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Jazz Articles about Rick Germanson
Joe Chambers: Dance Kobina
by Chris May
Drummer, composer and sometime vibraphonist Joe Chambers secured his place in jazz history going on six decades ago, though you might not guess it from listening to this album. In the mid-1960s, he was the drummer on a string of historic Blue Note albums recorded by Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and Bobby Hutcherson, among others, and also on a series of important albums Archie Shepp made for Impulse!, including the landmark Fire Music (1965). Given the ...
read moreGemma Sherry: Music To Dream To
by Jack Bowers
Vocalist Gemma Sherry's fourth album, Music to Dream To, recorded in July 2020, closely follows her third, Let's Get Serious, released less than a year earlier. This latest album expresses Sherry's love for the music of South America in general and Brazilian bossa nova in particular, with half a dozen engaging songs that sway to an irresistible bossa (or samba) beat. Two numbers"The Telephone Song" and Keep Talking"are repeated ("acoustic version," the track listing points out), and even counting the ...
read moreIan Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown
by Jack Bowers
American alto saxophonist Ian Hendrickson-Smith and Canadian tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds had been gigging together for almost two decades, mostly in Canada, but hadn't preserved any of their encounters on record until Hendrickson-Smith invited his companion to join him for a studio date in November 2019 at the renowned Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. The album was planned as a tribute to drummer Lawrence Leathers who died in June of that year, age thirty-seven. Leathers' nickname was ...
read moreGemma Sherry: Let's Get Serious
by C. Michael Bailey
A perfect response to challenge and change. In the parlance of the agrarian American South, Gemma Sherry is makin' hay while the sun shines. Let's Get Serious is the singer's light-as-air, coquettishly coy wink at the COVID-19 pandemica wink as opposed to any other response, as Sherry is a true Lady. The title of her third full-length (in 2020 alone) recording is deliciously ironic as the tone is anything but. Globally, this release is best defined in the ...
read moreIan Hendrickson-Smith: The Lowdown
by Pierre Giroux
Those who thought that the re-emergence of vinyl records might be a passing fad as a saleable medium in this era of CDs, streaming and MP3 downloads, are proving to be wrong. The latest sales figures produced by RIAA for the first half of this year show vinyl sales at $232 million compared to CD sales at $130 million. This is the the first time in 34 years that this happened.So with the wind in his sales (sic), ...
read more"Killer" Ray Appleton: Naptown Legacy
by AAJ Italy Staff
Quanti batteristi vorrebbero un'adolescenza come quella di Killer" Ray Appleton? Nato a Indianapolis nel 1941, ha iniziato a suonare le percussioni a nove anni, formandosi in quella fervida scena musicale accanto a Freddie Hubbard, James Spaulding, Melvin Rhyne, Larry Ridley e altri protagonisti dell'hard-bop anni cinquanta. In quel periodo Indianapolis era uno dei centri propulsivi del jazz moderno: da lì sono venuti Wes e Buddy Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, Slide Hampton, Pookie Johnson e molti altri strumentisti, che hanno contribuito a ...
read moreRick Germanson Trio: Off the Cuff
by John Kelman
With so many mainstream piano trios flooding the market, it's increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's easier when, in the instance of a Brad Mehldau, John Taylor or Enrico Pieranunzi, the artist's voice is so distinctive and approach so readily identifiable that there can be little doubt of its relevance. It becomes a greater challenge with pianists working this space who combine original composition with the Great American Songbook and, occasionally, more contemporary popular sources. Still, ...
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