Home » Search Center » Results: Chris May
Results for "Chris May"
Edsel Gomez: Cubist Music
by Chris May
Pianist/composer Edsel Gomez's assured and magnificent debut album Cubist Music is one to file alongside Daniele D'Agaro's remarkable Chicago Overtones, released this past summer. Each presents a strain of vigorous and creative nu-hard bop, in the tradition but also bursting out of it, and each conveys a vivid sense of place. Just as D'Agaro's album could ...
Christine Tobin: Romancing the Radical
by Chris May
Brought up in Ireland, singer/songwriter Christine Tobin moved to London in '87. She gigged prolifically before forming her own band and starting to record in the mid '90s. She is today one of the most highly regarded musicians on the British cutting edge, rooted in jazz but roaming far beyond it. One prominent commentator has described ...
John Hollenbeck & Jazz Bigband Graz: Joys & Desires
by Chris May
Because of their sheer physical bulk and lethal defensive firepower, big bands have remained fundamentally immune to the jazz revolutions of the last sixty years. Bop, hard bop, cool, free, fusion, funked up, rocked out, astral, groove, and ecstatic... all the major reinventions have been created by smaller lineups. (Miles Davis's Birth Of The Cool band ...
Lleuwen Steffan: Duw A Wyr
by Chris May
While black American gospel music has been a core ingredient in the jazz gumbo since slaves gathered to sing and dance in Congo Square, devotional music from other cultures has remained generally unheard. But as we know, with jazz no longer an exclusively American art form, things are changing, and musicians from all over are bringing ...
Nils Landgren & Joe Sample: Creole Love Call
by Chris May
Nils Landgren is an odd one. On the one hand he creates good for the soul, inventive chamber jazz; on the other he turns out touristic blandofunk. Creole Love Call, recorded in New Orleans and including some of the city's musical luminaries, though too far upstage and away from the action, lies about halfway between these ...
Leo Parker: Let Me Tell You 'Bout It
by Chris May
An uncomplicated, booting, bass-register driven melange of first generation bop and early R&B, Let Me Tell You 'Bout It is baritone saxophonist Leo Parker's finest surviving work, and it's measurably enhanced in this edition by Rudy Van Gelder's 2004 remastering. Parker came up through the swing/jump band nexus--his most regular employer during the '40s was Illinois ...
Various Artists: Congotronics 2
by Chris May
Earlier this year, the Congolese trance band known as Konono No. 1--a Mad Maxian agglomeration featuring ingenious and massive DIY amplification, electronically distorted, outsize likembe thumb pianos, and drum and percussion instruments made from recycled industrial scrap--burst out of Kinshasa to shock and awe the European music scene with Congotronics. It wasn't a jazz album by ...
Various Artists: Piano Works
by Chris May
An unlikely quartet of pianists to share the same box set, Joachim Kuhn, George Gruntz, Kevin Hays, and Ramon Valle contribute one solo CD apiece, each of them standing up as an individual work. But as it turns out, each of them also complements and is enhanced by its close proximity to the others. The Piano ...
Hans Koller: London Ear
by Chris May
This may or may not be the last album Steve Lacy participated in before his death--it is certainly amongst the last, recorded as it was in December '03, only a few months before he died--but in any event it has another timely significance. In a month when the octogenerian US bandleader Gerald Wilson, fast becoming a ...
Enrico Pieranunzi / Marc Johnson / Joey Baron: Play Morricone
by Chris May
Some composers' work is so uniquely and blissfully melodic that a musician need do no more than pick out the top line to induce happiness in the listener. Like Lalique glassware or Ming porcelain, the tune is a thing of beauty complete in itself, capable of standing a lengthy gaze or multiple repetition without any danger ...
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!
