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Alicia Waller and The Excursion: Some Hidden Treasure
by Angelo Leonardi
Una giovane cantante entra con autorità nell'universo vocale d'impronta soul/jazz ma in modo originale rispetto a quanto accade nell'affollato panorama di questi anni. Alicia Waller è infatti una soprano lirica laureata alla Gallatin School for Individualized Study della New York University. Ha ottenuto vari riconoscimenti e questo E.P. è il suo debutto. Lei ...
Rebecca Nash: Peaceful King
by Chris May
You can judge a book by its cover, and likewise an album. Sometimes. Too often, striking content fails to follow striking packaging. British keyboard player Rebecca Nash's Peaceful King, however, proves to be as beautiful as its artwork and graphic design. It joins a handful of other more or less recent, promise-fulfilling albums, from which Binker ...
Andrea Brachfeld: Brazilian Whispers
by Dan Bilawsky
While Brazilian Whispers marks Andrea Brachfeld's first thorough exploration of the titular stream of sound, you'd never know it from the results. Teaming up with Bill O'Connell, her longtime pianist and sounding board, the veteran flutist, who's typically engaged in Afro-Cuban affairs or straight ahead suggestions, sounds like she's been playing this music all her life. ...
The Stan Kenton Orchestra / Trinity College: Concert Impressions
by Jack Bowers
Here's another splendid two-disc anthology from Tantara Productions showcasing music from the capacious Stan Kenton library, performed on Disc 1 by the Kenton Orchestra circa 1972-76 and on Disc 2 by the Trinity College Big Band, Alumni Band and Symphony Orchestra in 2004 and 2007. Tantara has now released more than twenty albums, all devoted to ...
TuneTown: There From Here
by Friedrich Kunzmann
What happens in Canada stays in Canada. Sadly, this worn out phrasing tends to ring true when it comes to Jazz from there. Regrettably so. The jazz scenes in Québec and especially Toronto are as vibrant as they've ever been and produce some of the more interesting releases out there today. The drummer of the acoustic ...
Dave Liebman: Earth
by Mike Jurkovic
It's taken over two tumultuous decades for Dave Liebman to fully realize and execute his poetic, elemental suite. Alongside Pat Metheny,Billy Hart, and Cecil McBee, Water: Giver of Life (Arkadia Jazz, 1997) birthed the the long journey. Teaming with violinist/sound engineer Walter Quintus for 2006's Air (Finetunes) led to 2016's free-jazz flame torch with Dave Holland, ...
Jeremy Cunningham: The Weather Up There
by Jakob Baekgaard
The complex landscape of human emotions is still vastly uncharted, but every true work of art adds a little piece to the puzzle. This can be done in many ways, but it is rare that an album connects emotion with complex layers of memory, interpersonal relations, politics and societal structures. Nevertheless, this is what drummer and ...
Gil Scott-Heron / Makaya McCraven: We're New Again
by Karl Ackermann
"All the dreams you show up in are not your own." With those words to an interviewer at The New Yorker, Gil Scott-Heron tried to explain a degree of detachment from I'm New Here (XL Recordings, 2011), his “comeback" and the final studio album before his death that year. The project was initiated by the head ...
Emanuel Casablanca: It's Getting Strange
by Phillip Woolever
Emanuel Casablanca is a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn who displays a classic sense of experience that belies his relatively young age while invoking prime characteristics of iconic blues and soul artists. The result is a solid album that carries more down-home southern-based traits than a metropolitan-manufactured product. The basic sophistication of the smoothly developed opener, ...
Olli Hirvonen: Displace
by Glenn Astarita
A recipient of numerous awards and honors, Finnish guitarist Olli Hirvonen relocated to New York in 2011 where he attended the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. And on his maiden album for this label, the artist craftily fuses punk jazz, modern jazz, jazz fusion and noise music into a well-rounded, and sometimes psyched out presentation, highlighting ...
