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Results for "Charles Mingus"
Take Five With Jonathan Smith
by AAJ Staff
Meet Jonathan Smith: Portland, Oregon jazz guitarist, playing in the stylistic tradition of Grant Green. Instrument(s): Guitar.Teachers and/or influences? Dan Balmer, Bruce Forman, and many other great musicians I've had the good fortune to spend time with. A few special influences are: Ingrid Jensen, Benny Green, ...
Cloning Americana: For Which It Stands
by Raul d'Gama Rose
What are the color and the tone and texture of the music of protest and rebellion? Not red, it appears, but red white and tinged with the blues. At least this is what is posited by Cloning Americana, the ensemble that comprises saxophonist/clarinetist Billy Drewes, pianist Gary Versace bassist Scott Lee and drummer Jeff Hirshfield. Their ...
Bob Brookmeyer: Jack of All Trades, Master of Valves
by Jack Bowers
Bob Brookmeyer, a Renaissance man among jazz musicians who died December 15, 2011, four days before his eighty-second birthday, will be remembered as many things: composer, arranger, musician, educator, outspoken arbiter who brooked no nonsense and wasn't shy about letting others know when he believed they were not giving the music he loved the best they ...
Talking Cows: Almost Human
by Raul d'Gama Rose
If there is anything better than the off-the-wall humor of the video promo that preceded this Talking Cows album, it is the actual album itself. Yet much more than the humor of it all is the spectacular seriousness of the music: deadly serious, and for those familiar with the high standards of music (and humor) in ...
Eugene Chadbourne and Warren Smith: Odd Time
by Raul d'Gama Rose
All art is activist; or at least it should be when it challenges established and accepted forms that play to the laissez-faire, the reactionary and the antisocial--and the greater good of the greater number of people experiencing (or trying to experience) it. The music of Beethoven was just so, the composer cancelling the dedication of his ...
Take Five With Dave Bryant
by AAJ Staff
Meet Dave Bryant: Keyboardist and composer, Dave Bryant is best known for his work as a member of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time group. Bryant's addition to the group marked Coleman's first extended work with a keyboard instrument in decades.Instrument(s): Keyboards.Teachers and/or influences? I went through a ...
ReDiviDeR: Never Odd or EveN
by Ian Patterson
ReDiviDeR was born in 2007, when drummer Matthew Jacobson gathered some of Ireland's finest creative musicians to give voice to his compositions. Its debut, recorded live, has an undeniably visceral impact. Jacobson's compositions are like fine sketches around which the musicians add their own bold colors, seeking collective form and harmony. Improvisation of a post-modern and ...
Enrico Rava: To Be Free or Not To Be Free
by Ian Patterson
Freedom, it could be argued, is most deeply understood by those who have been somehow constrained against their will, or who have been prisoners of their own skewed vision of what it means to be free. Trumpeter Enrico Rava knows the meaning of musical freedom; he was part of the free-jazz scene of the 1960s and ...
Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion
by Kevin Fellezs
This article appears in Chapter 3 of Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion by Kevin Fellezs (Duke University Press, 2011). Vital Transformation: Fusion's Discontents Ironically, fusion was, on the one hand, largely a concern for jazz participants and observers even though they largely denied its value or ...
BAM or JAZZ: Why It Matters
by Greg Thomas
Since the last Race and Jazz column, the first of a multi-part discussion with John Gennari--the top scholar on the history of jazz criticism--a firestorm of controversy has arisen surrounding Nicholas Payton's declaration that, to him, the word jazz is dead. He also feels that the word jazz is tantamount to or worse than the “n" ...
