Jazz Articles

Southern Excursion Quartet: Trading Post

by Jerry D'Souza
September 19, 2009

The Southern Excursion Quartet, featuring saxophonist Don Aliquo, drummer Tom Giampietro, pianist Michael Jefry Stevens and bassist Jonathan Wires, moved from different parts of the United States to find their home in the Tennessee and Mississippi areas. The geographical relocation was conducive to a meeting of the four, who went on to find common musical ground.

The music is a revelation of how the quartet develops a theme. They read each other perfectly, sensing structure and enhancing development. The program, ...

Yale Strom: Borsht with Bread, Brothers

by Elliott Simon
February 5, 2008

Based largely on his many visits to Eastern Europe, violinist Yale Strom paints pictures in his music, writings and films of a pre-WWII shtetl music scene where Gypsy (Rom) and Jewish musicians slipped in and out of each other's traveling bands. This porous musical culture resulted in many of the tunes on Hot Pstromi's Borsht with Bread, Brothers. Hot Pstromi includes an interesting mix of jazz/world musicians like Klezmatics founding drummer David Licht, accordionist Peter Stan (Slavic ...

Ismael Reinhardt: Gypsy Swing

by William Grim
August 14, 2005

Gypsy Swing is a thoroughly delightful album that features the violin and guitar virtuosity of Ismael Reinhardt, a relative of the legendary Django Reinhardt. Building on the legacy of Django and Stephane Grappelli's Le Quintette du Hot Club de France, Ismael Reinhardt takes the basic structure of gypsy jazz (or jazz manouche) and embellishes it with a bop harmonic vocabulary.

The chestnuts of gypsy jazz are here--"Autumn Leaves," “It Had to Be You," and “Sweet Georgia Brown," among ...