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Lauren White: Making It Up As We Go Along
by Nicholas F. Mondello
With this, her fifth album, Los Angeles-based Renaissance lady, Lauren White offers eleven intriguing selections across a range of styles and sources, backed up by some of the city's best. While shrewdly avoiding the tried, true and over-recorded, White uses her subtle skills with taste and maturity. Interestingly, the album plays sequentially as if it were a performance. That is one of its attractions. Launching things, Steely Dan's “I'm Not the Same Without You" is a coy ...
read moreAnn Hampton Callaway: Finding Beauty. Originals. Volume 1
by Richard J Salvucci
"This is my most personal record," Callaway says. “Throughout my career, I've loved singing the great jazz classics and selections from the Great American Songbook, but I've always snuck my original songs on various projects. The pandemic made me think, 'I don't know if I'll live through this, but if I do, what's at the top of my bucket list?' And I realized that I wanted to tell my story and share the deepest part of me. What better way ...
read moreJeremy Cohen: Raymond Scott Reimagined
by Walter Atkins
Raymond Scott Reimagined is an engaging collaborative project with Quartet San Francisco, Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band and the Grammy winning acapella group Take 6 on two tracks. The album is a thoughtful and stylish interpretation of Raymond Scott's legacy. It is also interspersed with audio tidbits featuring Scott's singular musical approaches. The album kicks off with the enticing “Powerhouse," familiar to anyone who has watched a Warner Bros Looney Tunes cartoon. “Toy Trumpet" is a tasty composition ...
read moreGrant Geissman: Blooz
by Richard J Salvucci
There are several ways of judging the success of a recording. Perhaps a hearing makes the listener, if a musician, want to sit in and jam. That is a good sign. Then there is the “sit still test." For many, the direct, emotional and physical connection between music and brain leaves them simply hanging out, absence of motion impossible, sitting still not an option. Grant Geissman's Blooz happily passes both tests. Turn the volume up and a blues party comes ...
read moreGordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: The Reset
by Jack Bowers
Gordon Goodwin's dynamic Big Phat Band rumbles back onto the scene with The Reset, a somewhat less-than-big-phat album whose dual purpose, according to Goodwin, is to express hope and gratitude in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and to honor one of Goodwin's mentors, the late Sammy Nestico. Goodwin calls the album an EP, whose twenty-eight minute playing time places it in roughly the same ballpark as a vinyl LP from the good old days before digital recording and streaming. ...
read moreLauren White and the Quinn Johnson Trio: Ever Since The World Ended
by Richard J Salvucci
There is an interesting take of “Ever Since the World Ended" on You Tube. It is an evocative video, a kind of visual essay on Mose Allison's blues which could serve as an anthem to the pandemic and accompanying mess we are in. Lauren White (accompanied by Dolores Scozzesi) is appropriately downbeat, and well complemented by the Quinn Johnson Trio. One could enjoy a stiff drink while reflecting on the last year and listening. And, mostly, ...
read moreLauren White: Ever Since The World Ended
by C. Michael Bailey
There is a cadre of West Coast jazz musicians who tacitly orbit one Mark Winkler. This embarrassing wealth of talent includes: Cheryl Bentyne, Dolores Scozzesi, Judy Wexler, Robyn Spangler, Gary Brumburgh, Jeffery Gimble, Ada Bird Wolfe, and our present subject, Lauren White. White, an original East Coast product, expatriated to Westward to act and sing...and record. Her previous recording, Life In The Modern World (Cafe pacific Records, 2019) was the (unknowing) opening bookend to a most curious cultural year we ...
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