Reassessing
Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Red Garland's Piano
Pianist Red Garland follows up his debut recording A Garland of Red (Prestige, 1956) with what might be his finest statement leading a jazz trio, Red Garland's Piano. Garland continues his association with bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Taylor forming his most durable rhythm section, and one that would record with him on ten of his 45 recordings as a leader. The trio recorded the sides that would become Red Garland's Piano in December 1956 and March 1957 at ...
read morePiano
Following his debut as a leader on, Wynton Kelly: New Faces -New Sounds (Blue Note, 1951), pianist Kelly surfaced again some seven years later, this time on Riverside Records, with the simply titled Piano. The length of time between leader recordings is a testament to the pianist's value in a supporting role for artists like Dinah Washington (with whom he recorded almost exclusively between 1952 and 1955) Lester Young, and Dizzy Gillespie. During this same period Kelly contributed to several ...
read moreNew Faces - New Sounds
Jazz is littered with musicians like Elmo Hope: young, talented and, ultimately, doomed because of racism, poverty, and chemical dependency. Born in jny: New York City, the son of immigrants from the Caribbean, Hope managed to release more than a baker's dozen of studio recordings in as many years, before dying of drug addiction-related health problems in 1967 at the age of 43. Hope was primarily known as a jazz composer with a spare, deliberate piano style more akin to ...
read moreDial "S" for Sonny
Pianist Sonny Clark was culturally marginalized in much the same way as his contemporary Elmo Hope—both heroin-addicted jazz musicians in the 1950s: at the time, and romantically, a cliche. Both pianists have been sorely lumped into the “Bud Powell school of bop piano" which superficially may seem accurate until one considers the evolutionary continuum of jazz piano that places both Clark and Hope conceptually and stylistically beyond Powell. Clark was born in Georgia and raised outside of jny: ...
read moreNew Faces - New Sounds
In the early 1950s, Blue Note Records introduced new artists in the label's series New Faces -New Sounds. It highlighted such young artists as Horace Silver (1952); Lou Donaldson (1952); Elmo Hope (1953); and Frank Foster (1954). All of these recordings were released as part of Blue Note Record's 5000 Modern Jazz Series, all on 10-inch vinyl 33&1/3 LPs. This electronic space considered earlier Wynton Kelly's debut recording New Faces -New Sounds (1951) and now turns to another pianist with ...
read moreVernal Equinox
In making Vernal Equinox available on vinyl for the first time in forty-two years and on CD for the first time in three decades, Jon Hassell's 1977 album has been fully remastered for its updated release on the artist's own Ndeya label. This first commercially released work by Hassell was, by many accounts, an early glimpse into a sound that would later go on to be known as 'Fourth World,' a mix of electronics, jazz, classical Indian music field recordings ...
read moreScenes From A Voyage To Arcturus
Scottish writer David Lindsay published his A Voyage To Arcturus in 1920. It is said to have influenced everyone from C.S. Lewis in the writing of his Space Trilogy to J.R.R. Tolkien to Clive Barker. The story concerns a character Muskull and his fantastical journey across the planet Tormance that orbits the star Arcturus. And while the external landscapes encountered are surreal, so too are Muskill's inner landscapes, and the music. “Lindsay's fantasy eludes analysis," pianist/composer Ron Thomas ...
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