Results for "C. Michael Bailey"
Roseanna Vitro: Listen Here

Roseanna Vitro is a singer's singer in the same way as Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. She is a studied practitioner of the jazz vocal arts, an interpreter, performer, educator. Her repertoire, taste, and vocal chops are beyond compare. Vitro's ability has evolved horizontally and vertically over 14 recordings and nearly 40 years. The singer's most ...
Tómas R. Einarsson: Latínball í Búðardal

If jazz can be considered America's gift to the worlda music genre proven absorbent of local influences and capable of being recreated with every performance in every climatethen the brand of Latin jazz of Icelandic bassist Tómas R. Einarsson can be considered an extension of that same gift, second generation and once removed. Iceland, climatically and ...
Harry Allen: Tenor Saxophone In The Time of COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to any number of keen improvisations, each manifesting from the necessity of having to quarantine in place." Tenor saxophonist Harry Allen, the Frank Sinatra" of his instrument, thinks way outside the box--recording within the friendly confines of his own living room, while under health crisis house arrest. Good for you, ...
Marty Elkins: 'Tis Autumn

There exists a group of jazz musicians dedicated to pre-bebop jazz who have traditionally populated the catalogs of the Nagel-Heyer and Arbors record labels. These musicians include Herb Pomeroy, Max Kaminsky, Randy Sandke, Harry Allen, and Dave McKenna. Central to this group is vocalist Marty Elkins who, while in college, discovered the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald, ...
C. Michael Bailey's Best Releases of 2020

We are experiencing an existential fold in history, one where we do not even realize its gravity because it has been so cheapened by ourselves. The only thing that rises above all of this is art, and in particular, music. It is but grace that these artists provided us a gift we could never possibly warrant. ...
Gemma Sherry: Let's Get Serious

A perfect response to challenge and change. In the parlance of the agrarian American South, Gemma Sherry is makin' hay while the sun shines. Let's Get Serious is the singer's light-as-air, coquettishly coy wink at the COVID-19 pandemica wink as opposed to any other response, as Sherry is a true Lady. The title of ...
Louise Alexandra: Today

From Destiny to Today ... Vocalist and composer Louise Alexandra's Today requires a bit of unpacking. In 2012, a wunderkind polymath named Louise van Aarsen released a debut recording, Destiny receiving positive critical attention. Known as Dr. Louise Koopman in her day job as Sr. Research Scientist at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and in ...
Steve Masakowski and the Masakowski Family: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

Holiday Music...with an edge. The holiday season always provides plenty of inspiration for musicians. Jazzers are especially affected, having produced many notable records, beginning, with the Vince Guaraldi trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1965). That recording provides a convenient jumping off point for discussing the Masakowski Family's Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, ...
Bailey’s Bundle: Holiday Edition

This edition of my Christma holiday release reviews began this January with two recordings that I missed. There are always worthy holiday recordings released every year and 2020 has been no exception. The Archaic Corner Gothic Voices Nowell synge we bothe al and som: A Feast of Christmas Music in Medieval ...
Ada Bird Wolfe, Jamieson Trotter: He & Me

Ada Bird Wolfe's 2018 debut CD, Birdie (Self Produced), was one of the best recordings released that year. For Wolfe, music has been a lifetime love, even while in school and after, working in business, and writing full time. Wolfe has sojourned from the East to the West Coast, where she finally landed, set down roots ...