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Give The Bad Plus A Break
by Joshua Weiner
A pretty little girl, maybe 4 years old or so, dances and twirls to the music, long blond hair flying. Her mother sits nearby, watchful that she doesn't bump into any of the audience members enjoying the show. A dreadlocked man at the adjacent table leans over to the little dancer, points to the hyperkinetic drummer ...
Paul Motian: Rarum XVI: Selected Recordings
by Joshua Weiner
Paul Motian is best known to most jazz fans as the drummer in perhaps the greatest piano trio ever: the one led by Bill Evans in 1960-1961, which also included bassist Scott LaFaro. But that was a long time ago, and Motian has moved on and explored new realms over three decades as a leader. His ...
Music Association of Detroit: Bossa Nova Bitchslap!
by Joshua Weiner
The Music Association of Detroit (MAD) is widely held to be one of the most prolific of the free jazz ensembles that emerged from the hothouse of 1960's radicalism. Indeed, their discography lists 49 albums to date on 50 different labels. (1969's Farewell, Nubian Princess (Maqanga, Baqanga) was split between two labels—Pretension Records label head Jimmy ...
Bill Charlap Trio: Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein
by Joshua Weiner
The son of a Broadway composer, Bill Charlap seems to have the standard jazz repertoire in his blood. His is a resolutely mainstream approach, in the vein if not always the style of Oscar Peterson, and he sounds completely at home with the music on his latest album, Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein.
Jack DeJohnette: Rarum XII: Selected Recordings
by Joshua Weiner
Jack DeJohnette could be described as an “architectural” drummer: he plays as if unfolding a master plan, the long corridors of his backbeat leading on all sides to little rooms containing counter-rhythms, shifting accents, and dynamic changes. His drumming can also display an unusually melodic spirit, likely due to his considerable talents for both piano and ...
Susanna Lindeborg's Mwendo Dawa: Time Sign
by Joshua Weiner
“Mwendo Dawa,” this Swedish group’s press kit informs me, means “the way to a special goal” in Swahili. On the evidence presented by Time Sign, their “special goal” is to create some of the thorniest, most vertiginous fusion out there today. In this they succeed, with sometimes thrilling results. The difficulty of some of the music, ...
For All Time
by Joshua Weiner
Popularity is double-edged, and perhaps no jazz artist exemplifies this better than Dave Brubeck. The unparalleled success of his classic quartets with Paul Desmond, which expanded the market for jazz into colleges and the homes of suburbia, often obscured his very real musical innovations. The ever-increasing professional sheen of Brubeck's '60s albums for Columbia, his interest ...
Saga: Färger
by Joshua Weiner
Art Farmer made a great record with Jim Hall in the '60s entitled To Sweden With Love. If Färger, the debut album by the piano trio Saga, is any indication, Sweden is more than ready to return some of that love. By turns moody, joyous, exuberant, and somber, Saga plays jazz that mixes Scandinavian folk flavors, ...
Jim Ridl: Door in a Field
by Joshua Weiner
"Concept" albums are commonplace in jazz these days, and some artists seem to release nothing but. On the best of these, the idea behind the record adds depth and cohesion to the music within, but too often we end up with weak conceits masking lack of invention (think about all the “. . .plays Jobim", or ...
Jim Hall: Live!
by Joshua Weiner
Jim Hall is our greatest living jazz guitarist, and probably one of our greatest jazz musicians, regardless of instrument, to boot. So why, despite being widely acclaimed by jazz aficionados, is he not exactly a household name? It probably has to do with his innately self-effacing demeanor, both on and off the bandstand. Beginning in the ...
