion, and free. It basically touched on jazz that Ken Burns never deemed a necessary part of jazz history. In a chapter on guitarist John McLaughlin, Mandel mentioned a band that ...

McCoy Tyner: Counterpoints

by AAJ Staff
December 7, 2004

McCoy Tyner has basically been making the same insanely luscious and gorgeously dense modal music for nearly 40 years now. Which means that Counterpoints , which consists of five unreleased live tracks from a 1978 Tokyo concert (others were issued in 1979 on the currently unavailable Passion Dance ), is unlikely to offer anything new to anybody who's got more than a passing familiarity with the legendary pianist's work. That said, the sound is clear, Tyner is in ...

Miles Davis - Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1963-1964

by Colin Fleming
September 22, 2004

Seven Steps : Review #1 | Review #2 | Review #3 | Discuss | Poll

Miles Davis Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings Of Miles Davis, 1963-1964 Columbia Legacy 2004

One of the more undervalued phases in Miles Davis' career, the years 1963-64 are typically deemed a fallow period, marked by a few mildly inventive studio creations and scattershot radio broadcasts. Davis' transformations were often stylistic, but this collection puts the bulk ...