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Tom Teasley's Duo of Duos
by Geno Thackara
Tom Teasley Lunch Break (featuring Dave Ballou) Self Produced 2025 Considering that there's such a thing as talking drums, it is no surprise to hear how they can also whisper or sing or shout--at least in a skilled pair of hands, which is exactly what we have here. With a well-rounded ...
Ronny Wiesauer: Figures and Shapes
by Geno Thackara
Amidst his occasional outings with combinations of other players, Ronny Wiesauer keeps drifting back to a personal niche that is reliably comfortable and comforting. When settled in alone with a guitar, he spins pastoral meditations with the easy-flowing smoothness of a daydream--this is contemplative territory sometimes reminiscent of Ralph Towner or Pat Metheny, though without making ...
Miles Davis: Doo-Bop-A-Lu-Wah: The Musical!
by Geno Thackara
Easy Mo Bee is a fellow who does not like to leave things unfinished. Like any good producer, he is restlessly willing to shape and hone a work until things are fine-tuned down to the smallest details--a fine quality in rap recording, where a person really needs a sharp ear for slick beats and hooks. But ...
Yosef Gutman Levitt's Joy in Collaboration
by Geno Thackara
Maybe Yosef Gutman Levitt just never needs to sleep. Amidst the demands of life and family, the worldly bassist somehow consistently manages to produce three or four albums a year, largely of original material, and each distinct enough that it never seems to be coasting on a formula. It also helps to have a globe-spanning cast ...
Bela Fleck & the Flecktones: Blu-Bop
by Geno Thackara
This group's recipe does have some blues and bop buried in there somewhere, sure, although they also pack it with several houses' worth of kitchen sinks while twisting your mind and their fingers into pretzels. This one has still aged surprisingly well, even with echo-toned banjo and the frisky beats of a custom guitar-turned-MIDI-percussion device. Well, ...
John Paul Jones: Hoediddle
by Geno Thackara
Sure, everybody and their uncle knows about that band that John Paul Jones played in once upon a time, but there has seemed to be practically no recognition for his two (and apparently still only) solo albums from around the turn of the century. These were a pair of wild--and impressively eclectic, in the case of ...
Geno Thackara's Favorite Jazz Albums of 2024
by Geno Thackara
The year has unfortunately not allowed for reviewing anything near as much as I'd hoped, but the lack of coverage certainly does not mean a lack of quality--as always, there are some picks that just keep finding their way back to my speakers again and again. I'll add a quick honorable mention for Ultraviolet's Ripples and ...
Tabla Beat Science: Sacred Channel
by Geno Thackara
Bill Laswell must have known he was really onto something special when assembling this lineup, crossing some slick cyber-techno acts with endlessly open-minded Indian classical musicians such as Ustad Sultan Khan and the legendary Ustad Zakir Hussain. It was the kind of all-star group where the members don't outshine each other, but humbly mesh their brilliance ...
Jazz Sabbath: The 1968 Tapes
by Geno Thackara
The story continues: Jazz Sabbath's eponymous debut (Blacklake, 2020) introduced the premise of a progressive-minded late-'60s piano trio whose unreleased material was plagiarized and adapted in heavy blues style by those young upstarts Black Sabbath. The catalog got an even more fun horn-drenched expansion with 2022's Vol. 2 (Blacklake). The mysterious pianist Milton Keanes (da-dum) and ...
