Jazz Articles about Various Artists

Various Artists: 40 Years: A Charlie Brown Christmas

by Jim Santella
October 15, 2005

Oh, to be a child again and to spend Christmas morning surrounded by the things that Santa Claus left you overnight...

Bringing us those Charlie Brown memories from our early television years is an all-star lineup of smooth jazz artists who appreciate the music as much as we do. Surrounded by a large studio orchestra, each performer steps forward and delivers Christmas cheer the Charlie Brown way. It drives straight to your heart.

Vanessa Williams sings ...

100 Years of Jazz Guitar

by Jim Santella
October 12, 2005

Various Artists 100 Years of Jazz Guitar Columbia/Legacy 2005

Containing a veritable encyclopedia of written information about the guitarists who have molded jazz during its century of development, this four-CD boxed set has it all. From the earliest recorded traces of jazz guitar to Bill Frisell and John Scofield, it's all there for study and listening pleasure.

Early traditional jazz, blues, and ragtime included pioneering guitar refrains from legendary figures ...

Various Artists: F-IRE Works: Volume 2

by Chris May
October 9, 2005

The inventions and glories of London's F-IRE collective have been well documented here this year, and several tracks on this double-disc set--pieces like Polar Bear's “Fluffy (I Want You)," Acoustic Ladyland's “Remember," and Julia Biel's “Where Is She Now?"--revisit the highlights. The album also serves up a heap of new material, most of it from CDs to be released later this year or during '06.

So what future treats are coming our way? Plenty, if these advance tasters are anything ...

Various Artists: Verve Remixed 3

by Chris M. Slawecki
September 20, 2005

Annual Verve Remixed projects match up trip-hop and electronic music producers with historic treasures from the label's vaults in order to update or contemporize them. This third volume predominantly features female vocalists like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, and Anita O'Day, from among whom Sarah Vaughan gleefully steals the show.

RSL, a sound production team from Manchester UK, reconstructs Anita O'Day's “Sing, Sing, Sing, a Benny Goodman staple written by Louis Prima, smartly repositioning the skittering drums ...

Various Artists: Italian Cafe

by Woodrow Wilkins
September 14, 2005

To an English-only American, foreign words and phrases can be most daunting. However, when put to music, the picture can be quite different. Fred Buscaglione demonstrates that on “Juke Box, the opening track to Putumayo's Italian Café, a charming, delightful collection of twelve songs that blend Italian heritage with some American musical styles, such as jazz and swing. These songs cover a variety of moods from romance to party, and they seem right at home in a number of venues, ...

Independent Exposure: Part 1

by Eric J. Iannelli
September 12, 2005

The DIY ethic has been prevalent in rock music for several decades now, perhaps seeing its most significant explosion during the punk era of the late '70s. It would later give rise to a whole genre unto itself, otherwise known as “indie," or independent, characterized by artists who deliberately aimed to bypass the formal, big-money channels and instead issued their records on extremely small or ad hoc labels. The emphasis of indie was on the music and getting it heard ...

New Offerings From Clean Feed

by Mark Corroto
September 1, 2005

If you have to pick a label to mark an era in jazz, you might suggest Prestige in the 1950s, Blue Note ('60s), CTI ('70s), Columbia ('80s), and Knitting Factory ('90s) as the spokesmen for those particular decades of jazz. With this new century came an evolution in do-it-yourself musicians and the inevitable revolution into the smaller (say “independent") labels as arbiters of fashion.

In this new millennium the label Clean Feed Records from Portugal has presented more ...