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Colin Hancock
Oliver-Smith Incomparables: Stomp Your Stuff
by Pierre Giroux
Many bands play early jazz these days, but few make it sound as if the ink is still wet on the page. The Oliver-Smith Incomparables accomplish exactly that on Stomp Your Stuff, a recording that salutes the musical language of Jelly Roll Morton without ever treating it as a historical artifact. Pianist Andrew Oliver and drummer Hal Smith lead an exceptional ensemble featuring Colin Hancock on cornet, Andy Schumm on clarinet-cornet, T.J. Müller on trombone-cornet-vocal, Jacob Alspach on guitar-banjo, and ...
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by Jack Bowers
Although he was best known as a pianist, the late Jelly Roll Morton was never shy when it came to blowing his own horn. Among Morton's claims was that he had “invented" jazz, an assertion that almost surely stretches the truth but is virtually impossible to disprove. What is known is that Morton was playing a form of jazz as early as 1904 and that he and a later band, the Red Hot Peppers, helped place “hot jazz" on the ...
Continue ReadingTerry Waldo & The Gotham City Band: Treasury Volume 3
by Jack Bowers
When it comes to ragtime jazz, pianist, historian, author, and cultural preservationist Terry Waldo literally wrote the book. Said book is This Is Ragtime (Jazz at Lincoln Center, Inc., 1976), widely regarded as the most thorough and authoritative guide to one of modern jazz's early precursors. Treasury, Volume 3 is the last in a trilogy of recordings by Waldo's Gotham City Band devoted to the best of traditional ragtime music. This is exuberant toe-tapping jazz, radiating happiness and ...
Continue ReadingColin Hancock's Jazz Hounds Featuring Catherine Russell: Cat & The Hounds
by Pierre Giroux
Catherine Russell teams up with Colin Hancock's Jazz Hounds for the release Cat & The Hounds, a recording exploring the roots of Black popular music from the early 1920s. Far from simply nostalgic, the project acts as a lively revival of an evolving art form, balancing the syncopated ragtime style and blues-infused improvisations that defined the Jazz Age. Russell's commanding voice, rich with warmth and character, serves as the perfect centre of attention as the band uncovers rare and overlooked ...
Continue ReadingTerry Waldo & the Gotham City Band: Treasury, Volume 2
by Jack Bowers
Like any other handiwork you can name, contemporary jazz did not emerge from a vacuum. It sprang forth from a variety of sources, including but not limited to bebop, cool jazz, swing, trad jazz (Dixieland), blues, stride and perhaps the granddaddy of them all, ragtime. Yes, ragtime. Before there was King Oliver or Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Woody Herman, Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson or John Coltrane, there was ragtime. And for those who surmise that ragtime ...
Continue ReadingTerry Waldo: Treasury Volume 1
by Nicholas F. Mondello
Simply stated, and without hyperbole, Terry Waldo is an American musical treasure. He's also a treasure purveyor. A protégé of and mentored by Eubie Blake, Waldo is a player, composer, arranger, author, podcaster, theatrical director, and the noted oracle for ragtime and early American popular music. With Treasury Volume 1 (the first of a three-volume set), Waldo and his all-star Gotham City Band cover ten selections from the embryonic days of American jazz.Things kick this lively session off ...
Continue ReadingTerry Waldo & the Gotham City Band: Treasury Volume 1
by Jack Bowers
Pianist Terry Waldo isn't stuck in the past; he revels in it, as do his eager teammates on Treasury, Vol. 1--the first of three such discourses, according to the album's liner notes--recorded not in jazz's primal era but in May and June 2022 (save for “After You've Gone," recorded in October 2018 with the splendid guest vocalist Veronica Swift). Waldo, a student of jazz from its origins to present-day genres, treads a well-worn path here, reprising bright and enduring themes ...
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