Results for "duke ellington"

Mosaics: The Life and Works of Graham Collier by Duncan Heining from Equinox Publishing

June 30, 2018

Mosaics is the first biography of bassist, band-leader, composer, educator and author Graham Collier. Duncan Heining draws extensively on Collier’s personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life ...

Blue Highways and Sweet Music: The Territory Bands, Part I

by Karl Ackermann
June 25, 2018

Part 1 | Part 2 OriginsBy the second half of the 1920s, New York had supplanted Chicago as the center of jazz. The “Jazz Age"--a label incorrectly ascribed to F. Scott Fitzgerald--could rationally have been framed as the “Dance Age." Prohibition, and the speakeasies that it spawned, were packed with wildly enthusiastic patrons of ...

Ab Baars: And She Speaks - A Collection Of Ballads

by Mark Corroto
June 25, 2018

Mike Doughty of the rock band Soul Coughing wrote the lyric “is Chicago, Is Not Chicago..." to the song of the same name, followed by “a man cuts in half, just like he snaps a pencil..." The same could be said of And She Speaks -A Collection Of Ballads by saxophonist / clarinetist Ab Baars. This ...

Eric Dolphy: Gone In The Air

by Mark Werlin
June 20, 2018

Newly-remastered SACD reissues of Eric Dolphy's albums for the Prestige label mark the 90th anniversary of his birth. The recording sessions that Eric Dolphy led in the last four years of his life advanced the evolution of jazz. It was a tragedy that Eric Dolphy gave himself so completely and unselfishly to art ...

The Song Poetry of William Parker

by Jakob Baekgaard
June 19, 2018

The voice is close to the essence of what it means to be human. Through the voice, we express ourselves and sing our sorrow. It goes back a long way to hymns, blues, arias and standards. Through the tunes we tune in to ourselves and forget our daily strife. When songs are best, ...

Dan Wilensky: Good Music

by Dan McClenaghan
June 18, 2018

“There are only two kinds of music. Good Music and the other kind." So said Duke Ellington, and probably a whole bunch of other people. Good Music is saxophonist Dan Wilensky's examination of music for music's sake, his unpretentious “serving the music" recording. Seven of the eleven tunes are chordless trio affairs, bringing--as a ...

The Bach's Beach Vision Of Jazz Heaven

by Arthur R George
June 17, 2018

Heaven for some is a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield. For Pete Douglas, it was a house on a beach with a jazz club in his living room, a would-be heaven also for anyone who dropped in. Douglas passed on, in 2014 at age 85, sitting at his desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. But his ...

Duke Ellington: Duke Ellington In Coventry

by Chris Mosey
June 8, 2018

During World War Two, the Germans rained tons of high explosives, including parachute air-mines and incendiary petroleum mines on the English city of Coventry. In addition to factories supporting the British war effort, they destroyed the city's emblematic cathedral. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, took to using “Coventry" as a synonym for mass destruction. Enemy ...

Mimika Orchestra

Mimika Orchestra is an avant-garde concept jazz-world ensemble formed in London (UK) and currently based in Zagreb (Croatia). It was formed by the Croatian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mak Murtić in 2010. Murtić´s original compositions for the ensemble are strongly influenced by the Balkan folk traditions, using their specific modalities and rhythms in a contemporary jazz expression. Through music and stage appearance alike, every project explores a different theme. The pieces are conceptually and stylistically bound by a narrative highlighted by costumes and performance. So far, Murtić has introduced the audiences with a utopian society on Mars, a prehistoric migration from Africa into the world and a pagan Slavic funeral ceremony

Jungsu Choi Tiny Orkester: Tschuss Jazz Era

by Jack Bowers
June 3, 2018

At last, after lo these many years, a big band--make that a Tiny Orkester--from South Korea. If that's not surprising enough, what is even more striking is that composer / arranger Jungsu Choi's diminutive ensemble (tentet plus voices) is highly proficient and really swings. Choi wrote two of the album's five numbers; the others are Charlie ...