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Larry Coryell: Improvisations: Best of the Vanguard Years
by Josef Woodard
There have been many smoother operators in the world of jazz guitar than Larry Coryell, the brainy rough rider who was a natural-born fusioneer, in the best sense. There have been cleaner technicians on the instrument, with a more lucid sense of identity and careers that have followed a logical, rolling landscape. But not many have quite attained Coryell's strange, madly eclectic state of grace: into music he came, he saw and heard things not yet articulated, he conquered on ...
read moreJim Pepper / Amina Claudine Myers / Anthony Cox / Leopoldo Fleming: Afro Indian Blues
by Donald Elfman
It's American roots music in flying colors as four simpatico musicians dig deeply at a 1991 Austrian jazz festival. Native American (Craw) Jim Pepper, African-Americans Amina Claudine Myers and Anthony Cox and Puerto Rican Leopoldo Fleming wowed the audience with native music--the blues, jazz, Indian and African music that seems all about the passion and power to unite. The concert opens with--what else?--the blues. It's basically Billie Holiday's Fine and Mellow, and is a down-home groove. Myers ...
read moreJim Pepper: Polar Bear Stomp
by Bill Siegel
Jim Pepper Polar Bear Stomp Universal Music (Austria) 2004
Jim didn't want me to write about the music, since he thinks the music has the right to speak for itself. He also didn't want me to write a biography; instead, only my impressions." Enja Records co-founder and Jim Pepper producer, Horst Weber.
How fitting that Jim Pepper's friend and professional associate Horst Weber remembers that it was by impressions that Pepper wanted ...
read moreJim Pepper: Afro Indian Blues
by Bill Siegel
Amina Claudine Myers & Jim Pepper Afro Indian Blues PAO Records 2006
Why now? Why review a recording of a concert that happened fifteen years ago? For one, because it's taken this long for anyone to get around to releasing the performance on CD. But even more importantly, because this is a major event and should get all the exposure possible.
In 1991, at the time of the gig, Pepper was already sick with ...
read moreJim Pepper - Amina Myers - Anthony Cox - Leopoldo Fleming: Afro Indian Blues
by AAJ Italy Staff
Quest'inedito, suggestivo, concerto di Amina Myers e Jim Pepper, tenuto il 19 maggio 1991 al festival di Raab (Austria), documenta una delle ultime esibizioni del sassofonista, prematuramente scomparso nel 1992. L'incontro con la cantante afro-americana non poteva che avvenire sul terreno delle rispettive radici musicali: da alcuni anni sia Pepper che la Myers avevano lasciato gli ambiti d'avanguardia (il primo con Paul Motian, la seconda accanto ai protagonisti dell'AACM) per una sintesi, profondamente sentita e di grande impatto emozionale, con ...
read moreThere Are No Coincidences: A Tale of Synchronicity
by Bill Siegel
Or Meditations on Jim Pepper, Chief Bey, Milford Graves, a Heron and a Flock of Geese
(excerpts from this appeared in the Winter/Spring 2005 issue of Planet Jazz magazine)
If anything is a coincidence, then everything must be; And if everything is coincidence, then surely nothing really happens by chance.
Item: One of the first times I listened to saxophonist Jim Pepper ("Comin' and Goin,'" from the album of the same name). I was driving on a crowded ...
read moreDriving with Jim Pepper
by Bill Siegel
It was a dark and stormy night. No really, it was dark and it was stormy. I was driving home, maybe halfway from Leicester, Massachusetts to Nashua, New Hampshire. Ordinarily, it was maybe an hour-and-a-quarter's drive, but in this rain it would take at least two hours, I guessed. It hadn't been a particularly snowy winter, but as spring approached it seemed that nearly every weekend that I made that trek it was raining. Raining hard.
There are stretches along ...
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