Featured Jazz Articles
The Musician / Entrepreneur: Eddie Roberts
by B.D. Lenz
Throughout my Chats with Cats columns I've tried to seek out information and advice from professionals across the jazz spectrum to give musicians, like myself, the tools to forward their own careers. This is an unprecedented time where technology has put it all out there for the taking. I discuss all of this in my Mind Your Business columns as well. In this installment I interviewed a prime example of the musician/entrepreneur. Eddie Roberts, best known as the ...
read moreECM Records Touchstones: Part 2
by Dan McClenaghan
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 This second edition of “ECM Touchstones" explores more of the label's early recordings, repackaged and offered up as a way to present music that had perhaps slipped through time's cracks, into the hard-to-find category. Of these, four were re-released in 2019, one in 2008—32 to 43 years after their original releases. The music on these albums is stylistically diverse and uniformly excellent. All of it has stood the test of ...
read moreHow Do You Rate Miles Davis’ Music, On Record and Live, In The 1980s?
by Ian Patterson
The release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: That's What Happened 1982-1985 invites renewed reflection on Miles Davis' music in the 1980s. A few tracks aside, these studio outtakes from the recording sessions that produced Star People (Columbia, 1983), Decoy (Columbia, 1984) and You're Under Arrest (Columbia, 1985) don't amount to a whole heap of beans, which is hardly surprising if they were not good enough to make the official album releases. But the previously unreleased live album ...
read moreECM Records Touchstones: Part 1
by Dan McClenaghan
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Every album ever released by ECM Records would be readily available in a better world. But that, understandably, is not the case. The German label, founded by Manfred Eicher--who still holds the helm--debuted in 1969 with pianist Mal Waldron's Free At Last. In the ensuing five-plus decades, the Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM) has made the world a better place, releasing well over 1,700 albums. The label is often said ...
read moreMary Lou Williams: Into the Zone of Music
by Jakob Baekgaard
Few musicians have embraced the entire history of jazz like Mary Lou Williams, and at the same time shaped its development compositionally and instrumentally. She brought jazz into contact with classical music and played spiritual jazz before it became hip, but she was also a treasured teacher and mentor. Mary Lou Williams was born in Atlanta, Georgia on May 8, 1910, as Mary Elfrieda Scruggs. She grew up with an absent mother who drank, and the father was ...
read moreTen Essential Keith Jarrett Solo Recordings
by Karl Ackermann
Keith Jarrett is a perfectionist. Perfection and innovation are, more often than not, mutually exclusive qualities and that is where Jarrett reveals his unique strain of genius. He remains the most respected and influential figure in the world of jazz, improvisation, and beyond. Despite two strokes that have permanently left him unable to play piano, his place in the pantheon of musical greats is cemented. Throughout his career, Jarrett has explored a wide range of musical styles, including traditional and ...
read moreLeonard E. Jones: Taking Control Of Destiny
by Barbara Ina Frenz
Bassist and photographer Leonard E. Jones laid the foundation of his musical and artistic ideas as an original member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The AACM ranks as the most well-known and influential organization of the 1960s under African American leadership that created American experimental music through challenging “racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure" (George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 2008) to make this music thrive and reach the highest levels. Lewis characterizes the ...
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