Home » Search Center » Results: Album Reviews
Results for "Album Reviews"
Kit Downes: Dreamlife of Debris
by Karl Ackermann
Kit Downes' ECM debut marked a substantial departure from his earlier recordings with saxophonist Tomas Challenger. Wedding Music (Loop Records, 2013) and Vyamanikal (Slip Imprint, 2016) were rhythmically complex with abstruse melodies that tended toward repetitive patterns and drones. With his ECM title Obsidian (2018), Downes, still on organ, worked in a more solidly constructed environment, ...
Jimmy "Duck" Holmes: Cypress Grove
by C. Michael Bailey
Cypress Grove is the tale of two very different artists following well-tested and successful professional trajectories. While none of the Ur-bluesmen (Charlie Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Ishmon Bracey) are living, there remain a few musicians who knew them while they were still alive. One such musician is Jimmy Duck Holmes of Bentonia, Mississippi. ...
Shannon Gunn: Gunn's Ablazin'
by Hrayr Attarian
Washington DC native Shannon Gunn makes a bold artistic and social statement with her stimulating debut Gunn's Ablazin'. Gunn showcases her talents as a trombonist, composer, arranger and bandleader as she fronts two different ensembles interpreting eight originals and four very diverse covers. The album starts with “Orange Noise," a commentary on the U.S. ...
Matthew Shipp - Mark Helias - Gordon Grdina: Skin And Bones
by Karl Ackermann
The Skin and Bones Music Series is an ongoing succession of creative music events in various venues in and around the city of Kelowna in British Columbia. The concerts have hosted a diverse group of jazz artists from veterans such as Peter Brötzmann to rising stars The Bjorn Kriel Trio. Among the series' featured acts was ...
Earprint: Easy Listening
by Jerome Wilson
Earprint's second album follows the template laid down by its first: relatively short tracks that concentrate a bevy of ideas into energetic four to six minute bursts. Trumpeter Tree Palmedo and saxophonist Kevin Sun bounce off each other's lines with precision and style while bassist Simon Willson and drummer Dor Herskovits provide a sizzling underbed of ...
David Finck: Bassically Jazz
by Dr. Judith Schlesinger
It's hardly news that David Finck is an eloquent, inventive, and swinging bassist, with a long line of illustrious projects and collaborators. Finck has been on hundreds of top recordings and stages, performing with everyone from Rosemary Clooney to Ivan Lins and George Michael, and was the favorite bassist of the great Andre Previn. While Finck ...
Edoardo Marraffa: Diciotto
by Neri Pollastri
Diciotto sono gli anni che separano il primo album in solitudine realizzato da Edoardo Marraffa -Solo, pubblicato da Bassesfere -e questo suo lavoro uscito per la Aut Records, che raccoglie quindici brani, in prevalenza per sax tenore e in parte per sopranino (del quale Marraffa è uno dei massimi specialisti in Italia), composti in periodi diversi ...
Jo-Yu Chen: Savage Beauty
by Angelo Leonardi
La brava pianista taiwanese allieva di Kenny Barron e Jason Moran è tornata a incidere dopo quattro anni di silenzio, confermando il suo valore e le linee di fondo della sua estetica. Anche in quest'album Jo-Yu Chen aggiunge al suo stabile trio un ospite (Mark Turner prende il posto di Kurt Rosenwinkel) e conferma la co-produzione ...
Javier Red's Imagery Converter: Ephemeral Certainties
by Troy Dostert
Pianist Javier Red hails from Mexico, but since 2015 he's been part of the ever-dynamic Chicago jazz scene, enabling him to team up with three other Windy City-based colleagues on Ephemeral Certainties, the debut disc from a band he calls Imagery Converter. With a shared commitment to finding purpose through diverse melodic fragments and disparate rhythmic ...
Ivo Perelman / Matthew Shipp: Efflorescence Volume 1
by Mark Corroto
Charles Darwin (1809—1882) might have set in motion, with his Theory of Biological Evolution, the idea that we humans are related to apes, but it was the later explorations into DNA and genetics that proves our basic structures are but a few variations from all other lifeforms on earth. What, you make ask, does this have ...
