Results for "A Bu"

A Bu

2021: The Year in Jazz

by Ken Franckling
January 1, 2022

The jazz world continued grappling and adjusting in year two of the COVID-19 pandemic. International Jazz Day again went virtual for the most part. Singer Tony Bennett put the final stamp on his touring—and likely recording—career after his Alzheimer's disclosure. Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield was headed to federal prison. The National Endowment for the Arts welcomed four ...

A Bu Trio with Larry Grenadier and Eric Harland: One Step East

by Karl Ackermann
April 3, 2021

Pianist/composer A Bu, whose given name is Dai Liang, has outgrown the “child prodigy" tag but not the attributes. A student at Central Conservatory in Beijing, and later at Juilliard, he was influenced by a meaningful meeting with Chick Corea at the age of thirteen. Corea performed in Shanghai, where he invited A Bu onto the ...

2020: The Year in Jazz

by Ken Franckling
January 2, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic put the jazz world in a tailspin, just like the world at large, in 2020. And there is plenty of uncertainty going into the new year about what “new normal: might emerge from the darkness. International Jazz Day, like so many other things, became an online virtual event this time around. Pianist Keith ...

Karl Ackermann’s Best Releases of 2020

by Karl Ackermann
December 9, 2020

2020 abridged: A staggering loss of lives and livelihoods. We had worldwide social unrest, wildfires, locust swarms of Biblical proportions, killer hornets, killer drones, kids in cages; an impeachment, an election, an attempted insurrection. Oh, and Poland accidentally invaded the Czech Republic. It was not exactly the Gilded Age. Yet, amid doom-scrolling, the creative music community ...

A Bu: Live At Beijing Poly Theater

by Karl Ackermann
July 13, 2020

Beijing's Poly Theater has held over three-thousand international artistic events since its opening in 1991. The prestigious fifteen-hundred seat cultural hub was the site of a 2018 solo piano concert by Dai Liang (aka, A Bu), possibly the best unknown pianist in music. A prodigy who began playing at four, the pianist was discovered in 2012 ...

2019: The Year in Jazz

by Ken Franckling
January 2, 2020

The year 2019 was robust in many ways. International Jazz Day brought its biggest stage to Australia. An important but long-shuttered jazz mecca was revived in a coast-to-coast move. ECM Records celebrated a golden year. The music and its makers figured prominently on the big screen. The National Endowment for the Arts welcomed four new NEA ...

John Beasley: Master of All Trades

by Jim Worsley
April 4, 2019

In today's busy world, sometimes you just can't do it all. Apparently, John Beasley never received that memo. The pianist, composer, arranger, producer, music director, and film and TV composer is in high demand, and has an enormity of projects that would seem to belie the twenty-four hour day reality. It is perhaps the variance in ...

Butterflies Fly in Pairs

By A Bu

Label: Sennheiser Media
Released: 2016
Track listing: Butterflies Fly in Pairs I; Forever Suite Part I; Forever Suite Part II; With Mind I; With Mind II; Memories of Love; The Last Trip; Rainchel; For Kurt; Let Me Catch You; Butterflies Fly in Pairs II.

Claude Nobs: We All Came Out To Montreux...

by Ian Patterson
June 30, 2016

Montreux Jazz Festival is fifty. It's a significant milestone and cause for celebration. No doubt there will be an added festive element to this year's edition of the festival, founded by Claude Nobs—along with pianist Géo Voumard and writer René Langel—in 1967. Yet for many, the celebrations will be tinged with sadness due to the absence ...