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Being Grateful: Defining the Jazz Years Part One - 1973
by Jacob Hobson
Jazz, like the Grateful Dead, has never been particularly easy to define. It seems jazz, in its most simply defined meaning, is improvised music. The Grateful Dead have been called a thousand different things since its official formation in 1965, but has rarely been called a jazz band. There have always been and will always be ...
Jazz Musician of the Day: Jimmy Smith
All About Jazz is celebrating Jimmy Smith's birthday today! Born James Oscar Smith in Norristown, Pennsylvania, USA. Smith was influenced by both gospel and blues. He first achieved prominence in the 1950s where his recordings became popular on jukeboxes before there were commonly used terms to describe his unique musical flavor. In the sixties and seventies ...
Greg Lewis: Organ Monk: American Standard
by C. Michael Bailey
Dan Bilawsky was mightily impressed with Greg Lewis' two previous Organ Monk offerings, Two in the Black (Self Produced, 2012) and Organ Monk (Self Produced, 2010), where he notes the challenges to non-piano surveys of Thelonious Monk's canon. Greatly in absence is the element of Monk's percussive pianism. But Bilawsky notes that Lewis compensates for this ...
Craig Yaremko Organ Trio: CYO3
by Dan Bilawsky
When saxophonist Craig Yaremko was in college at the New School, one of his mentors--the esteemed Jane Ira Bloom--heard him playing with an organ group. Right then and there she said, “Craig, your sound was made to play with an organ trio." Now, more than a decade later, Yaremko is proving her right. ...
Bob DeVos: Shadow Box
by David A. Orthmann
On the face of it, Shadow Box, Bob DeVos' fifth outing as a leader, is a sixty minute case study of the evolution of the organ combo, one of the music's most popular and enduring formats. DeVos tips his hat to legendary individuals (some of whom he played with in the early stages of his career) ...
Chris Biesterfeldt: Urban Mandolin
by Jack Bowers
A mandolin player opening his first album as leader with Dizzy Gillespie's mercurial “Bebop"? Wow! That takes a lot of (fill in the blank). But Chris Biesterfeldt, best known as a guitarist, and for Broadway shows at that, not only sails through those tricky changes but handily nails everything else on this impressive trio album whose ...
Jeremy Monteiro Heads Jazz Organ Summit At Singapore's Esplanade, 23-24 October
Three for the price of one seems like a damned good deal, especially when we’re talking about three of jazz’s finest exponents of the organ, the KeyB organ to be precise. Jeremy Monteiro (Singapore), Alberto Marsico Italy and Tony Monaco (USA) are getting together for this Jazz Organ Summit –at the Esplanade Recital Studio, Singapore, the ...
Take Five With Janis Siegel
by AAJ Staff
Meet Janis Siegel: Over the past four decades, the voice of Janis Siegel, a nine-time Grammy winner and a seventeen-time Grammy nominee, has been an undeniable force in The Manhattan Transfer's diverse musical catalog. Alongside her career as a founding member of this musical institution, Siegel has also sustained a solo career that has spawned ...
Kevin Hays: Creative Flow
by George Colligan
[ Editor's Note: The following interview is reprinted from George Colligan's blog, Jazztruth]If you aren't familiar with pianist Kevin Hays, you should be. He's recorded and toured with many of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. And those who call him can't seem to get enough of him. His recent projects as a ...
Improvising Art: From Jam Bands to Jazz
by Jacob Hobson
The author Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow." The art of improvisation does just that: it makes the soul grow. The soul of the improvising performer is constantly stretched and twisted in search of that unnamed spiritual experience in which lasting ...
