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Grant Stewart: 'Live at Smalls'
Grant Stewart continues to be one of my favorite modern tenor saxophonists. He has a huge sound, he's nimble and knows when to turn on the speed, and he loves showing off on standards. I'm old school—jazz to me is about showing your stuff, competing hard, and having respect for the music's grand tradition. Grant hits ...
Dave Brubeck: 1920-2012
Yesterday afternoon, my Leisure & Arts editor at the Wall Street Journal called with awful news: pianist-composer Dave Brubeck had died. He then asked if I could turn around an appreciation for Thursday's paper. No problem, I said. But after I filed the piece, the national news section wanted it, and the desk had to trim ...
Donald Fagen: 'Sunken Condos'
For many fans of Steely Dan, Donald Fagen's snake-skin voice is the sound of college, the start of intellectual life and newly won independence from parents' clutches. Today, he's Neptune of a sub-rosa region where jazz, R&B and rock intersect. In this funk-rock world, horns come and go, a harmonica wails, a rock guitar weeps, a ...
Charles Mingus: Workshop Concerts
By 1960, bassist, composer and leader Charles Mingus wasn't a jazz musician in the traditional sense. He was an activist, and if the new Charles Mingus: The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964-65 (Mosaic) box is any indication, his music was two years ahead of Huey Newton's Black Panthers and the Black Power movement in general—both of which ...
Artie Shaw: 'Second Chorus'
Artie Shaw hated movie studios. As early as the late 1930s, he detested the way studio bosses abused stars and the seemingly inane demands they made on actors, writers and musicians. He also found that the hours spent waiting around studios between filming takes was a waste of time, and he abhorred how the studios sucked ...
Rhythm and Blues Revue
Back in 1955, R&B was already rock and roll. Little Richard, Chuck Berry and other artists were pioneering a new form that was highly theatric, distantly integrated in appeal, and loaded with sexual overtones. What isn't well documented is the battle brewing within R&B. As rock and roll expanded, the form not only began crowding out ...
Andre Previn: Early Jazz Years
Today, Andre Previn is viewed by many jazz fans as a jazz pretender—a dyed-in-the wool classical pianist and conductor and a prolific film composer who can manage jazz impersonation but shouldn't really be considered among jazz's piano greats. All of which is complete nonsense if you are aware of Previn's early jazz recordings. If you aren't, ...
Lockjaw Davis: Moodsville, Vol. 4
Starting back in 1958, Prestige Records as an experiment began creating brand lines to appeal to different types of consumers. It launched Swingville, Bluesville and Moodsville. Each provided buyers with a self-evident signal as to the general type of jazz inside. On Moodsville releases, the music by leading jazz musicians generally moved at the pace of ...
Duke Pearson: Merry Ole Soul
It's that time of year—when I pick my classic holiday jazz or pop album. The rules are simple: It has to be an old recording, it has to have escaped most people's radar, and it has to have retained a certain holiday charm—not too sappy and not too earnest. Just timeless fun that brings to mind ...
Duke Ellington: Complete Columbia
I fully appreciate Duke Ellington's importance and contribution to jazz. But for the longest time I've never been overly nuts about his music. For years, I felt that a large percentage of his works were wound too tight, oppressively mannered and sticky-fancy in places. But that's largely ignorance talking, since I've never really given Ellington a ...
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