Jazz Articles

Gold Sparkle Trio with Ken Vandermark: Brooklyn Cantos

by Germein Linares
June 19, 2005

Maintaining focus in free jazz seems like an oxymoron. By free, obviously, one assumes no rules, no shackles, and no restrictions. This is fine and dandy in theory; in execution, though, some do better than others with this musical autonomy. It might be free all right, but, is it music and, more importantly to us, is it even jazz?

Brooklyn Cantos, thankfully, is focused free jazz, adventurous music with a purpose. The Gold Sparkle Trio of alto saxophonist Charles Waters, ...

Gold Sparkle Trio w/Ken Vandermark: Brooklyn Cantos

by Mark Corroto
November 30, 2004

They say great minds think alike. I say great musician minds don't think so much alike as they are alike. Bird and Dizzy. Ornette and Cherry. Bennink and Mengelberg.

Operating in similar but different spheres for quite some time, the collaboration between Ken Vandermark and the Gold Sparkle Trio is a true meeting of the minds. Vandermark, born in Rhode Island, made his mark in the creative jazz community of the 1990s Chicago scene, while Andrew Barker and ...

Chris Speed's Yeah NO: Swell Henry

by Eyal Hareuveni
September 10, 2004

Four years have passed since the last release by Chris Speed's Yeah NO quartet, Emit (Songlines, 2000). Speed has been busy in those years as a key player in the ensembles of Uri Caine, Dave Douglas, Myra Melford, Matt Moran and John Hollenbeck. He toured and played with three collaborative bands with overlapping personnel--the Balkan-tinged quartet Pachora, with his own Yeah NO players, electric bassist Skuli Sverrisson, drummer Jim Black, and guitarist Brad Shepik; Jim Black's AlasNoAxis, with Sverrisson and ...

Last Days of May: Radiant Black Mind

by Derek Taylor
April 1, 2000

The closest referent for this group that I can think of (and my knowledge of this kind of music is admittedly severely limited) is the Bay-area based Mermen, a group led by another underground guitar icon, Jim Thomas, which traffics in similarly loose-ended paeans to the psychedelic age. Surf overtones are largely absent here, but the two groups share an obvious affinity for psychedelic sound experimentation and both guitarists fraternize heavily with the possibilities afforded by the amplification of their ...