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Jeff Dayton-Johnson's Best of 2008
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
When the world economy entered into a tailspin this year, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner dubbed the event the “Jazz Effect“ given that it emanated from the United States (she was drawing a parallel, for example, to the 1994 “Tequila Effect" that followed a botched currency devaluation in Mexico). I was so happy that a ...
Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: Infinity
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
With The Nature of the Beat (Patois, 2008), trombone virtuoso Wayne Wallace established himself as the musician you'd most like to have living in the downstairs apartment. If you had to have musicians downstairs, that is. The reasons Wallace and his extraordinary band mates would be welcome are essentially twofold. First, their repertoire is ...
Lee Shaw Trio: Live in Graz
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Live in Graz gives listeners a chance to catch up with one of the more improbable second acts in jazz: that of eighty-something pianist Lee Shaw. A poised Shaw usefully recounts the biographical details in the accompanying DVD (which is unfortunately somewhat shoddily produced): she acquired a broad musical education in tiny Ada, Oklahoma; later continued ...
Adam Niewood & His Rabble Rousers: Epic Journey, Volumes I & II
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Adam Niewood's Epic Journey, Volumes I & II is the third vertex in an isosceles triangle of recent releases, the other two points being Noah Preminger's Dry Bridge Road (Nowt, 2008) and Chris Potter's Follow the Red Line: Live at the Village Vanguard (Sunnyside, 2007)--records by saxophonist-leaders ranging from reasonably to very young, with similar instrumentation--notably ...
Jean-Paul Elysee: Pourtant...
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Pourtant..., from Parisian vocalist Jean-Paul Elysee would not likely have popped up on AAJ's radar had it not been released on Aphrodite Records, a solidly all-jazz label. While decidedly jazz-accented, this record is another animal altogether, a contemporary heir of the French chanson tradition of Georges Brassens and Boris Vian.As such, this music is ...
Miucha: Miucha com Vinicius, Tom, Joao
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
The concept behind this attractive but all-too-succinct compilation sounds like a question from a tropical version of the Trivial Pursuits game: Who is the only vocalist to have recorded at one point or another with all three of bossa nova's holy trinity--Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto and Vinicius de Moraes? It's surprising that there is only ...
Frank Macchia: Saxolollapalooza
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Way in the background on some classic big band recordings, there is a high-pitched aural glow, a sustained, ethereal, almost liturgical hum coming from somewhere in the reeds section. Duke Ellington's “There Shall Be No Night," from the great Blanton/Webster Band box set (Bluebird, 1990), has it. Partly it's the recording technology of the time, sufficiently ...
Noah Preminger: Dry Bridge Road
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Readers and theatre-goers probably found Anton Chekhov disquieting when they first encountered his work at the turn of the twentieth century. Here was a guy who used nineteenth-century materials--the bourgeois drawing room, issues of social class, well-behaved prose--to depict what would become emblematic twentieth-century themes: psychology, anomie, the little heart breaks of daily life.Wunderkind ...
Eugene Lee: Meditations
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Jazz musicians have showed a sporadic enthusiasm for meditation: experiments by John Coltrane (and Alice Coltrane), Pharoah Sanders and Keith Jarrett spring to mind, as does the clarinetist Tony Scott's quixotic Music for Zen Meditation (Verve, 1964) The music on these records focuses either on the nirvana-like state to which meditation practitioners could aspire ...
Kelly Rossum: Family
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Minneapolis trumpeter Kelly Rossum's previous release, the excellent Line (612 Sides, 2007) was in some ways as abstract and linear as its title. Family, fittingly, is as comforting and warm as its predecessor was austere--but also, appropriately, slightly bittersweet and elegiac.Partly, the difference is due to the presence of pianist Bryan Nichols. Line is ...
