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Dan Bruce's Beta Collective: Earthshine
by Troy Dostert
On the first listen, it's easy to fall under the sway of the sweetness of Dan Bruce's silky guitar tone, only to miss the substance at the heart of his music. Just as similar guitarists like Ben Monder or Kurt Rosenwinkel possess a generous, accessible sound with an exploratory edge, Bruce brings a finely-polished technique that ...
Jure Pukl & Matija Dedić: Hybrid
by Roger Farbey
New York-based Slovenian saxophonist Jure Pukl and Croatian pianist Matija Dedić team-up with quartet completed by Matt Brewer on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums for an exciting set recorded in NYC in May 2016. Pukl has collaborated with the likes of Branford Marsalis, Jeff “Tain" Watts, Dave Liebman and Vijay Iyer and Dedić's has performed ...
Troels Jensen and The Healers feat. Miriam Mandipira: My Love
by Chris Mosey
After studying music in her native Zimbabwe, Miriam Mandipira moved from that unhappy country, first to South Africa, then 10 years ago to Denmark. Here she became a mainstay of the local blues scene. Her influences, she said, were Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith but she sounded more like Aretha Franklin and Randy Crawford and still ...
Black Diamond: Mandala
by Glenn Astarita
This Chicago-based quartet projects a raw and vibrant soundstage, nicely balanced with breakneck speed unison lines and introspective dialogues, topped off by tenor saxophonists Artie Black and Hunter Diamond's hearty choruses. They dig deep, yet on burners like the swiftly executed bop piece “Rudy's Mood," they dish out briskly executed unison lines, leading to hyper-mode frameworks, ...
Tomeka Reid: Tomeka Reid Quartet
by Patrick Burnette
Even jazz fans who follow recordings coming out of Chicago might still not have heard of cellist Tomeka Reid. Before 2015, when Tomeka Reid Quartet was released, she worked mostly as a sideman (side-person?) with such local luminaries as Nicole Mitchell and Dee Alexander, as well as participating in the AACM. Given that it's her debut ...
David Virelles: Gnosis
by Mark Sullivan
Cuban-American pianist/composer David Virelles continues the exploration of Afro-Cuban musical traditions begun with his first recorded collaboration with vocalist/percussionist Román Díaz on Continuum (Pi Recordings, 2012), continuing through Mbókò (ECM, 2013) and Antenna (ECM, 2016). He uses “gnosis" to refer to ancient collective knowledge, and this music is about the intersection of cultures--contemporary improvisational language and ...
Eva Kano: New Chapter
by Jim Olin
Eva Kano is certainly the kind of performer who thrives in the unexpected. Her sound is not easily identifiable but she is never afraid to explore a wide variety of musical ideas, even when they might sound unorthodox or unconventional. At the core of it all, you'll find Kano's jazz sensibilities. After all, jazz is a ...
Marius Neset: Circle of Chimes
by Ian Patterson
It's not just the breath-taking scope and depth of saxophonist/composer Marius Neset's ACT Music releases, Lion (2014), Snowmelt (2016) and now Circle of Chimes (2017) that's remarkable, but the fact that such powerful waves of music have come from the thirty-two-year old Norwegian in the span of just three years.Stylistically diverse as they are, ...
Tom Rainey Obliggato: Float Upstream
by Dan McClenaghan
Drummer Tom Rainey's reputation runs toward the “outside." His “worked with" resume speaks loudest perhaps from his collaborations with saxophonist Tim Berne--not a guy given to relaxing into a reverent take of, say, "What's New" or “Stella By Starlight." So a set of the familiar standards from Rainey comes as a bit of a surprise.
Dominic Lash: Extremophile
by John Sharpe
According to Wikipedia, an extremophile is an organism that thrives in physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to most life on Earth. By titling the second disc from his Quartet in this way you can't help but think that bassist Dominic Lash is drawing an analogy with the place of the improviser in the ...
