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Mauricio de Souza: Five Roads
by Chris M. Slawecki
If your idea of a great drummer's album is an album full of sonic bombast, do not pick up Five Roads by drummer Maurício de Souza and his ensemble Bossa Brasil. If you love showy drum fills, histrionic drum solos, or volume masquerading as intensity, you'll find none here. Instead, the drummer leads Bossa Brasil down ...
Richie Beirach-Gregor Huebner Duo & The WDR Big Band: Crossing Borders
by Dan Bilawsky
Richie Beirach, Gregor Huebner and the WDR Big Band. Now there's a triumvirate that speaks to enormity and nonconformity. On Crossing Borders, the revered pianist, the style-skirting violinist and the boundary-pushing large ensemble join forces for a program that's both crafty and dynamic, playing to past glories and present tense all at once. Tied to no ...
Laura Jurd: Stepping Back, Jumping In
by Roger Farbey
Laura Jurd's Stepping Back, Jumping In was commissioned by the major London music venue, King's Place, as part of its “Venus Unwrapped" series. Jurd debuted her project at the venue on March 1, 2019 followed by St George's Bristol and The Sage, Gateshead on March 4 and 5, 2019 where this album was recorded.
Marc Jufer: Trip To The Center
by Mike Jurkovic
Swiss saxophonist Mark Jufer's Trip to the Center comes at you in a flurry of sharp, biting angles, presenting a free-form trio with a flair for twisting and turning on the whim and intuition of any of its three venturous inhabitants. An excited tangle of themes and ideas recorded in two days, Jufer, elastic ...
Randy Brecker: Rocks
by Chris M. Slawecki
The easiest answer isn't always the best answer, but sometimes it is. So it's both easy and proper to point out that trumpet and flugelhorn master, composer, and bandleader Randy Brecker was kind enough to simultaneously review his release with the NDR Bigband, the Hamburg Radio Jazz Orchestra, when he titled it Rocks. Assembled ...
Tommy Halferty & Norma Winstone: Tommy Halferty Invites Norma Winstone
by Ian Patterson
Though the collaboration between Irish guitarist Tommy Halferty and English singer Norma Winstone goes back twenty five years, this, surprisingly, is the duo's debut recording. That it came about at all is thanks to the lever pulling of Irish jazz impresario Allen Smith, who first brought Winstone across the pond in the early 1990s. Winstone and ...
Mark Lockheart and Roger Sayer: Salvator Mundi
by Roger Farbey
Hot on the heels of Mark Lockheart's highly acclaimed Days On Earth (Edition, 2019), comes this liturgically-based duo recording. The saxophonist is accompanied here by virtuoso organist Roger Sayer, director of music at London's Temple Church. Sayer was a student at the Royal College of Music where he won multiple prizes for organ recital and was ...
Poor Isa: let's drink the sea and dance
by Mark Sullivan
At first glance, Poor Isa is primarily a banjo duet. But the actual sound of the album belies any assumptions about how such a project should sound. As on their joint album When The Shade Is Stretched (Aspen Edities, 2017), Belgian banjo players Frederik Leroux and Ruben Machtelinckx tend to subvert the traditional style of the ...
Rosana Eckert: Sailing Home
by C. Michael Bailey
Rosana Eckert has made a name for herself as a jazz vocals composer and arranger with her previous recordings, At The End Of The Day (GEM Records, 2003) and Small Hotel (GEM Records, 2010). Bright and imaginative, Eckert draws from a lifetime of music beginning with her childhood in El Paso, Texas, where the musical melting ...
Mats Holmquist: Together
by Angelo Leonardi
Dopo la limitata collaborazione del 2017 in Big Band Minimalism il trombettista Randy Brecker e l'arrangiatore svedese Mats Holmquist realizzano un nuovo disco orchestrale passando dalla big band della radio lettone a una delle migliori big band europee, la finlandese Umo Jazz Orchestra. Il disco non è solo un alto esempio di mainstream ...
