Results for "Anthony Davis"

Anthony Davis

The music of pianist, improvisor and composer Anthony Davis eludes easy categorization. Active in a variety of media, including operatic, symphonic, choral, chamber, dance, theater, and improvised musics, Davis has focused upon the integration of improvised and notated expressive resources. His work embodies an intercultural approach, drawing not only upon traditional and current African-American sources, but upon the Javanese gamelan, American Minimalism, and the European and Euro-American avant-garde. His fourth and most recent opera, AMISTAD, based on the slave ship uprising of 1839 and the subsequent trial, premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in November of 1997, with libretto by Thulani Davis and direction by New York Public Theater artistic director George C

2020: The Year in Jazz

By KEN FRANCKLING

The COVID-19 pandemic put the jazz world in a tailspin, just like the world at large, in 2020. And there is plenty of uncertainty going into the new year about what “new normal: might emerge from the darkness. International Jazz Day, like so many other things, became an online virtual event this time around. Pianist Keith ...

Leo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri

By DANIEL BARBIERO

Coming to New England: Emerson, Ives and Brown When trumpeter/composer Leo Smith returned to the United States after having spent 1969-1970 in Europe, he settled not in New York, as most jazz musicians might be expected to do, or even in jny: Chicago, where he'd spent a fruitful several years in the 1960s. Instead, he chose ...

The Creative Musicians Improvisers Forum: New Haven's AACM

By DANIEL BARBIERO

The late 1960s through the 1970s and '80s were difficult years for jazz and jazz-derived improvised music, but they were also years that saw musicians—by necessity—respond to these difficulties with creative solutions. With first the rise and then the commercial dominance during those years of rock music and the corresponding eclipse of jazz, creative musicians in ...

Frank Kimbrough: Monk's Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk

By ANGELO LEONARDI

Fino a che punto può spingersi la rilettura del songbook monkiano senza alterare l'estetica e la profondità emotiva del suo autore? Le rivisitazioni degli ultimi decenni hanno privilegiato l'esaltazione dei suoi tratti asimmetrici (le melodie sghembe, i conflitti ritmici, le armonie dissonanti) usando quei brani come pretesto per esplorazioni d'avanguardia. Quando si è usato quel repertorio ...

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn: The Transitory Poems

By MARK CORROTO

The Transitory Poems might be the first improvised solo piano recording accomplished by a pair of pianists. Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn are 21st century masters and descendants from the likes of Cecil Taylor, Keith Jarrett, Andrew Hill, Anthony Davis, and Paul Bley. This live duo recording, from 2018 in Budapest, is an act of improvisatory ...

Michael Dessen: Somewhere In The Upstream

By GIUSEPPE SEGALA

L'organico di trio con trombone, contrabbasso e batteria non è particolarmente diffuso, ma può annoverare tra gli esempi più significativi la lunga, formidabile esperienza di Bass Drum Bone, in cui Ray Anderson, Mark Helias e Gerry Hemingway hanno scandagliato modalità espressive e dialogiche ad ampio raggio. Il trio guidato dal trombonista e sperimentatore di suoni Michael ...

Quinsin Nachoff: Quinsin Nachoff's Ethereal Trio

By MARK CORROTO

It's interesting how modern jazz performers come to the music from very different circumstances than those of players of bygone eras. Instead of learning their craft in a bar or bagnio, they went to a conservatory to sharpen their chops. What they lack in perceived street-smarts (the outdated 1950s hipster delusion of jazzman as junkie), they ...

The Politics of Dancing: Jazz and Protest, Part 2

By KARL ACKERMANN

Part 1 of Jazz and Protest took an in-depth look at two landmark artists and the songs that laid the groundwork for protest within the jazz community. Billie Holiday's “Strange Fruit" took a circuitous route from its origins as a poem to its successful recording on a small label that was not afraid to lend a ...