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Article: Album Review

Rhythm Future Quartet: Travels

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by Dan McClenaghan
February 27, 2016

Gypsy jazz started, in terms of popular recognition, with guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli, and their lively and supremely swinging Qunintette du Hot Club du France. The group recorded hundreds of tunes in the thirties and and forties, released on the 78 rpm discs that were the recorded music mode at the time, and ...

Article: Album Review

Michael Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus: The Distance

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by Dan McClenaghan
February 21, 2016

Here's a surprise. Bassist Michael Formanek is probably best known for his two recent ECM Records dates, Rub and Spare Change (2010) and Small Places, a couple of modernistic quartet sessions featuring saxophonist Tim Berne, pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver. These are tight and intense sets, architecturally solid, free-like outings that may have helped ...

Article: Album Review

Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Make Magic Happen

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by Dan McClenaghan
February 3, 2016

The computer/internet age ushers in new ways of selling music. Record stores, flipping through bins of long playing albums--long gone. Compact discs--not selling like they used to. Digital downloads--the thing of the future? Guitarist Jon Lundbom has come up with the idea--influenced by trumpeter Dave Douglas' foray into this territory, perhaps, with his Three Views (Greenleaf, ...

Article: Album Review

Marc Copland: Zenith

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by Dan McClenaghan
January 31, 2016

After releasing a series of excellent but under-recognized CDs on various small record labels--starting in the mid-1980s--pianist Marc Copland rose in prominence in 2006 when he took up residence on Germany's Pirouet Records. The highlight of his Pirouet days was a set of trio discs wrapped in a marketing package dubbed “The New York Trio Recordings." ...

Article: Album Review

Roxy Coss: Restless Idealism

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by Dan McClenaghan
January 26, 2016

Upcoming saxophonist Roxy Coss opens her splendid Origin Records debut, Restless Idealism with a traditional approach on her original tune, “Don't Cross the Coss." It's a happy and assertive sound, and when she takes her first solo, her robust tone brings Coleman Hawkins to mind. Coss and her band, churning along on a well-lubricated drive train ...

Article: Album Review

Greg Abate & Phil Woods: Kindred Spirits: Live at Chan's

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by Dan McClenaghan
January 20, 2016

The legendary alto saxophonist Phil Woods' (1931-2015) health was failing at the time Kindred Spirits: Live at Chan's was recorded, but you never know it by listening to the crisp delivery, the vitality of a hot bebop band playing in the mode of the iconic altoist Charlie Parker. Saxophonist Greg Abate joins Woods in the front ...

Article: Album Review

Aruan Ortiz Trio: Hidden Voices

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by Dan McClenaghan
January 17, 2016

The jazz piano trio comes in a wide spectrum of approaches, from the traditional--Red Garland, Tommy Flanagan--to the way out there avant-garde, like Cecil Taylor. When the subject of “Cuban pianists" comes up, some of the first names that come to mind are probably those who work in a traditional vein: Chucho Valdes, perhaps, or maybe ...

Article: Album Review

Christine Jensen/Maggi Olin: Transatlantic Conversations: 11 Piece Band Live

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by Dan McClenaghan
January 16, 2016

Prior to the release of her marvelous big band outing, Habitat (Justin time, 2013), Canada's Christine Jensen was probably best know as the alto saxophone-playing sister of high profile trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. Sweden's Maggi Olin's major notoriety--on the United States' side of the Atlantic--certainty came from her work as a pianist/composer for the under-recognized quintet, Nordic ...

Article: Album Review

Carlos Vega: Bird's Ticket

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by Dan McClenaghan
January 11, 2016

Saxophonist Carlos Vega's band crackles. The sound of “A Confluence in Chi-Town," the opener on his Bird's Ticket recording, has an on-the-edge urgency in its distinctive approach to the standard jazz quintet format--bass/drums/keyboard rhythm section and a trumpet and a saxophone--a line up like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie used. Vega, a veteran of ...

Article: Album Review

Ray Vega & Thomas Marriott: Return of the East-West Trumpet Summit

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by Dan McClenaghan
December 28, 2015

Seattle-based trumpeter Thomas Marriott plays well with electricity. Specifically, with the Hammond B3 organ. The most memorable of his now nine CDs on Origin Records feature either the Hammond B3 or some serious Moog synthesier/Fender Rhodes work: Crazy: The Music of Willie Nelson (2007 ), with Ryan Burns on electric keys; Human Spirit (2009), featuring Gary ...