Home » Search Center » Results: Chris May
Results for "Chris May"
Trudy Kerr: Cloudburst
by Chris May
Something of a miniature epiphany this. A vocal album sufficiently musicianly, substantial and in the instrumental tradition that it could equally well be filed under mainstream. Think vocal jazz automatically equals jazz-lite? Think again. Cloudburst is London-based Australian Kerr's fifth album and follows her fine '02 homage to Chet Baker, My Old Flame. This ...
Various Artists: London Is The Place For Me 2
by Chris May
Vibrant and beautiful almost beyond words, the fifty year old recordings being collected on Honest Jons' London Is The Place For Me series are giant and precious treasures of early black British music. Exquisite artistic achievements in their own right, they also throw light on the early development of post bop jazz in the UK.
Ruben Gonzalez: Momentos
by Chris May
This is one of those evenly tempered and prettily mellifluous albums which sound at first like background music, but which reveal a subtle and sophisticated beauty if you pay closer attention. Like guitarist Johnny Smith's transcendental '52 masterpiece Moonlight In Vermont, this roughly contemporaneous compilation of archive recordings by Cuban pianist Ruben Gonzalez sounds superficially like ...
Transcendental Psychology: Redefinition
by Chris May
There's something winningly old school and unreconstructed about Chris Lockett's Transcendental Psychology amongst the studied artifice and self-conscious cool of the jam band scene. Not that it's a jam band under the letter of the FDA regulations--but it will be bracketed as one, sure as night follows day. Trans Psych's scope is both narrower ...
Polar Bear and Theo Travis/Steve Lawson: Live At The Vortex, London
by Chris May
How sweet it is--to have the Vortex back, having being forced out of its original premises by the greed of a property developer and spending a year in limbo. In the space of one week, Polar Bear and Theo Travis, and in the days between them Loz Speyer's Time Zone, Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine's Last ...
Charlie Hunter & Bobby Previte as Groundtruther: Longitude
by Chris May
The second volume in Charlie Hunter and Bobby Previte's planned trilogy of Groundtruther albums, Longitude is both more extreme and more rock-oriented than its predecessor, last year's Latitude. That album included Greg Osby as its featured guest musician, and though it was light years away from the mainstream aesthetic in its focus on electronica, soundscapes, and ...
Daniele D'Agaro: Chicago Overtones
by Chris May
With a distinguished track record of retro/repertory and free/new territories projects already behind him, Italian reedist Daniele D'Agaro brings the various strands of his music together here in a luminous, edge-of-your-seat masterpiece which will delight anyone with one ear for jazz history and another for its future. The album is simultaneously a reaffirmation of the past ...
Bill Cole & William Parker: Two Masters: Live At The Prism
by Chris May
Bill Cole and William Parker have much in common: belief in the healing and transforming power of music, respect for non-Western musical forms, and a commitment to free improvisation. Cole's Untempered Ensemble, which has included Parker in recent years, as well as Parker's prolific output with his own Little Huey Orchestra and a multitude of other ...
Gianluigi Trovesi & Gianni Coscia: Round About Weill
by Chris May
In his liner notes to this album, philosopher/novelist Umberto Eco talks about Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia revisiting Kurt Weill “in a musical drowse dominated by an almost oneiric principle of contamination." As you do. In plain English, Eco is suggesting that Trovesi and Coscia have approached the music as if in an eclectic, stream of ...
Shrimp Boat: Something Grand
by Chris May
Chances are, unless you noticed AUM Fidelity's recent re-release of the '89 album Speckly, Shrimp Boat may be a mystery to you. The band shone brightly during the late '80s and early '90s on Chicago's art rock scene, before drifting apart in '93. And there they might have stayed, a more or less forgotten footnote in ...
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!
