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Shakti: This Moment
by Geno Thackara
The Shakti of This Moment is essentially the Shakti of all its moments--a natural fusion bridging jazzy interplay with the forms and rhythms of Hindustani carnatic music, even if the sound is leagues away from the all-acoustic wildfire that first singed countless ears with the live Shakti with John McLaughlin (Columbia, 1976). The group's unexpected reemergence ...
Michael Hedges: Aerial Boundaries
by Geno Thackara
For all the people that do crazy things with the guitar, there have been precious few that actually invented new ways to play it. The late Michael Hedges did it with an organically grown hodgepodge of a style that he called “heavy mental," all acoustic tones and wicked smarts. This fellow could make one guitar into ...
Tinariwen - Then and Now
by Geno Thackara
Tinariwen sounds just like the deserts they are named for, hard-baked and rough as sand-scoured stone. It's the natural product of decades of life for this amorphous collective of Touareg nomads--living in and out of exile, surviving (and sometimes fighting in) people's revolutions, and finding time in between to put their tribes' lives and experiences into ...
Glenn Zaleski: Summer Song
by Geno Thackara
Glenn Zaleski's playing style is a little swing, a little more contemplation, and a lot of New York City class. Those key elements are all there in this tricky-flowing turn on a Dave Brubeck classic--not really the tune for a sunny-day barbecue, as one might almost guess from the title, but rather one for winding down ...
Gretchen Parlato and Lionel Loueke: Lean In
by Geno Thackara
With a voice as sweet and cool as a spring breeze, Gretchen Parlato would sound at home in any cozy jazz club from Paris to Sao Paulo. The sound of Lionel Loueke's voice and guitar is at least 60 percent rhythm, with his plucking and crooning having an innate percussive pulse running through it. Two decades ...
John Coltrane: After the Rain
by Geno Thackara
Famously, John Coltrane's liner notes for his definitive work A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1964) were full of praise for the benevolence that's always there “through the storm and after the rain." The (probable) source of that phrase from the previous year is decidedly less famous, but then, it's the kind of calm moment you have to ...
Dave McMurray: Grateful Deadication 2
by Geno Thackara
Yet another Grateful Dead tribute will probably invite the same reactions from devotees and anyone else--either “oh, these songs again? “ or “Hmm, these songs again?" For anyone willing to take a look, it will (of course) come down to the way the material is presented and retooled, which in Dave McMurray's case means the sound ...
Jon Stickley Trio: Point to Point
by Geno Thackara
Cross Nickel Creek with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and you'll start getting close to Jon Stickley's neighborhood--but there's still a lot more in there to discover once you make your way around town. The JS3 starts with folk/bluegrass instrumentation (acoustic guitar/violin/drums) and adds dashes of anything from math-prog to Latin or Celtic, while the dazzling ...
3x3: Piano Trios: May 2023
by Geno Thackara
We're still wandering all over the place here; from abstract to groovy and back again, or sometimes some of both at once. Little North Wide Open Self Produced2023 This Scandinavian outfit figuratively wanders farther into the wilds every time around, it seems--their style doesn't have many traces of traditional ...
Maria Baptist: Essays on Jazz
by Geno Thackara
If a title such as Essays on Jazz might suggest something dry or academic (or, god forbid, pretentious), perish the thought. For one thing, Maria Baptist has spent decades as a professor of music and knows her stuff enough to live up to the name. For another, she has spent even more time living the jazz ...
