Results for "Eric Dolphy"
Eric Dolphy

Eric Allan Dolphy was a jazz musician who played alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet.
Dolphy was one of several groundbreaking jazz alto players to rise to prominence in the 1960s. He was also the first important bass clarinet soloist in jazz, and among the earliest significant flute soloists; he is arguably the greatest jazz improviser on either instrument. On early recordings, he occasionally played traditional B-flat soprano clarinet. His improvisational style was characterized by a near volcanic flow of ideas, utilizing wide intervals based largely on the 12-tone scale, in addition to using an array of animal- like effects which almost made his instruments speak. Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos had a logic uncharacteristic of many other free jazz musicians of the day; even as such, he was definitively avant-garde. In the years after his death his music was more aptly described as being "too out to be in and too in to be out."
Nicole McCabe: Introducing Nicole McCabe

If you were a young and talented jazz musician in Portland, Oregon, you would make yourself highly visible on the local scene to gain invaluable experience playing with the best the city had to offer. In addition to your more formal studies, you would extend your musical outreach from post-bop modernism to the avant-garde. Most importantly, ...
Alberto Pinton Trio: All The Difference

Multi-instrumentalist Alberto Pinton might have been born in Italy, but more and more his music bears the signature of his home in Sweden. Or maybe an explanation is that this trio effort in May of 2020 was recorded during the global pandemic, when touring musicians were granted time for contemplation and introspection. In any case, All ...
@ Bremen 1964 & 1975

Label: Sunnyside Records
Released: 2020
Track listing: Disc 1: Hope So Eric; Fables Of Faubus. Disc 2: Piano Solo; Sophisticated Lady; Parkeriana; Meditations On Integration. Disc 3: Sue’s Changes; For Harry Carney. Disc 4: Free Cell Block F ‘Tis Nazi USA; Black Bat And Poles; Fables Of Faubus; Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love; Cherokee; Remember Rockefeller At Attica; Devil’s Blues.
Mark Sullivan's Best Releases of 2020

Despite the circumstances, this was a high volume year for album releases, rich in both quantity and quality. Mine is not a ranked listing, but more or less in reverse chronological order. Since I wrote fewer album reviews than average, for the first time I have included several releases that I did not review myself.
Joost Lijbaart: Free Conversations With Myself

For an artist, making any album is something of a journeythe birthing of ideas, the moulding and sculpting of concepts, the creative trial and error, the emotional highs and lows, and in the end, the satisfaction of a work completed. Dutch drummer/percussionist and composer Joost Lijbaart has travelled that road many times in a thirty-year career, ...
Charles Mingus: @ Bremen 1964 & 1975

It is 1964 and the big bass emperor rules the old continent as he commanded every stage he set foot on. So @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 just does not sound right. Charles Mingus Swings Bad Ass and Liberates Your Body and Your Mind @ Bremen sounds way more like it. Foras much as anything in ...
Chris May’s Best Releases Of 2020

Not the best year for live gigs in London, but Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra just made it under the wire, lighting up the Jazz Cafe in late January. Rather like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Sosimi's band has form as an incubator of young talent. A recent star in the making was trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, who has ...
Charles Mingus: @ Bremen 1964 & 1975

Four hours of previously unissued, premier-league music by Charles Mingus is something to shout about, and @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 is about as good as the bassist and composer's posthumously released live albums get. Four CDs chronicle two extended, intense performances recorded in Germany by Radio Bremen. Both gigs featured all-star bands and both are ...
Out of the Roma Villages of Turkey, Clarinet Reigns Beyond Its Traditions

The clarinet, foundational for jazz from Sidney Bechet unto Eric Dolphy, remains in strong use in the indigenous Roma music of the eastern Mediterranean. Elsewhere in the world clarinet generally has been moved aside by saxophone's bigger sound. But in the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, clarinet provides jazz shadings to traditional music, speaks a range of ...