Home » Search Center » Results: Javier AQ Ortiz
Results for "Javier AQ Ortiz"
John Heward Trio: Let Them Pass (laissez-passer)
by Javier AQ Ortiz
In the case of any abstract interpretation of human experience, it is not necessary to get--or even know--the author's point of view in order to assail it at any level. In the case of Let Them Pass (laissez-passer), the first recording by the John Heward Trio, it does help to be aware of the collective spur ...
Ray Mantilla & The New Space Station: Man-Ti-Ya
by Javier AQ Ortiz
Man-Ti-Ya is the latest launch of percussionist Ray Mantilla's Space Station, featuring a full-size sounding septet. As usual, Mantilla recruits skilled musicians for his releases. On this occasion, highlights include veteran pianist “Eddie MartÃ-nez, who enhances this recording not only with his remarkable performance, but also through his arrangements; saxophonist Willie Williams, who distinguished himself with ...
Patrick Brennan: Rapt Circle & The Drum is Honor Enough
by Javier AQ Ortiz
Altoist Patrick Brennan's latest two releases, under the ever-evolving and exploratory guise of Sonic Openings Under Pressure, aren't threaded the same way, even when weaving the same musical material as he does in Rapt Circle. The aforementioned documents live music from two different presentations in 2002. One of them included percussionist Juma Santos Ayantola, ...
The Beat Circus: Ringleader's Revolt
by Javier AQ Ortiz
If one were to cast Howard Stern's Wack Pack as the band members of the traveling carnival of the outstanding HBO show Carnivàle, the music on Ringleader's Revolt could be envisaged with some ease as a soundtrack. Hell, even the cover art offers an inkling! The Beat Circus operates on a musical boundary hardly ...
Triot With John Tchicai: Sudden Happiness
by Javier AQ Ortiz
Reedist John Tchicai is par for the Triot course in Sudden Happiness. Tchicai's work on tenor sax, as well as bass clarinet and vocals, is wholly en suite with this vividly youthful pianoless trio featuring Stefan Pasborg on drums, Nicolai Munch on bass, and Mikko Innanen on alto, soprano, and baritone saxophones. The wise restraint of ...
Los Mocosos: American Us
by Javier AQ Ortiz
San Francisco's Los Mocosos is one of the West Coast's Hispanic hybrid musical groups liable to mix an assortment of musical styles into its formula. Unlike, say, Steve Coleman's attempts at mingling Afro-Cuban music with jazz--which yielded superimposed musical elements, rather than a unified whole--this group can and does mix seemingly disparate musical genres and styles, ...
Don Wilner: Figments of My Imagination
by Javier AQ Ortiz
The Musical Director of the Van Dyke Café, Miami Beach's leading jazz venue, serves the diminutive jazz audiences of South Florida quality music by accompanying various passing guests, as well asperforming with local ensembles, including his own. Figments of My Imagination, his second release under his name, is Don Wilner's latest. Take heed of this Brazilian ...
Luis Munoz: Vida
by Javier AQ Ortiz
As adept as Luis Muñoz is at various percussion instruments, keyboards and piano included, the versatility and sensibility of his writing are also showcased on Vida. He braids various Latin American styles to form an attractive jazzy Bo Derek-like musical hairdo of sorts that travels well in various contexts. Whether it be as background music at ...
Sonny Simmons: Jewels
by Javier AQ Ortiz
Inspired by the works of Charlie Parker, Vincent Van Gogh, Sigurd Rasher, and Eric Dolphy, saxophonist Sonny Simmons recorded Jewels at a California home in 1991. Simmons' best-known composition, “Music Matador,"? initiates the recording. It was originally featured on an Eric Dolphy recording, and in a recent AAJ interview Simmons affirms that it is ...
Rachel Z: Everlasting
by Javier AQ Ortiz
If one has little sympathy for the jazzification of popular music, low tolerance for jazzified swinging musicality for its own sake, outright disgust for anything other than scorching tempos or abstraction for its own sake, derision for space and breaths of cooled musical air between the polarities of accessible depth and potent fragility, then one should ...
