Articles by Dan McClenaghan
Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Aki Takase / Christian Weber / Michael Griener: Auge
Pianist Aki Takase had a hand in the creation of one of 2020's top jazz CDs: Slow Pieces For Aki (Intakt Records), by her husband and fellow pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. She suggested a set less involved in the speed, volume and intensity that was Schlippenvach's customary avant-garde approach. He answered with a twenty-one tune recording of ever-shifting beauty and down tempo restraint. Takase--with partners Christian Weber, on bass, and Michael Griener playing drums--opens 2021 with an answer ...
read moreHal Galper Quintet: Live At The Berlin Philharmonic 1977
It must be gratifying to accomplish everything you set out to do. Pianist Hal Galper says he has done just that. And, after a career that included work with trumpeter Chet Baker and saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and Stan Getz, along with a ten year stint in saxophonist Phil Woods' band (1980-1990), followed by ten years of touring and recording with his own trio, that claim would have been a valid one then, before the dawn of the new millennium. But ...
read moreErik Verwey: People Flow
Dutch pianist Erik Verwey lives in a houseboat on the river Amstel, in Amsterdam. His view takes in the shimmering water and the geometry of the right angled architectures jutting from the greenery of the shoreline. It is a view that certainly influences his music. But not perhaps as much as do the encounters with people who flow, river-like, through his life. Encounters that Verwey has translated into People Flow, his debut album. Verwey's sounds, on eight piano ...
read moreMarc Copland: John
Pianist Marc Copland crossed paths with guitarist John Abercrombie in the early '70s, playing in drummer Chico Hamilton's group. Copland was, at the time, a saxophonist. The collaboration there began a fifty year friendship and multiple Abercrombie/Copland collaborations . Abercrombie passed away in 2017. John is Copland's eulogy for him, solo piano renditions of a set of his friend and mentor's compositions In 2018 Copland also released a tribute to another late partner in music, bassist Gary Peacock, ...
read moreMeridian Odyssey: Second Wave
Seattle's Origin Records opened 2021 on a hopeful, turning-of-the-page note with Second Wave, by the group Meridian Odyssey. The band comprised five young (twenty-something) Seattle-ites who took advantage of the time on their collective hands, and the low air fares resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, to journey to Alaska, where guitarist Martin Budde's father—a pilot—owns an airplane hangar which served as a recording studio. Where the plane, the hangar's previous occupant, ended up is uncertain. But the saxophone, guitar, bass, ...
read moreJason Whatley: On the Beak
If Australia is “The Land Down Under," then Tasmania could be called “The Land Way Down Under,' a thumbprint of a main island cut adrift from the southern hemisphere's one country continent about 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, to sit off the south western corner of the state of Victoria, not too far from Antarctica. An isolated land with a population of about 550,000 that doesn't get a lot of airtime on ...
read moreVadim Bessarab Trio: Differences
When the COVID-19 virus hit Ukraine in early 2020, the nascent Vadim Bessarab was forced to abandon its concert plans. But the no-concerts mode gave the group the opportunity to engage in rehearsal with “double power and passion." This resulted in the trio's first recording, documented with the help of what Bessarab describes as an “aspiring recording and mixing engineer." That aspirer, Cyril Oleynikov, doesn't have his own studio, so he records on location. In this case the location was ...
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