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Victor Assis Brasil: Esperanto/Toca Antonio Carlos Jobim
by Chris M. Slawecki
By the summer of 1970, popular music's lunatic joyride through the 1960s had fully careened into the new decade. Almost anything and everything still seemed possible. That summer, saxophonist Victor Assis Brasil returned to his home in Brazil from studies (alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, and others) at the Berklee College of Music to ...
Yelena Eckemoff: Desert
by Dan McClenaghan
Pianist Yelena Eckemoff's backstory doesn't suggest the potential for a rise to the category of top level jazz pianist. But here she is, after emigrating to the U.S. from Russia with her husband--leaving her children (temporarily) and everything else (permanently) behind in 1991 to escape repression and to start a new life. Classically trained in her ...
Dave Pietro: New Road: Iowa Memoirs
by Jack Bowers
In 2011, New York City-based saxophonist Dave Pietro was invited to spend three weeks as artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa. While there, he worked with young musicians in school programs across the state. It proved to be a rewarding commission for the native New Englander who was so enheartened that he chose to recreate the ...
Variospheres: Live in Solothurn
by Ian Patterson
When Tomasz Stańko's first classic quintet came to the natural end of its road in 1973, with all its members looking for new directions in music, violinist Zbigniew Seifert embarked on a solo career that saw him record a number of albums with very different line-ups. In fact, bar a brief period at the end of ...
Sonar with David Torn: Vortex
by John Kelman
It might be all too simple to explain away Sonar, the Swiss twin-guitar/bass/drums quartet now in its eighth year together, through a series of touchstones. King Crimson, by way of that band's co-founder/guitarist Robert Fripp's Guitar Craft? Check. The influence of Nik Bartsch and Don Li's innovative meshing of Steve Reich-ian minimalism with deceptively complicated polyrhythmic ...
Fabel: FABEL
by Jakob Baekgaard
Lonely tree. Lonely trumpet. Blowing through the clouds of green. Fields on fields in open space. A woodcutter leaving logs. Playing simple melodies. The piano breathes a song. In the country. In the city. People gather to escape themselves. The burning fire of passion. Smiles are exchanged, and they wander. In the night. ...
Jurgen Burdorf: Picking Up Steam
by Friedrich Kunzmann
Picking up Steam is Dutch guitarist Jurgen Burdorf's third album in as many years. Like its predecessors, it finds Burdorf's punchy guitar at the center of a quartet--putting on show his diversified skillset which ranges from Americana to blues, jazz and funk, making for a juicy set of fusion tunes. Seeing how all the ...
Berkeley Choro Ensemble: The View from Here
by Chris M. Slawecki
Like its organic natural wonders, the music of Brazil seems to flourish in different forms and styles of beauty. But much of its music has grown from the root of choro: Born in the mid-to late-1800s from the joining of Afro-Brazilian dance and jazz rhythms with European salon and chamber music, choro was simultaneously a seminal ...
Kenny Barron: Concentric Circles
by Mike Jurkovic
Hard to believe that, as Kenny Barron turns 75, Concentric Circles is his Blue Note debut, one that is as muscular, fleet, and entertaining as any debut by any man two-thirds his age. Trust Barron's deeply-versed quintet to swing like a big band plus, and “DPW" leaps out at you with a jumping, bop ...
Martial Solal: My One And Only Love: Live at Theater Gütersloh
by Dan Bilawsky
English poet Samuel Johnson famously and accurately remarked that “He that runs against Time has an antagonist not subject to casualties." With that statement, Johnson essentially cut to the ultimate truth behind man's battle with mortality, the powers of change, and the swift dominance of the aging process. But he didn't say it all. What he ...
