Home » Search Center » Results: Chris May
Results for "Chris May"
Wayne Shorter: The Soothsayer
by Chris May
A good month for tenor saxophone connoisseurs, April 2008, with a second Rudy Van Gelder re-master released alongside Ike Quebec's signature Blue & Sentimental (Blue Note, 2008). The Soothsayer may be comparably less of a benchmark in Wayne Shorter's discography, and remains to some extent overshadowed by its close contemporary Speak No Evil (Blue Note, 1964), ...
Ike Quebec: Blue & Sentimental
by Chris May
Ill health and “personal problems" prevented Ike Quebec (1918-63) from becoming the star he could otherwise have been. The tenor saxophonist straddled 1940s swing-to-bop with as much style as his near contemporary, Dexter Gordon. His warm, weighty, approximately out-of-Coleman Hawkins playing was tailor-made for the hard bop era which followed--but he spent most of the 1950s ...
Michael Adkins Quartet: Rotator
by Chris May
A gigantic album from an extraordinary “new" tenor saxophonist. Rotator is actually Michael Adkins' second disc as leader, but his first--Infotation (Semblance Records, 2005), recorded back in 2000 and five years finding a label--slipped under the radar of many listeners. Thirty-something Adkins, brought up around Detroit but based in New York since 1998, seems to have ...
Russ Lossing / John Hebert: Line Up
by Chris May
Modern bass playing, and the special relationship in jazz between bass and piano, could be said to have begun in the early 1940s, with the partnership of pianist Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Blanton. In a series of duo recordings as impactful, among musicians, as saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's couplings a ...
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey: Lil' Tae Rides Again
by Chris May
With Lil' Tae Rides Again, their first studio album since The Sameness Of Difference (Hyena Records, 2005), the mercurially inclined Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey have taken their biggest step so far into the unknown, re-inventing themselves in the process, at least for this project. The band gave unfettered creative control of the finished disc to their ...
Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman: Song X: Twentieth Anniversary
by Chris May
Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman Song X: Twentieth Anniversary Nonesuch Records 2005 The untrammeled pleasure Pat Metheny has given this listener over the last couple of months with the freewheeling trio album Day Trip (Nonesuch Records, 2008) has prompted a trawl through the guitarist's back catalogue in search of another ...
Tony Kofi Quartet: The Silent Truth
by Chris May
Saxophonist Tony Kofi is that increasingly rare thing on the British jazz scene, a player who didn't spend three years “learning" the music at an academic institution, but who discovered it, and developed his gift for it, mostly on the bandstand. True, Kofi did once spend a year at Berklee College of Music on a full ...
John Ellis & Double-Wide: Dance Like There's No Tomorrow
by Chris May
The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which laid waste to much of New Orleans in August 2005, has inspired a clutch albums lauding the city and its people, and lambasting the colossal failure of the US government to pick up the pieces. Some of these tributes have been heartfelt; others have appeared opportunistic, going on cynical. Until ...
Sunny Murray Trio with John Edwards and Tony Bevan: The Gearbox Explodes!
by Chris May
Released under the titular leadership of drummer Sunny Murray, The Gearbox Explodes! features the same line-up as Home Cooking In The UK (Foghorn Records, 2004), and is in practice another exercise in collective music making of the purest and least hierarchical kind. Murray's leadership is confined to establishing an opening tempo and beat for each of ...
His Name Is Alive: Sweet Earth Flower: A Tribute To Marion Brown
by Chris May
Starting with a bold and beautiful idea--to perform a concert tribute to an iconic musician from an earlier age while that musician is still with us--His Name Is Alive have gone on to record an album of such oh-my-god beauty and vitality that the listener may at first be reduced to silent, slack-jawed wonder. And while ...
Album Showcase
Trending
Jazz Raconteurs
Julius Hemphill: Marty Ehrlich and Tim Berne Remember a...
In Tribute To...
John Coltrane At 100: A Global Perspective
History of Jazz
John Coltrane in Detroit: A Brief History
Live Review
Detroit Jazz Festival 2026: A Gathering in a Great Jazz City
Profile
Sequoia Snyder: Growing in the Light of the Masters
Interview
Jasur Khalilov: From Falak to Fusion
Profile
The Discreet Charm of Tete Montoliu
VOTE!
