Home » Search Center » Results: Album Reviews
Results for "Album Reviews"
Peter Hum: Ordinary Heroes
by Dan Bilawsky
The ideals of promise and hope, and the desire to create a better world and drive out the darkness, need not be fueled or forwarded by the extraordinary. As George Takei, the legendary actor-cum-activist once noted in referencing the individuals who provided succor during the horrors of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, it's ...
Blaer: Yellow
by Mike Jurkovic
With a whispery shifting undertow, Swiss pianist-composer Maja Nydegger constructs her vivid, musical imaginings of Yellow on the memories of melodies perceived and experienced in other lifetimes, in other dimensions, in other states of humanness. Some, like the quietly sensual title track and its immediate successor, “The Unknown," expand towards full consciousness slowly, methodically urging you ...
Michael Formanek Very Practical Trio: Even Better
by Giuseppe Segala
Trigonometria musicale? Triangolazioni sonore? Certamente, la formula del trio ha sempre riscosso un'attenzione speciale nel jazz, non solamente nella sua forma classica e costantemente esplorata, che affianca pianoforte, contrabbasso e batteria. In particolare Jimmy Giuffre, negli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta, ne ha esplorato con grande profondità e acume alcune possibili varianti, sondando dinamiche, centri di gravità ...
Paolo Botti La Fabbrica dei Botti: Lomax Lives!
by Neri Pollastri
Nel 2015, in occasione del centenario della nascita del grande etnomusicologo Alan Lomax, Paolo Botti gli dedicò un album al quale pensava da molto tempo, essendo sempre stato il ricercatore statunitense uno dei punti di riferimento della sua formazione e crescita artistica. In quel disco il multistrumentista romano proponeva una ventina di brani di Lomax eseguendoli ...
Chicago Underground Quartet: Good Days
by Karl Ackermann
Of the many Rob Mazurek led groups, his Chicago Underground collective has been the most prolific and adventurous cooperative with seven duo outings and another four trio releases. The quartet version of Chicago Underground, like the 1998 “Orchestra" formation, had issued only one album, the self-titled debut on the Thrill Jockey label in 2001. A one-off ...
Light Star Guiding: Light Star Guiding
by Mark Sullivan
Light Star Guiding is a Polish quartet which makes music collectively, with a seamless combination of composition and improvisation (all the music on this album is credited to the whole band). It is a very contemporary sound, frequently employing repetition and trance. Tenor saxophonist Ray Dickaty says he sees the project as an electric counterpoint to ...
The Coachella Valley Trio: Mid Century Modern
by Jack Bowers
Guitarist Doug MacDonald had been gigging around the Palm Springs, CA, area with bassist Larry Holloway and drummer Tim Pleasant as the Coachella Valley Trio for three years when the three amigos entered a studio in 2019 to record their first album as a working group. The result is Mid Century Modern, a burnished and buoyant ...
Gemma Sherry: Songs I Love
by C. Michael Bailey
Is it remotely possible that we need yet one more collection of standards from the Great American Songbook? Are computer servers not clotted to the point of infarction with the detritus of recordings by everyone who thinks he or she is a jazz singer? But here is a recording that reminds us why a collection of ...
Bremer/McCoy: Utopia
by Jakob Baekgaard
Since they released their debut, Enhed (Raske Plader, 2013), Danish bassist Jonathan Bremer and pianist Morten McCoy have been quietly crafting their own sound, and their fourth album, Utopia, marks a new beginning for the duo simply billed as Bremer/McCoy. The difference this time is that David Byrne's renowned Luaka Bop label has ...
Dan Jonas: The Spirituality Suite
by Jack Bowers
Utah-based trumpeter Dan Jonas says The Spirituality Suite was written as a response to his own struggles with spirituality in the twenty-first century. The music is thus largely conceptual, or as Jonas explains it, “Much of the inspiration . . . lies in the musical interval of a perfect fourth. The interval can be either consonant ...
