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Wallace Roney: Understanding

by John Kelman
With the concept of mentoring an increasingly forgotten part of how young, up-and-coming musicians cut their teeth--learning from older, more experienced musicians before heading out into the world as leaders--the jazz world needs more people like Wallace Roney. One look at every record the trumpeter has made since signing with HighNote in 2004, with Prototype the ...
Tom Harrell: Number Five

by John Kelman
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," they say, and since coming to HighNote in 2007, trumpeter Tom Harrell has lived by that old adage, utilizing the same quintet for its auspicious debut, Light On, and three subsequent recordings, culminating in 2011's outstanding Time of the Sun. Number Five continues Harrell's winning streak with the same ...
Getting to the Jazz Point: An Exposé

by AAJ Staff
Jazz... famous for complex harmonies, syncopated rhythms and an emphasis on improvisation. The music at its best is a form of personal expression, valuing non-conformity and freedom. It has birthed and is to an extent, defined by musicianly quirks, idiosyncrasies and singularities. There are also a great many non-musical threads that bind the tradition together and ...
Jaga Jazzist: '94 - '14

by John Kelman
It's hard to believe that Norway's Jaga Jazzist is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, in 2014. Not that there aren't other groups that have lasted as long, but look for a group whose primary composer was just 14 when the whole thing began, find a band where five out of its eight current members were ...
Peter Erskine Trio: As It Was

by John Kelman
The box set you hold in your hands features three players who came together in an exceptional group to play some of the most compelling and exploratory piano trio music of the 20th Century's final decade. This threesome, led by Peter Erskine, released four albums recorded between July 1991 and July 1997: 1993's You Never Know, ...
John Abercrombie: The First Quartet

by John Kelman
With the release of Arcade (1979), Abercrombie Quartet (1980) and M (1981), John Abercrombie's entire ECM discography as a leader is finally available on CD. Looking back at these albums and their position in his oeuvre, they are revealed as seminal documents of Abercrombie's arrival as a distinctive writer, improvising guitarist and bandleader, delivering on the ...
Terje Rypdal: Odyssey: In Studio and In Concert

by John Kelman
To achieve confluence, an artist must first demonstrate multiplicity. With the benefit of hindsight, the meeting of disparate concepts might appear inevitable when reassessing a decades-long career, but few artists actually possess not only the building blocks but the intuition and acumen to achieve what is, in Sanskrit, called Sangam. That ECM has two recordings using ...
Exposures

by John Kelman
Between the impact of the COVID pandemic since 2020, and in the eight year-long tenure of King Crimson's final lineup, which toured between 2014 and 2021, there's been a lot revealed about its sole remaining founding member, guitarist/keyboardist Robert Fripp. Since 2012, the more than five-decade history of King Crimson, live and in the ...
King Crimson: Music is Our Friend: Live In Washington and Albany, 2021

by John Kelman
You probably know the old adage about assumptions. After seeing the current (slightly fluid) King Crimson lineup twice every time the perennially groundbreaking group made it to North American shores since 2014, with no Canadian dates available in 2021 and the COVID Delta variant running rampant across the United States, the decision was made to forego ...
Who Do You Think We Are?

by John Kelman
Trying to find a distinct definition of what has come to be known as The Canterbury Sound" is as elusive as attempting to describe what, in the jazz world, has become an overused epithet for the German ECM Records label and The ECM Sound." Attempts to do so usually fail short because, rather than being actual ...