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Pat Metheny: Day Trip
by Chris May
It's way too early in the New Year to be making sensible predictions, but hey, let's drive in the center of the road for a moment: if guitarist Pat Metheny's Day Trip doesn't end up amongst the top half-dozen albums of 2008, some very powerful voodoo indeed must be coming round the corner. Day ...
Steve Lantner Trio: What You Can Throw
by Chris May
There are times, during the loping, rollicking “New Routine" which opens this album by pianist Steve Lantner's trio, that it sounds, and even more emphatically, feels like you are listening to one of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk's great trios of the early 1950s--shades of “Blue Monk," “Bemsha Swing" and “Little Rootie Tootie" jostle, accommodate and morph into ...
Daniel Levin Quartet: Blurry
by Chris May
Though there's nothing remotely revivalist or retro about it, the music made by cellist Daniel Levin's drummerless quartet--glowing, lyrical, adventurous chamber jazz--resonates strongly with the first stirrings of free jazz circa 1960 and the third stream/cool experiments of the half-decade leading up to it. Like all the most successful post-modern creative ventures, Levin's quartet positions its ...
Von Freeman & Friends: Young And Foolish
by Chris May
Still one of the best kept secrets in jazz--when he's referred to at all in the standard histories, it's usually only in passing, as the father of reed player Chico Freeman--Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman deserves, instead, to be celebrated as a national treasure.Freeman was, in his prime, a swing-to-hard bop stylist of extraordinary ...
Various Artists: The Harlem Experiment
by Chris May
On the face of it, The Harlem Experiment sounds like a winner. A multi-generational, multi-cultural cast of A list players--including singer Taj Mahal, trumpeter Steven Bernstein, reed player Don Byron, drummer Steve Berrios and bassist Ruben Rodriguez--revisiting a dozen or so soul, funk, Latin, jazz and pop cuts with heavy New York associations, and with the ...
Max Roach & Anthony Braxton: One In Two, Two In One
by Chris May
Max Roach & Anthony Braxton One In Two, Two In One Hatology 2004 Revisiting the legacy of the drummer Max Roach, who passed aged 83 in August 2007, one is reminded that his years of great music making were not confined to the birth of bop ...
Oliver Lake: Zaki
by Chris May
Reissued on the excellent grounds that it contains music which deserves to be listened to today, Zaki was recorded live at Jazz Festival Willisau in 1979. Although saxophonist Oliver Lake had been a member of soon-to-be festival favorites, the World Saxophone Quartet since 1977, he was still little known outside the U.S. and Willisau was one ...
Habib Koite & Bamada: Afriki
by Chris May
Habib Koite & Bamada Afriki Cumbancha 2007 With his third album, Baro (Putumayo, 2001), Malian guitarist, singer and songwriter Habib Koite attracted the kind of celebrity endorsements you imagine some press agents might kill for. Joan Baez ranked Koite alongside Jimi Hendrix in the pantheon of guitar greats, while, backstage ...
Bismillah Khan: The Shenai's Humble Master
by Chris May
For most people in the West, classical Indian raga music means one instrument, the sitar, and one player, Ravi Shankar. Quite why Shankar came to be considered the greatest modern sitar player over Vilayat Khan and several others, and the sitar as the primary raga instrument over the sarod or the shenai, is debatable. But serendipity ...
Terence Blanchard: A Tale Of God's Will (A Requiem For Katrina)
by Chris May
Jazz history isn't exactly littered with great albums featuring string orchestras. There have been a few--tenor saxophonist Stan Getz's Focus (Verve, 1961) and British reed player Tim Garland's If The Sea Replied (Sirocco, 2005) are both masterpieces, but precious few others were recorded in the 44 years which separate them. All too often, string orchestras seem ...
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