Jazz Articles

Harrison Bankhead Quartet: Velvet Blue

by Mark Corroto
December 10, 2013

Harrison Bankhead's time has come. The Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) is on a roll with the release of Velvet Blue. For decades, the bassist has been the bedrock upon which great Chicago jazz has been built. He was the foundation for legendary players like Fred Anderson, Von Freeman, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Malachi Thompson and a collaborator with Nicole Mitchell in the Indigo Trio and Hamid Drake and Ernest Dawkins with the Chicago Trio. In ...

Triptet: Figures in the Carpet

by Hrayr Attarian
March 16, 2013

Triptet's music is hard to categorize within one particular genre. The Seattle based group's second release, Figures in the Carpet, is a unique cross between the hypnotic ambience of synth-pop and avant-garde jazz's complex and dissonant harmonies. Elegiac and mystical motifs and free-flowing spontaneity endow the album with a thematic unity.The deconstructed lullaby “Surfactants," for example, opens with wistful chimes over waves of robotic drone and other sonic effects. French hornist Greg Campbell, with his vibrato-filled sound, joins ...

Sylvain Leroux: Quatuor Creole

by Hrayr Attarian
August 7, 2012

Flautist Sylvain Leroux's debut, Quatuor Créole, is an enchanting mélange of Guinean sounds, French influences and jazz inflections. In that aspect it is essentially Creole, but not necessary a work of New Orleanian or Haitian folkloric music. Leroux plays the tambin, a West African reed flute, and a dozon ngoni, a lute from the same region--often alternating between the two on the same track. This is heard on the bluesy, hypnotic and griot (jeli)-style “Gambalou." Elsewhere, Leroux ...

Eugene Chadbourne and Warren Smith: Odd Time

by Raul d'Gama Rose
February 4, 2012

All art is activist; or at least it should be when it challenges established and accepted forms that play to the laissez-faire, the reactionary and the antisocial--and the greater good of the greater number of people experiencing (or trying to experience) it. The music of Beethoven was just so, the composer cancelling the dedication of his mighty Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") to Napoleon Bonaparte after the Frenchman declared himself Emperor. So, too, has some of the finest music of modern ...

Harrison Bankhead Sextet: Morning Sun, Harvest Moon

by Raul d'Gama Rose
August 12, 2011

Harrison Bankhead's uniqueness is not restricted solely to his bass playing, which is touched by the melodicism of Ray Brown and the authority and inventiveness of Charles Mingus in a voice singularly his own. Bankhead is a composer with a sensibility finely attuned to a painterly impressionism, while being unafraid to fly in the face of convention, dappling his music with torrid references to avant-garde atonalism. All of this is in evidence on his solo debut, Morning Sun, Harvest Moon. ...

Yuganaut: Sharks

by Raul d'Gama Rose
August 14, 2010

It is somewhat easy to be fooled, by the playfulness of Yuganaut's musicians, into thinking that Sharks is a flippant album. So, as rapidly as the thought occurs let it perish. The music on this album is deep as the ocean of sound from where it comes, and the musicians do a fine job of exploring the tones and textures that abound, as the music deliberately tumbles from their various instruments, to make a confluence of dramatic sound which, in ...

William Hooker Trio: Yearn for Certainty

by Raul d'Gama Rose
August 8, 2010

Drummer William Hooker can tell stories in many more ways than one. On Yearn for Certainty, he works his majestic tenor vocal chords as he recites a poem that accompanies the initial track, “Ingratiated Beam--Leroy." One track later, on the superbly crafted, rhapsodic melody of “Century's Soles," Hooker manipulates his ensemble of drums to tell a wholly different story, reaching deep into the African-ness of the origin of all civilization, as he follows footprints in the proverbial sands of time. ...

The OtherTet: The OtherTet

by Raul d'Gama Rose
November 22, 2009

The seemingly innocuously titled The OtherTet is far from an exercise in making-music in a modern idiom. A generation ago, speculation would be rife about minimalism and atonalism, terms that are laughable in today's context of existential angst. Therefore, when contemporary musical compositions delve into the macabre and the irony of contemporary existence a new idiom is born. One that combines the lament of the blues with the expressive rhythmic riches of Afro- centricity and the reinvention of music on ...

Tom Abbs & Frequency Response: Lost & Found

by Jerry D'Souza
August 18, 2009

Tom Abbs is a multi-instrumentalist who, besides violin and didgeridoo, plays bass, tuba and cello on this CD. He has enlivened the free jazz scene in New York, not only through his collaborations with Cooper-Moore and Steve Swell among others, but with his music as well. He thinks with a vivid imagination and as such injects his compositions with melody, free falling notes, jazz harmony and a picturesque development. The last may well spring from his role as film-maker.

Tom Abbs and Frequency Response: Lost + Found

by Lyn Horton
July 23, 2009

Rarely does a recording's clarity of purpose come through in one listening, but bassist Tom Abbs and Frequency Response's Lost + Found fits the bill. The significance of this record originates in the brevity of each of bassist Abbs' eighteen pieces--lasting, on average, only slightly over three minutes, with the longest being six and the shortest about two.

The key to plugging into this album is recognizing that the major concern is the expression of one musical concept after another. ...