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Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge: Within Us
by Jack Bowers
Any big band celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary has earned a triumph surpassing most others. To mark the occasion with an album as admirable as this one is icing on the celebratory cake. The fact is, composer/arranger Chuck Owen's Florida-based Jazz Surge, formed in 1995, shows no signs of aging or becoming obsolete. Thanks to Owen's broad-beamed ...
SoSaLa: Nu World Trashed
by Glenn Astarita
Per the press release, saxophonist, vocalist SoSaLa (Ornette Coleman, Salif Keita) is the abbreviation of his birth name, Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi. He's a Swiss-born Iranian American and a well-known activist, educator, author and the president of Musicians for Musicians (MFM) who exhibits complete command of his saxophones during two live tracks and seven studio tracks, recorded ...
Offset 5: Deflections
by Chris M. Slawecki
Curiously, Italy's Offset 5 began as a trio and took more than a decade to become a quintet. Offset 5 began in 2010, when guitarist Marcello Abate formed an alliance with drummer Federico Negri and contrabassist Davide Paulis in a trio devoted to tradition and standards. Offset 5 grew into a quartet with the 2016 addition ...
Joe Harriott Quintet: Free Form & Abstract Revisited
by Chris May
A tiny island, Jamaica has punched far above its weight musically. Dub and reggae are the primary manifestations, but the island has also produced a disproportionately large number of notable jazz musicians, many of whom left during the late 1940s and 1950s to relocate to Britain, Jamaica's so-called mother country during the colonial era. Alto saxophonist ...
Antonio Adolfo: Jobim Forever
by Edward Blanco
Pianist, composer, educator and arranger extraordinaire, Antonio Adolfo has been at the forefront of the samba and bossa nova genre for decades. A proponent of the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Adolfo pays tribute to the genre master on the splendid Jobim Forever. This homage focuses on the icon's work from the 1960s, selecting songs that ...
Mahogany Frog: In the Electric Universe
by Chris M. Slawecki
Have you ever tried to catch a frog? Frogs are impossibly quick. They jump around unpredictably in starts and stops and in every possible direction. By the time you catch up to a frog, that frog is generally somewhere else already. Frogs are very difficult to catch. Listening to In the Electric ...
Steve Maddock: The Blues Project
by Pierre Giroux
In the mid 1960's, there was a Greenwich Village, NYC pop band called The Blues Project which was primarily informed by folk, rhythm & blues, jazz and pop music of the day. One of their early success was entitled Flute Thing," a tune from the group's 1966 album Projections (Verve / Folkways). Keyboardist / vocalist Al ...
Chris Standring: Wonderful World
by Richard J Salvucci
Many years ago, there was a radio station, WJBR, broadcasting from Wilmington, Delaware. The call sign stood for Just Beautiful Radio and that was precisely what you got. No-one called it easy listening or anything like that--it was the early 1960s--but listeners got a predictable dose of Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, Frank Chacksfield, nothing too challenging. ...
Italian Spirit: In Japan
by Chris M. Slawecki
Italian Spirit began in 2014 as a duo featuring pianist Alessandro Collina and trumpeter Marco Vezzoso, instructor at the National Conservatory of Nice. Their name refers to their repertoire: classic, traditional and contemporary songs designed to revive and inspire emotions in Italians far from home. Collina and Vezzoso have performed extensively from west to east; Live ...
Don Peretz: Dikson
by Dan Bilawsky
Dikson takes its name from a sparsely populated arctic port located in northern Russia. And its music, though heated by strong individualists, largely reflects that origin, embodying the powerfully icy atmosphere of its influence. Masterminded by drummer Don Peretz, this eight-song jazz-tronica journey, nodding toward a remote realm at the top of the world, bumps, grooves ...

