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The Bob Sneider & Joe Locke Film Noir Project: Fallen Angel
by John Kelman
Upstate New York might seem an unlikely place for a jazz scene to develop, but Rochester's renowned Eastman School of Music has provided fertile common ground for a wealth of players to come together over the years. Guitarist Bob Sneider and pianist Paul Hofmann, for example, recorded Interconnection (Sons of Sound, 2004) and a recently released ...
Soft Machine: Floating World Live
by John Kelman
Fans of Soft Machine, which began with mid-1960s psychedelia but evolved into Britain's most influential jazz/rock group, generally consider the “classic lineup to be keyboardist Mike Ratledge, bassist Hugh Hopper, drummer Robert Wyatt and the recently deceased saxophonist Elton Dean. Many also suggest that ex-Nucleus woodwind multi-instrumentalist/keyboardist Karl Jenkins' recruitment signalled the beginning of the end, ...
Steve Khan: Got My Mental
by John Kelman
The great thing about the ECM label is that it never deletes a title, which means that new fans of legacy artists like pianist Keith Jarrett can go back and explore their artistic development. Sadly that's rarely possible with most labels, and it's becoming even more challenging when an artist's career spans several, as is the ...
Joe Locke / Christos Rafalides Vibes / Mallet Duo: Van Gogh by Numbers
by John Kelman
If jazz is a marginalized genre and the vibraphone is a marginalized instrument within that genre, then Van Gogh by Numbers--an album of vibes and marimba duets--is clearly a first. But the idea of an intimate series of mallet duets will come as no surprise to listeners familiar with Joe Locke, who's been active for over ...
Matthias Lupri Group: Metalix
by John Kelman
While Same Time Twice (Summit, 2002) found vibraphonist Matthias Lupri emerging as a noteworthy contemporary jazz composer, Transition Sonic (Summit, 2004) represented a significant compositional leap. Lupri fashioned a suite of pieces that, while generally unrelated thematically, ultimately created a longer, more complex narrative whose whole was greater than the sum of its parts. With Metalix ...
Thomas Stronen: Parish
by John Kelman
While Parish's first album, the live Rica (Challenge, 2003), was more collaborative from a compositional perspective, the group's new eponymous record continues to be the brainchild of Norwegian percussionist Thomas Strønen. With strong players like fellow Norwegian double-bassist Mats Eilertsen, Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson and clarinetist/saxophonist Fredrik Ljungkvist, Parish couldn't be anything but highly collaborative. The ...
Richard Leo Johnson: The Legend of Vernon McAlister
by John Kelman
One look at the cover of guitarist Richard Leo Johnson's latest album, with its sepia-toned photograph of a serious-looking Johnson seated with a Duolian steel-bodied guitar, and you might expect a radical departure from Poetry of Appliance (Cuneiform, 2004). And you'd not be far from wrong. Unlike Johnson's last record, which featured his esoteric working trio ...
Donald Fagen: Morph The Cat
by John Kelman
Sometimes tight-knit teams like Donald Fagen and Walter Becker--better known as Steely Dan--make it difficult to determine what each individual brings to the table. It's no secret that Becker and Fagen have strong jazz sensibilities, not to mention an affection for Tin Pan Alley, having started out as staff writers for ABC Records before realizing their ...
Paul Bollenback: Brightness of Being
by John Kelman
Good music is where you find it, and breadth of stylistic interest needn't dilute a distinguishable voice. Like Bill Frisell's East/West (Nonesuch, 2005), guitarist Paul Bollenback's Brightness of Being brings these points home most effectively. While Bollenback and Vic Juris are two very different players (Bollenbeck is also younger), both remain sadly underappreciated, despite their ability ...
Paul Shapiro: It's in the Twilight
by John Kelman
Reconvening the same group that made his debut, Midnight Minyan (Tzadik, 2003), so engaging, tenor saxophonist Paul Shapiro's new release is an even more exuberant affair. Combining a wealth of musical styles with the distinctive Jewish flavor that has made John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series so unpredictable, Shapiro proves that twilight needn't be a time ...
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