Home » Search Center » Results: Album Review
Results for "Album Review"
Pasquale Stafano: Sparks
by Mike Jurkovic
Funny how it seems to be that we're forever catching up to jazz no matter how astute or socially notified we believe ourselves to be. Case in point is Sparks, pianist Pasquale Stafano's stylistic and creative balancing act. Released in the pre-omicron haze of September 2021, Sparks delivers more and more as one surrenders ...
Fred Hersch: Breath By Breath
by John Chacona
Why is Fred Hersch not sufficiently mentioned among the great jazz pianists? It could be a generational thing. At 66, Hersch is an eminent tweener, too old to qualify as the Hot New Thing and too young to be an Elder Statesman. He's in good company there with fellow sexagenarians Myra Melford, Satoko Fujii, Uri Caine, ...
Fred Hersch: Breath By Breath
by Pierre Giroux
The intellectual and musical curiosity that inspires the work of pianist Fred Hersch is broad and deep. Validation of this is in his current release Breath By Breath which is informed by his early piano education and listening to string quartets, supported more recently by his advocacy of meditation as a way manage external factors beyond ...
Joaquin Muro: Contracara
by Mike Jurkovic
Recorded in the same sessions and presented (digitally only) as the B-side to his first album--the fully careening Oxymoron (ears&eyes, 2021)--Brazilian trumpeter Joaquin Muro, with his high powered, firebrand peer, tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia wailing bravely at his side, sets Contracara ablaze. The music is at its overheating core is a fiery, free jazz ...
Rodger Fox Big Band: You Gotta Know
by Jack Bowers
As trombonist Rodger Fox's superb New Zealand-based big band thunders toward its golden anniversary in 2023, the recordings keep coming. Here are two more, the first (Live) taped in October 2020 during what must have been a much longer concert at the Bruce Mason Centre in Auckland; the second, You Gotta Know, recorded that same year ...
Nu Band: In Memory of Mark Whitecage: The Nu Band Live At The Bopshop
by Troy Dostert
One of the underappreciated veterans of free jazz, Mark Whitecage passed away in March of 2021, leaving a well-established legacy of strong recordings in which his searing yet soulful alto saxophone merged with many of the more visible figures on the scene. Joe McPhee, Anthony Braxton, and Annette Peacock are just a few of the luminaries ...
Three-Layer Cake: Stove Top
by Chris M. Slawecki
If nothing else, the trio of Mike Pride (drums, marimba, glockenspiel, bells, organ), Brandon Seabrook (guitar, banjo, tapes) and Mike Watt (bass) deserves a truth in advertising" award, because Stove Top, their first collaboration, is precisely that: a three-layer instrumental cake. Stove Top began cooking when Pride appeared as a guest on Watt's podcast. ...
LA Cowboy: The Big Pitch
by Richard J Salvucci
There is, one supposes, a niche for most everything, although some tastes are surely acquired. Admittedly, a kind of epistolary recording that seems to combine To Live and Die in LA" with Lady Millea's I Don't Mind Missing You (Reconcile, 2021) is a bit difficult to characterize. Some writers have called this a sort of retro ...
The Nu Band: In Memory of Mark Whitecage: The Nu Band Live At The Bopshop
by Dan McClenaghan
Multiple reedman Mark Whitecage (1937-2021) may not have enjoyed the profile he deserved, but he was an extraordinary improvisational free-jazz force who recorded prolifically for CIMP Records. Bassist Joe Fonda, a member of Whitecage's Nu Band, enjoyed a forty year musical involvement with the man, and In Memory Of Mark Whitecage: The Nu Band Live At ...
Reggie Quinerly: New York Nowhere
by Chris M. Slawecki
Born in Houston, drummer Reggie Quinerly attended his hometown's famous High School of the Performing and Visual Arts. He then moved on to study under such masters as Jimmy Cobb, Lewis Nash, and Kenny Washington in the Masters in Jazz Studies program at Juilliard, and released his debut recording, Music Inspired by Freedmantown (Self Produced, 2012) ...

