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Results for "Geri Allen"
Min Rager: First Steps
by Raul d'Gama Rose
It is not often that a woman is given much elbowroom in contemporary music, no matter how good she may be. However, when she is as good as Min Rager on First Steps, more than elbowroom had better be made for her and her piano. True, Rager has been preceded by a celestial pantheon of female ...
Thelonious Monk: Pianists Riff on Monk
by George Kanzler
This month, over a dozen pianists will participate in a free concert, Thelonious Monk at 92, at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan. Seven of them, and two other pianists with an abiding interest in Monk, answered questions about Monk's music and more specifically, his piano playing, as influence and inspiration. Jazz ...
2009 Detroit Jazz Festival
by Wilbur MacKenzie
Detroit Jazz FestivalDetroit, MISeptember 4-7, 2009A short distance from Hitsville USA, where Berry Gordy created the Motown sound, shaping the history of American music and culture, and the Diego Rivera Court, where the artist's murals pay tribute to the workers whose hands made the auto industry a reality, sits Hart Plaza, Detroit's waterfront ...
30th Annual Detroit International Jazz Festival: In Pictures
by C. Andrew Hovan
30th Annual Detroit International Jazz Festival Detroit, Michigan September 4-7, 2009With perfect temperatures and wall-to-wall sunshine, Detroit recently celebrated a tradition that has brought jazz to the city every Labor Day weekend for the past 30 years. Billed as the largest free jazz festival in North America, this year's festivities ran ...
Count Basie Orchestra: Swinging, Singing, Playing
by Robert J. Robbins
Count Basie OrchestraSwinging, Singing, PlayingMack Avenue2009 Although over a quarter-century has elapsed since the passing of William “Count" Basie in 1984, the bandleader and pianist's legacy has proved one of the most durable from the big band era, and the Basie band's Swinging, Singing, Playing maintains the Basie ...
Stefon Harris: Authenticity and Audacity
by R.J. DeLuke
Authenticity is a special word for vibraphone wizard Stefon Harris when it comes to his art, which springs from the tradition of jazz music, but is approached through a modern lens that takes into account the sounds and perspective of 2009. He has enough audacity--also a special word for Harris--to say it clearly, to ...
Jack Cortner Big Band / Peter Hand Big Band / Chicago Jazz Philharmonic
by Jack Bowers
Jack Cortner Big Band Sound Check Jazzed Media 2009 For someone who waited so long before taking his first swings as leader of his own big band, Jack Cortner shows again on Sound Check, the band's second impressive recording in as many years, that he's got game. He's ...
Geri Allen: Journey to the Light
by Greg Thomas
Geri Allen's playing and compositional efforts manifest a stylistic flexibility grounded in her absorption of the lessons of the masters of the jazz idiom, and her desire to innovate upon that legacy. As an apprentice during high school and college, and then as a journeywoman, Allen has kept company with musical legends.
Trio 3: At This Time and Berne Concert
by Clifford Allen
30-odd years ago, the lineup of Trio 3--a veritable supergroup--might have seemed surprising. By the mid-'70s, drummer Andrew Cyrille had fed polyrhythmic invention to Cecil Taylor's unit structures and tuned drums for ten years, while bassist Reggie Workman was known for his work with Coltrane and a number of Blue Note artists. Reedman Oliver Lake, who ...
Jacksonville: Big City, Big Band, Big Plans
by Jack Bowers
Almost everyone who's even mildly interested knows that the big band scene in the US isn't what it used to be. On the other hand, the big bands aren't yet dead, as some alarmists have claimed, or even on life support. Thanks in part to college and armed services programs, there are perhaps as many or ...
