Interview News

Brains, Beauty ... and a Bass

Source: The Augmented Ear by John Patten
July 16, 2010

If you've not listened to Esperanza Spalding, you're missing out on a rare treat.Spalding is a 25-year-old dynamo, maybe the best thing to happen to jazz in a decade or two because she has the star quality missing from so many young players. Eldar and Julian Lage are exciting players, but Spalding is not only a capable player--she's also a singer capable of making a song her own.Check out this video of her performing Stevie Wonder's “Overjoyed":

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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 3)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
July 16, 2010

In the early years of LP cover design, there were no rules. The only driving force was that a cover had to be graphically gripping. Designers then often worked with just two colors, and much rested on typeface solutions and the integration of motion, dimension and excitement. As one of the early jazz-album cover designers and art directors, Paul Bacon was free to follow his artistic instincts and invent a fresh, new cover look. But Paul was also on ...

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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 2)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
July 15, 2010

Paul Bacon is modest and soft-spoken. Since the late 1940s, jazz musicians have sensed in the album illustrator, designer and art director a wise and gentle soul. This was particularly true of Thelonious Monk, who saw Paul as an unpretentious artist and sensitive thinker. For his part, Paul saw in Monk a creative genius who was impervious to conformity and allergic to hidden agendas. Paul felt strongly from their first meeting in early 1948 that Monk was everything a jazz ...

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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 1)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
July 14, 2010

Even if the name Paul Bacon doesn't ring a bell, his covers for more than 200 jazz albums will. Paul helped set the mood and mystique for modern jazz back in the early 1950s at the dawn of the LP jacket. Back then, Paul was the illustrator and art director of many early Blue Note albums and became Riverside's art director until the 1960s, when he went on to an even more illustrious career as a book-cover designer. [Photo of ...

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Fretless Guitarist Timucin Sahin Interviewed at AAJ

Source: All About Jazz
July 14, 2010

Turkish-born/New York-based guitarist Timuin ahin is one of those artists who defines the avant-garde genre. He'll admit that his music is not for everyone, it is not for the casual listener, but it's the music that he hears and the music that he loves. This is not dance music per se, but there is a pulse that underlines ahin's work, that binds the freely improvised and the structured, producing layers of interest in his pieces that go beyond simply being ...

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Happy Birthday, Paul Gonsalves!

Source: Riffs on Jazz by John Anderson
July 13, 2010

Paul Gonsalves, born on this date in 1920, was a tenor saxophonist mainly known for his long association with Duke Ellington. He was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, but his parents were of Cape Verdean heritage. As a child, he and his brothers played Portuguese folk songs on guitar for family gatherings. They also played “hillbilly" and Hawaiian music. These family dates, however, became a chore and turned off the young Paul from playing music. Fortunately, he and his oldest brother, ...

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Leading Questions: Michael Barnett

Source: Seattle Jazz Scene
July 13, 2010

Interview and photo by Steve Korn

When I was 14, I fell in love with the sound of the bass, specifically, Milt Hinton.

If I could do it all over again, I'd probably do most of it again, perhaps more efficiently.

Practice makes perfect, allegedly, but it never quite does which is why we keep doing it.

The bass is “a thing of beauty and a pain-in-the-ass forever."

When I look at where I'm at right now, I know I'm ...

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Saxophonist Nat Birchall Interviewed at AAJ

Source: John Kelman
July 13, 2010

Two of the most over-used phrases in music journalism are “overnight star" and “out of nowhere," and so apologies for starting with them here. But when it comes to describing British saxophonist Nat Birchall, they have an unusual degree of exactitude. Birchall, born in 1957 in the rural seclusion of the hill country of North-West England, where he still lives in 2010, and a saxophonist since 1979, didn't make an impression on Britain's national jazz scene until 2009, when he ...

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