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Alex Bird: You Are the Light and the Way
by Chris M. Slawecki
You Are the Light and the Way presents an interesting challenge for a writer. Twelve new songs by Canadian vocalist Alex Bird (lyrics and music) and keyboardist Ewan Farncombe (music and arrangements) consistently sound like new songbook classics"--in several places, as if Harry Connick Jr. magically composed music with Johnny Mercer. Bird, Farncombe and the Jazz ...
Darrell Grant: The New Black
by Paul Rauch
Pianist Darrell Grant's debut album Black Art (Criss Cross) was released in 1994, and became acclaimed as one of the definitive statements of New York jazz in the 1990s. It featured bassist Christian McBride, drummer Brian Blade, and the late, great Wallace Roney on trumpetall of whom would go on to make major statements of their ...
Meg Morley Trio: Journey Through Home
by Bruce Lindsay
Meg Morley self-released her debut EP, Through the Hours, in 2017 and followed it up a few months later that year with her trio's first album, the self-published Can't Get Started. Five years later, the same trio--Morley on piano, Richard Sadler on bass and Emiliano Caroselli on drums-- has returned, with Journey Through Home. It is ...
Amanda Whiting: Lost In Abstraction
by Gareth Thompson
Ahh, the angelic harp, a symbol of celestial beings, Biblical healing, Irish identity and a rubbish lager. In jazz terms we think of the instrument in relation to Casper Reardon, Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and more recently Deborah Henson-Conant. A noble list of names if not exactly boundless. The harp is, after all, much less portable ...
DaShawn Hickman with Charlie Hunter: Drums, Roots & Steel
by Doug Collette
When keyboardist John Medeski (of Medeski, Martin and Wood) produced the The Campbell Brothers' Can You Feel It? (Ropeadope, 2005), he helped bring deserved attention to the woefully unrecognized field of sacred steel," a musical style and African-American gospel tradition that features the steel guitar. Now, seventeen years later, guitar wunderkind Charlie Hunter makes a similar ...
Jim Self: Hangin' Out
by Richard J Salvucci
One can be forgiven for not knowing a saxhorn from a saxophone, or, for that matter, whether a particular horn is a member of a certain family. Yes, there are aficionados (not to mention serious players) who can quite accurately describe the histories of the instruments, their lineages, and their peculiarities or idiosyncracies. Yet for many, ...
Espen Eriksen Trio featuring Andy Sheppard: In The Mountains
by John Eyles
Formed in 2007, with personnel which has remained unchanged since, the Espen Eriksen Trio released its first Rune Grammofon album, You Had Me At Goodbye, in 2010. Since then, they have regularly released albums on the label, the most recent being End of Summer (2020). Prior to the current release, their only album which did not ...
ARC Trio and the John Daversa Big Band: ARCeology: The Music of MSM Schmidt
by Jim Worsley
What would happen if fusion, already a hybrid of musical genres, was compounded with the sound of big-band? Further, that both genres were stretched well outside the box? An ensemble of bright musical minds came together on just such a project. The results could have been the disastrous soup of too many cooks in the kitchen ...
Andrea Brachfeld: Evolution
by Jane Kozhevnikova
Andrea Brachfeld is a critically acclaimed flutist, composer and educator. She has won multiple awards, including a grant from Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and was once recognized as the best jazz flutist by Hot House magazine. Evolution features Brachfeld's longtime collaborators Bill O'Connell (piano), Harvie S (bass) and Jason Tiemann (drums). ...
Lisa Ullén, Elsa Bergman, Anna Lund: Space
by John Sharpe
Although pianist Lisa Ullén, bassist Elsa Bergman and drummer Anna Lund supply a formidable bottom end to the surging horn polyphony of Anna Högberg's Attack, on Space they find an alternative means to convey emotion and rapport through collective improvisation. Across five studio tracks, the Swedish threesome practices an egalitarian creed which does not privilege any ...

