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Houston Person: Reminiscing at Rudy's
by Jack Bowers
The “Rudy's" in the title of tenor saxophonist Houston Person's album, Reminiscing at Rudy's, is not a nightclub or other such venue but the New Jersey studio of celebrated recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder who died in 2016. As befits reminiscing, the bulk of the album's numbers are tender ballads, every one of which lands squarely ...
Maria Mendes: Saudade, Colours of Love
by Richard J Salvucci
Every language has words that defy translation. Take “saudade" in Portuguese or Galician. Or “fado." Go to a standard dictionary, and “saudade" appears as “nostalgia" or “longing." In reality, a native speaker will tell you “saudade" means a kind of indefinable melancholy for people, places or things that may only exist in the imagination, and “fantasy" ...
Marína Ósk: One Evening in July
by Jane Kozhevnikova
Who knew back in the early days of jazz that the songs written back then would later become standards and inspire people in the “far far away" 2022? Marína Ósk, a promising emerging musician from Reykjavík, Iceland, has found her composer's voice in writing lyrical jazz pieces which sound like some songs of the “Great American ...
Ahmad Jamal: Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse
by Karl Ackermann
2022 marks the ninety-second year of pianist and composer Ahmad Jamal. An NEA Jazz Master and Grammy winner, in 2007 he was designated a Kennedy Center honoree as a Living Jazz Legend. His first release was The Three Strings (Epic, 1951) and, throughout that decade, he recorded a dozen albums, all in a piano trio format. ...
Alla Boara: Le Tre Sorelle
by C. Andrew Hovan
Although critical consensus would have it that jazz is a unique art form with its roots placed squarely in America, the music has always been open to the influences of other music and cultures. Prime examples would have to include the early strains of French gypsy music that morphed with jazz thanks to the influence of ...
Fred Moten, Brandon López, Gerald Cleaver: Moten/López/Cleaver
by Mark Corroto
Chuck D of Public Enemy fame once said, “rap music is the CNN of the ghetto." His words, coupled with samples and the scratching of turntables, were revelatory in their day, very much like a five-minute news update. Poet and cultural critic Fred Moten's words are more like a deep dive graduate colloquy. He presents his ...
Louis Armstrong: Louis Wishes You A Cool Yule
by Chris May
Plenty of jazz fans loathe “holiday" albums, defined as many of them are by cheap sentimentality and fake bonhomie. If the eggnog does not make you retch, the tackily jazzed-up Christmas carols will. But Louis Armstrong's Louis Wishes You A Cool Yule is an exception. Armstrong himself was exceptional. As Duke Ellington observed, ...
Courtney Pine: Spirituality
by Chris May
In the 1980s, as a co-founder of the band Jazz Warriors and with his debut album Journey To The Urge Within (Island, 1986), reed player Courtney Pine inspired a generation young black British musicians, and not a few white ones, too. On Spirituality, Pine teams up with pianist Zoe Rahman, herself an influential figure, for a ...
The Headhunters: Speakers In The House
by Doug Collette
Herbie Hancock's Headhunters (Columbia, 1973) remains one of the seminal works of the jazz fusion era. The group's heavy emphasis on rhythm not only separated it from its guitar-oriented peers of the era, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the middle-period Return to Forever, but also from Weather Report: grooves became increasingly more prominent as that band evolved, ...
Kaja Draksler, Susana Santos Silva: Grow
by Mark Corroto
Music is sound, but is sound music? For John Cage, sound was indeed music. His avant-garde experiments with silence, environmental sounds, and prepared instruments opened up an entire world for discovery and others' improvisations. Even though he disliked the concept of improvisation, preferring chance to a musician's choices, our modern and post-modern free improvisation world has ...
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