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Randal Despommier: South
by Dan Bilawsky
Growing up in Metairie, Louisiana--a mere six miles from New Orleans--alto saxophonist Randal Despommier's formative experiences were rooted in the Crescent City's fertile sonic soil. A stone's throw away from the action, he was able to cut his teeth on the local scene(s) and put his horn to good use in Mardi Gras parades. In addition, and in some of those instances, he learned a great deal by watching and musically interacting with his father, Phil Despommier--a pupil of NOLA ...
Continue ReadingByron Asher's Skrontch Music: Lord, when you send the rain
by Gareth Thompson
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive one in American history. Seven states were affected and the political fallout saw Herbert Hoover reach the White House by 1929. The saxophonist Byron Asher believes another political action was the development of New Orleans jazz, early in the twentieth century, in direct resistance to the racism of Jim Crow Louisiana. On his rootsy reflective debut, Byron Asher's Skrontch Music (Sinking City Records, 2019), he sought to represent these twin ...
Continue ReadingJon Cleary: So Swell
by Thomas Cole
Imagine the joy of discovering a new album from Jon Cleary recorded in 2020, featuring Johnny Vidacovich and James Singleton together and occasionally accompanied by James Rivers on sax. Part of the Newvelle Records project involved producing an actual vinyl record titled The New Orleans Collection though it escaped notice from a casual listening audience with access only to segments of the sessions on YouTube. With ample advance notice with full charts provided by Cleary for this epic ...
Continue ReadingJon Cleary: The New Orleans Collection: So Swell
by Pierre Giroux
Newvelle Records, which was established in 2015, believes that in the digital age there is an opportunity to build a new model for the creating and distributing music. Each year, Newvelle releases a series of six albums, exclusively on vinyl, that pairs musicians with celebrated artists, writers and poets. The New Orleans Collection contains four single sleeve 180-gram clear vinyl albums, each of which was recorded in New Orleans between January and March 2020 at Esplanade Studios, a former church ...
Continue ReadingCyrus Nabipoor: Live At The Marigny Opera House
by Mike Jurkovic
Whatever Mother Nature or callous venture bankers do to the battered city of New Orleans, its music keeeps getting passed from legend to legend to legend, to the next wave of youngsters that best exemplifies the historical resiliency of a people and their city. And perhaps one of the busiest and most inventive A-listers on New Orleans' thriving jazz scene is trumpeter Cyrus Nabipoor, whose bold, magnetic lines and openness to free falling genres--Thelonious Monk, funk, rock, trad, hip-hop, bop--makes ...
Continue ReadingCyrus Nabipoor: Live At The Marigny Opera House
by Jim Worsley
Trumpeter Cyrus Nabipoor and his quintet dive headfirst into the deep end of musical conversation in this live performance, with “What Is This." The exchanges between Nabipoor and tenor saxophonist Brad Walker are crisp, spoken with emphasis and assurance. Balancing guitar strains from George Wilde reset the clock, leading to a more inclusive conversation with the rhythm section of drummer Brad Webb and bassist James Singleton. The intensity of the Nabipoor composition, “What Is This," is eschewed for ...
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