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Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington & Lena Horn

by Joe Dimino
In honor of the 2022 book Dangerous Rhythms by New York Times best selling author T.J English, we constructed an hour of jazz celebrating the story of his intersection of the mob and the music. It starts in Chicago with the great King Oliver and ends in New York City with Jimmy Durante. In between, we ...
Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker: Live Revisited

by Chris May
The first six tracks on this album, which were recorded at New York City's Town Hall on June 22, 1945, are amongst the most exciting in the jazz compendium. Not only because of their intrinsic artistic merit but also because they mark one of the first, if not the first, occasion the vanguard of the bop ...
The Harry Allen Orchestra: With Roses

by Pierre Giroux
Harry Allen is a tenor saxophonist's tenor saxophonist with an elegant tone and swinging style in the manner of Scott Hamilton, Lester Young or Ben Webster. He has a well-rounded discography of over 70 releases as a leader and many others as a sideman. Over the course of his prolific career, Allen has appeared with the ...
Marc Copland: Impressions

by John Kelman
Solo performances may approach presenting an artist at his or her most vulnerable, but it's in the context of the duo that they're the most exposed. Not only are their abilities, instincts and improvisational élan laid bare, but their communication skills, at the deepest level, are impossible to disguise. The good news is that, were pianist ...
Take Five With Violinist Jeremy Cohen

by AAJ Staff
Meet Jeremy Cohen Jeremy Cohen comes from a family of five musicians. Classically-trained and a student of Itzhak Perlman and Anne Crowden, Cohen's eclectic style reflects his respect for a wide range of violinists from Perlman and Fritz Kreisler to Joe Venuti and Eddie South. He has performed as soloist with numerous orchestras including ...
The Vocal Music of Charles Mingus

by Ellen Johnson
Part 1 | Part 2 Part ICharles Mingus is not typically the first name that comes to mind when discussing jazz vocal repertoire, but perhaps it should be. Since the 1940s, Mingus wrote songs in collaboration with other musicians and even penned his own lyrics. His oeuvre encompasses popular songs of the era as ...
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 ...
Not Like Before: Michael Robinson's Jazz Without Borders

by Michael Robinson
Playing my personal vision of jazz, claiming that name as part of my heritage, I endeavor feeling the rhythms of life in the present, past and future, entering into them through touch and nuance at the piano, connecting rajas, sattva and tamas; circular movement, cohesion and disintegration. I've been fortunate to know masters of improvised ...
Paul Quinichette: Like Basie

by C. Andrew Hovan
Like any business concerned with making a profit, the record industry has often resorted to questionable concepts, tributes, or other hooks to lure more costumers to their product. Currently we find ourselves in an era where the quality of original music is arguably on the decline, thus it has become even more prevalent to use nostalgia ...
Billy Lester: Unabridged

by Howard Mandel
Pianist Billy Lester is a musical original. That's obvious from the first, oh, 17 seconds of Unabridged, his sixth album and second all-solo recording. Listen to the unusual, brief motif with which Lester opens Overture: Passionate Musings," then develops, complicates and completes it faster than you'd tie a shoelace. Pause--and he continues. Not to ...