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Jazz Articles about Walter Smith III

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Radio & Podcasts

Favorite Music for 2023, Part 1

Read "Favorite Music for 2023, Part 1" reviewed by Michael Ambrosino


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Album Review

Anthony Branker & Imagine: What Place Can Be for Us? - A Suite in Ten Movements

Read "What Place Can Be for Us? - A Suite in Ten Movements" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi


L'avventuroso post-bop del compositore Anthony Branker, ben espresso dall'album Beauty Within del quintetto Imagine, trova nuovi e più articolati sviluppi in questo What Place Can Be for Us?. Il gruppo conferma il chitarrista Pete McCann e la coppia Fabian Almazan e Linda May Han Oh ampliandosi fino a un medio organico con alcuni dei massimi giovani strumentisti di New York: il trombettista Philip Dizack, i sassofonisti Walter Smith III e Remy Le Boeuf, il batterista Donald Edwards e la vocalist ...

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Liner Notes

Josh Nelson: LA Stories: Live at Sam First

Read "Josh Nelson: LA Stories: Live at Sam First" reviewed by Robert Petersen


Josh Nelson's LA Stories: Live at Sam First was recorded in February 2022 at Sam First, which has quickly become the heartbeat of L.A.'s jazz community. With this album, Nelson continues a love letter to Los Angeles he began with his 2017 release, The Sky Remains, which was part of his Discovery Project multimedia series. In a city where history is too often forgotten, Nelson puts it center stage. In “Tiburcio," Nelson conjures the life of the 19th ...

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Album Review

Walter Smith III: Return To Casual

Read "Return To Casual" reviewed by Dave Linn


Walter Smith III released his debut album, Casually Introducing (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2006), to enthusiastic reviews. On it, he covered Sam Rivers, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman and wrote the other six tracks, showcasing a mature and varied sense of composition. His playing and arrangements showed him to be a new, young (he was 26 years old) artist on the rise. Over the ensuing years, he released eight other albums, mainly for European labels. These recordings (including one live ...

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Album Review

Kendrick Scott: Corridors

Read "Corridors" reviewed by Chris May


Some of the press releases coming out of Blue Note's Los Angeles HQ since the pandemic have been ripe for inclusion in British satirical magazine Private Eye's Desperate Marketing column. In this, the Eye prints particularly egregious, or just plain laughable, attempts by publicists to hook-up what they are selling with headline news events, or to make eye-wateringly hyperbolic claims, or to manufacture an intellectual or cultural context for an artefact where none such exists. True, one ...

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Album Review

Kendrick Scott: Corridors

Read "Corridors" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic


Drummer Kendrick Scott's A Wall Becomes A Bridge (Blue Note, 2019) was everything to everybody and then some. Optimistic yet well aware of the roiling contradictions beneath it all, the formidable Corridors, its revivalist tenor intact, carries on that spirit of interplay and common alliance. Breaking from the start with the loping, street-smart, stride of “What Day Is It?" Scott with Corridors take a sure journey, featuring conversant saxophonist Walter Smith III and the equally versed bassist Reuben ...

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Liner Notes

Anthony Branker: What Place Can Be for Us? - A Suite in Ten Movements

Read "Anthony Branker: What Place Can Be for Us? - A Suite in Ten Movements" reviewed by Michael Ambrosino


Ma Rainey channeled music as her ritual of “singing to understand life." Congressman John Lewis leveraged music towards the “good trouble" he created fighting for civil rights in an uncivil land. Anthony Branker understands music as the calculus of his life's work—the art of weaving words and sound into transcendent tapestries that explore the rich, complex, and nuanced aspects of intolerance, beauty, prejudice, spirituality, gender, equality and social justice. The composite of this artistry exists within the remarkable ...


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