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Women in Jazz, Pt. 3: The International Women in Jazz Organization
by Karl Ackermann
In part 1 and part 2 of the Women in Jazz series, we looked at the historical marginalization of women in jazz from Lil Hardin Armstrong and Blanch Calloway in the 1920s to Tia Fuller in 2019. Part 2 focused on several prominent pioneering artists including the all-female International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Marian McPartland, and Melba ...
Swingadelic: Bluesville
by Jack Bowers
If you're partial to music that is sunny and freewheeling and almost commands a smile, you should have no trouble warming to Bluesville, the eighth recording by New Jersey-based Swingadelic, now twenty-two years old and counting. As its name implies, the orchestra (more often than not a mini-big band a dozen or so strong) re-creates an ...
Kansas Smitty's: Things Happened Here
by Chris May
Kansas Smitty's is the house band at a London jazz bar of the same name. Band and bar are fronted by the American-Italian alto saxophonist, clarinetist and bass clarinetist Giacomo Smith, who with guitarist David Archer wrote most of the material on this album. The band's style embraces swing era Kansas City through to more recent ...
Jazz & Film: An Alternative Top 20 Soundtrack Albums
by Chris May
Jazz and the movies have a shared history stretching back almost a hundred years. The relationship came into its own in the US in the mid twentieth century. Elia Kazan's 1950 movie Panic In The Streets is an early example of how film makers used jazz-based soundtracks to enhance drama and atmosphere and create ambiances of ...
Sex & Drugs & Jazz & Jive: Top Ten Stash Records Albums
by Chris May
With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount ...
Tamir Hendelman: The Many Colors and Cultures of Tamir
by Jim Worsley
With so many talented jazz pianists over the years, it can be a challenge to make your own mark or carve out your own identity. Many fine musicians have simply blended into the scene, seemingly unnoticed, due to a lack of singularity that sets them apart. Tamir Hendelman crashes that barrier with a signature sound that ...
Dinosaur: To The Earth
by Ian Patterson
One of the flag bearers of contemporary British jazz, Dinosaur's rise to more international renown accelerated with its signing to Edition Records, and the subsequent release of Together, As One (2016) and Wondertrail. (2018). Formerly known as the Laura Jurd Quartet, the band had already been going since 2010, releasing one album, Landing Ground (Chaos Collective, ...
Black Lives Matter, Black Culture Matters
by Franz A. Matzner
Black lives matter. I am a jazz writer, so my lens on this truth is in some respects through music. The protests sweeping the country—and globe—are potent and necessarily focused on ending racial violence and police brutality. The images we see with increasingly open eyes of the barbaric treatment of African Americans are changing perceptions and ...
Idris Ackamoor: An Afro-Futurist Odyssey
by Chris May
In summer 2020, Idris Ackamoor will release Shaman! on Britain's Strut label. It is his third album with the post-2015 incarnation of his 1970s band, The Pyramids. It reunites Ackamoor with flautist Margaux Simmons, with whom he had co-founded The Pyramids in 1972. Ackamoor's route to Afro-Futurist jazz began in the US in ...
Ryan Porter: Coming to you Live from Paris
by Aaron Paschal
Los Angeles trombonist, Ryan Porter is set to release his first West Coast Get Down live album entitled Live in Paris at New Morning. In this interview, Porter talks about his experience performing on his first European tour, recording the live album, his relationship with Roy Hargrove and the importance of Social Ambassadors. New ...
