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Ludovic de Preissac Septet: Retrouvailles
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Pianist Ludovic de Preissac's new record reminds me why I fell in love with jazz in the first place; in both a very general and specific sense.Generally, in the sense that Retrouvailles evinces, from beginning to end, that paradoxical mixture of solidarity in the pursuit of a collective goal, together with competitive ...
Manu Codjia: Songlines
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Electric guitarists in jazz sort themselves into two camps. Do you follow the magisterial Charlie Christian, and favor clean lines that a horn player might play, using electricity the way Billie Holiday used a microphone to make subtle nuances more easily heard? Or do you follow the arguably less gifted (but equally influential) Johnny Smith, embracing ...
Mike Dillon's Go-Go Jungle: Battery Milk
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Vibraphonist Mike Dillon has a very good idea (which is much more than is needed to make a record these days). Dillon's idea is to make a kind of distorted around the edges, loud, vibes-based funk-rock. Perhaps the finest example on this, his début recording, is “Broc's Last Stand." It's the presence of the vibes that ...
Wolfgang Muthspiel and Brian Blade: Friendly Travelers
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Friendly Travelers is an attractive set of guitar and drums duets by two widely-traveled (and apparently friendly) musicians. Guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel's ample use of overdubs, loops and other effects is endlessly entertaining and certainly prevents any ennui. This proliferation of guitar voices nevertheless also prevents the listener from focusing carefully on Muthspiel's musical personality. Though capable ...
Dewey Jackson: Live at the Barrel 1952
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
An exact contemporary of Louis Armstrong, St. Louis trumpet player Dewey Jackson (1900-1966) claimed that his favorite players of the instrument were Louis Desvigne, Johnny Dunn and Tommy Ladnier. Approximately one percent of you are nodding your heads sagely at this point, saying, “Ah, another trumpeter from the Desvigne-Dunn-Ladnier school of jazz; marvelous," while the rest ...
Frederic Monino: Around Jaco
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Bassist Frédéric Monino offers this tribute to Jaco Pastorius twenty years after the latter's senseless death-- and I use the word “senseless advisedly; Pastorius' murder made no sense. Monino's disc furthermore appears amidst important retrospectives of his greatest band, Weather Report: the box set Forecast: Tomorrow (Columbia/Legacy, 2006); and Weather Report co-leader Joe Zawinul's Brown Street ...
Guillaume de Chassy: The Ugly and the Beautiful
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
February 2007, Paris: Pianist Guillaume de Chassy has just recorded his first solo piano album and he is performing an entirely solo set at the Archipel theater to celebrate its release. If he's nervous, it doesn't show; he jokes easily with the appreciative crowd, leading them through the by-ways of the musical journey that led him ...
Florian Ross Trio: Big Fish & Small Pond
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
In the year before I loaded Florian Ross's Big Fish & Small Pond onto the iPod, I listened to a lot of other new piano trio releases. Even one led by another guy called Florian: Florian Weber's Minsarah ( Justin Time, 2006). Most of these records were somewhere between good and very good, but few were ...
Rachid Taha: Diwan 2
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Rachid TahaDiwan 2Universal Music France2006 It is tempting to view Diwan 2 as a “roots" album: there is a preponderance of covers of older material, and the instrumentation leans substantially less on distorted electric guitar than did Rachid Taha's last album, the phenomenal Tékitoi (Wrasse, 2004). As on ...
Pierrick Pedron: Deep in a Dream
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Deep in a Dream was the jazz event of 2006 in France; alto saxophonist Pierrick Pedron and the album were showered with prizes and dominated journalists' “best-of lists. The explanation that everyone gives for their high marks is surprisingly guileless: the story they tell is one of an emerging figure of the French scene flying to ...
