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Jazz Articles about William Parker
Hirsh / Swell / Clouse / Parker: Out On A Limb
by Mark Corroto
Can déjà vu be contagious? Or at least a particular quality or disposition that is communicable? This might be the question to ask after sitting down with Out On A Limb by the improvising quartet of Steve Hirsh, Steve Swell, Jim Clouse, and William Parker. The music this unit created spontaneously in April 2024 does not appear from thin air, it is a product of a half-century of innovation and modernism in music. Much of that history has ...
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William Parker, Kimura/Guy/Hemingway & Frank London
by Maurice Hogue
There are some shiny new trio albums highlighting this edition of One Man's Jazz that are well worth checking out. Bassist William Parker, keyboardist & instrument inventor Cooper-Moore and drummer Hamid Drake have played together in all manner of situations but they've never recorded as a trio; the new Heart Trio rectifies that, although don't expect to hear Parker play bass or Cooper-Moore play piano--they've brought the “other" stuff. It's a terrific album. In the traditional piano trio mode comes ...
Continue ReadingJames Brandon Lewis: For Mahalia With Love (Expanded Edition)
by Stefano Merighi
La musica di James Brandon Lewis è potente, assertiva, trascinante. Ma rivela talvolta, sotto lo strato di forza, una sottile e affascinante vulnerabilità emotiva, che rende ancora più ricco il suo discorso compositivo e solistico. Come nel caso di questo scintillante omaggio al mondo espressivo di Mahalia Jackson, che si realizza attraverso memorie familiari, quelle della nonna che ha trasmesso a James questa passione tuttora bruciante. Lewis è una delle voci più convincenti del jazz contemporaneo che non ...
Continue ReadingJames Brandon Lewis: For Mahalia With Love (Expanded Edition)
by Chris May
Not since Oded Tzur's Isabela (ECM, 2022) has a comparably exalted tenor saxophone-led album come along, not until For Mahalia, With Love. Vaultingly great jazz and deep solace for the soul, For Mahalia, With Love was released in late 2023. An annual cycle for albums of this quality is actually a sufficiency, for there is enough in both these, and those that preceded them, to last a listener a lifetime. File next to John Coltrane's Crescent (Impulse!, 1964) and Albert ...
Continue ReadingRoy Campbell: Visitation Of Spirits
by John Sharpe
A former stalwart of the New York avant jazz scene, which finds expression at the annual Vision Festival, trumpeter Roy Campbell died in January 2014, aged 61. While not quite forgotten, his name does not spring readily to the lips a decade on. Perhaps Visitation Of Spirits, an archival live recording from 1985, will help redress that situation. It features the Pyramid Trio, one of Campbell's more enduring groups, which issued three albums over a lifespan of more than 25 ...
Continue ReadingJames Brandon Lewis / Red Lily Quintet: For Mahalia, With Love
by Pat Youngspiel
Moving on chronologically from George Washington Carver--the African-American musician and influential agricultural scientist to whom James Brandon Lewis' previous recording with the Red Lily Quintet, Jesup Wagon (Tao Forms 2021), was dedicated--For Mahalia, With Love continues the pattern of paying homage to influential Afro-Americans who, in their own way, changed the course of history. This album's dedicatee is the early gospel queen Mahalia Jackson, whose seminal performances lit a spark in the saxophonist's grandmother; she in turn carried the spark ...
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