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Laszlo Gardony - Signature Time (2011)
Source:
Something Else!
Hungarian-born pianist Laszlo Gardony is an accomplished musician and composer, having graduated from Berklee and serving as a professor there for a number of years. He's mingled with many of the best jazz has to offer: Dave Holland, Miroslav Vitous, David “Fathead" Newman, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman and John Blake are all name artists he's worked with, some of them extensively. Last month came Gardony's ninth album, Signature Time, and while the title might suggest a bunch of experiments in ...
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Vibrant Historical Reconstruction with Brian Carpenter's "Hothouse Stomp"
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Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards
Early jazz was not a matter of three or four bands with monster soloists playing in a vacuum. Not every band had the over- powering playing of Armstrong, Oliver or Keppard gracing the front line. And jazz as it flowered was not merely a showcase for soloists. There was the hot two-beat swing, the arrangements, the fact that this was music for people to dig live, not some living museum of early style. That perhaps is obvious, but histories of ...
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Dave Douglas - GPS Vol. 1, Rare Metals (Greenleaf, 2011)
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Music and More by Tim Niland
Trumpeter, cornet player and composer Dave Douglas leads a myriad of bands that cover a lot of territory. This one, Brass Ecstasy, takes the ideas from brass bands and New Orleans bands of the past and moves the music into the present. Recorded in an informal manner, the music feels off the cuff, the sounds of musicians playing for themselves and having fun doing it. The personnel of the group is: Dave Douglas on trumpet, Vincent Chancey on French horn, ...
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Anne Mette Iversen Quartet - The Milo Songs (2011)
Source:
Something Else!
When I think of all the members of the young, exciting roster that the fledgling Brooklyn Jazz Underground Jazz Records has in its ranks, one of the first names I think of is Anne Mette Iversen. She is a serious talent at both acoustic bass and compositions. OK, so there might be a few dozen bass players out there who are that strong in both departments, and quite a number of them I've said those things about them here. But ...
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One Track Mind: Fleet Foxes, "The Shrine/an Argument" (2011)
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Something Else!
By Mark Saleski Do things in music always have to go smoothly? Does it bother you when your expectations are upset? I've always enjoyed it when a song takes an unexpected left turn. Two great examples are John Zorn's version of the “The James Bond Theme" (from Naked City) where, right in the middle of a fairly well-behaved and swingin' version of the tune, mayhem takes over as the musicians play whatever they please for eight bars. Let me tell ...
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Yes - Fly from Here (2011)
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Something Else!
This album is, in many ways, better than it has any right to be. Yes had already tried a project with Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes—and without Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman—in 1980, and the resulting project Drama turned into an guitar-focused curio. The group went back to the drawing board, adding Trevor Rabin as Steve Howe departed, and welcoming back Anderson. This updated sound, at times an almost unrecognizable prog-pop amalgam, helped shoot the band to the top of ...
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Canadian duo Koller Michels' second album reflects depth of friendship and mutual love for jazz
Source:
Lauren Rogers
George Koller is the bass; Julie Michels is the voice. On their aptly-titled second album, Bass and Voice, that is all the Canadian duo needs. On Bass and Voice, Koller and Michels are on the opposite ends of an emotional thread, each of them holding up a side; listening to the music that unreels between them is like prying into a private conversation. There is a level of intimacy that happens between two musicians communicating with one another through the ...
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Australia's Backlash Jazz Quintet revives hard bop sounds with cage-rattling energy on new CD
Source:
Lauren Rogers
To trumpeter Benn Hodgkin, jazz is about an era. A specific style. And a record label. When Hodgkin formed his band the Backlash Jazz Quintet in 2002, it was to pay homage to the hard bop records that Blue Note released in the '50s and '60s. Artists such as Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, and Freddie Hubbard helped pioneer the genre, which brought a funky element to jazz inherited from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and the blues. On the Backlash ...
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