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Black String: Karma
by Ian Patterson
Black String's karma must be good. The globally respected UK magazine Songlines awarded the South Korean quartet its Asia and South Pacific Award for Mask Dance (ACT Music, 2016), the band's potent debut. Critical acclaim for Black String's intoxicating blend of Korean traditional music and free improvisation, however, was universal, with invitations taking it all over ...
Jason Palmer: The Concert: 12 Musings for Isabella
by Jerome Wilson
On March 18, 1990, two thieves went into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and made off with thirteen works of art, paintings and drawings by masters such as Rembrandt, Degas and Vermeer plus a couple of antique artifacts. To this day, the works have never been recovered and the museum still keeps the empty ...
The Lost Melody: New Songs for Old Souls
by Edward Blanco
The Lost Melody is not the title of a new CD, but the name of a piano trio that has been together for two decades producing three previous albums to their credit. This 2020 release is entitled New Songs for Old Souls, offering a collection of ten original songs in the tradition and style of music ...
Cesar Cardoso: Dice of Tenors
by Jack Bowers
Dice of Tenors is Portuguese-bred tenor saxophonist Cesar Cardoso's ardent salute to a half-dozen of the world's foremost tenor saxophone masters: Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson and Benny Golson. To carry out that purpose, Cardoso has convened an admirable octet on which he shares the front line with trumpeter Jason Palmer, ...
Trio Kleine Ahnung: Laniakea
by Friedrich Kunzmann
Berlin-based guitarist Carl Morgan gets together with his Australian compatriots Rajiv Jayaweera on drums and Sam Anning on bass for a date packed with Indie-rock infused compositions that live off of the trio's jazzy interplay and modern soundscapes. Between Morgan's modern guitar slurs and the rhythm section's minimalist approach to accompaniment, this record is imbued with ...
Mark Segger Sextet: Lift Off
by Dan Bilawsky
Fracas and focus are not mutually exclusive concepts. In purely linguistic terms, invoking the label “avant-garde" when addressing sound often calls to mind a melee-as-music scenario. The audible truth, however, is something else entirely. An artist's work can lean far to the left without falling off the comprehensibility scale, and drummer Mark Segger makes that argument ...
Bobby Shew / Bill Mays: Telepathy
by Nicholas F. Mondello
Trumpet and piano duo albums are relatively rare. Louis Armstrong and Earl “Fatha" Hines' “Weather Bird" (1928) was a groundbreaker, although a single. Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie (Pablo, 1974) and Clark Terry's One on One (Chesky Records, 1999), where CT played with fourteen different jazz pianists, come to mind. Telepathy, a horn-piano collaboration featuring trumpeter ...
Dinosaur: To The Earth
by Chris May
Britain's Edition label has remained independent of London's post-2015 alternative jazz scene, whose aesthetic is formed in part by the emphases of identity politics and which now, in 2020, has gone overground with the signing of three bands led by movement auteur Shabaka Hutchings to Impulse! in the US. Edition, which was founded in 2008 by ...
Gloria Reuben & Marty Ashby: For All We Know
by Dan Bilawsky
The deeply felt farewell on vocalist Gloria Reuben's Perchance To Dream (MCG Jazz, 2015)—a duo take on “Here's to Life," with guitarist Marty Ashby—foreshadowed the arrival of this intimate date. It may have taken five years for this pair to find their way to this work, but it was destined to happen at some point. This ...
Art Hirahara: Balance Point
by Kyle Simpler
There are times in life when many of us try to find a sense of stability in an uncertain world. New York-based pianist Art Hirahara refers to this as homeostasis, or “a sense of balance within ourselves regardless of what is happening around us." With Balance Point, his fifth release for Posi-Tone Records, Hirahara uses the ...
