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Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis
by Howard Mandel
Ornette Coleman, the musical savant who freed jazz and every other art form that cared to dispense with stifling conventions and stultifying pretense, recorded Ornette at 12 and Crisis at the height of the 1960s' countercultural creative promise and world-wide unrest. It was an era of citizens claiming hard-won freedoms as civil rights, of ...
Fela Kuti: Army Arrangement
by Chris May
Fela only occasionally used outside producers on his albums. Mostly, the results were good: EMI producer Jeff Jarratt's Afrodisiac (EMI, 1973), British dub master Dennis Bovell's Live In Amsterdam (Polygram, 1983) and keyboard player Wally Badarou's exceptional Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense (Philips, 1986). But on one occasion it was spectacularly bad: avant-funk bassist Bill Laswell's ...
Jennifer Wharton: Not a Novelty
by Dan Bilawsky
The eponymous debut from Jennifer Wharton's Bonegasm broke the mold. There are no two ways about it. And while some may look at a statement like that and cry hyperbole, history begs to differ. With rare exception, the bass trombone—a horn forever typecast as an anchor—has been marginalized. So the idea of an ensemble featuring that ...
Our Jazz Pianists LIVE!
by Rob Garratt
Before you even drop the needle or hit play, take a moment to soak in the title of the recording you hold in your hands. The emphasis must fall squarely on the first word: these are our jazz pianists—Hong Kong's. A proud statement of ownership, acknowledging a fresh wave of young talent breaking in a city not renowned ...
Josie Falbo: You Must Believe in Spring
by Howard Mandel
The first moments of Josie Falbo's You Must Believe in Spring sweep us into a lush soundscape, through a cinematic introduction, up close and intimately to her marvelous voice. Her voice is full, rich and pure top to bottom, fluid and shapely as anything imaginable, imparting true faith into lyrics valuing a lifetime's experience, acceptance, appreciation ...
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 ...
Lisa Hilton: Paradise Cove
by Lisa Hilton
"I think we all need jazz in our lives these days. From its inception, jazz and blues were created to boost moods or morale by America's earliest composers, such as Scott Joplin, Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, and Nick La Rocca around the beginning of the 1900s. The music on Paradise Cove was composed and created to ...
Mike DiRubbo: Human Spirit
by C. Andrew Hovan
In an era that seems to more fully embrace the idea of the 'tough young tenor,' alto saxophonist Mike DiRubbo puts forth a singular voice that stands apart from the crowd. With exceptions such as Kenny Garrett, Steve Wilson, and Vincent Herring, DiRubbo is one of the few musicians of this generation to choose the alto ...
Elma Kais: Licentia Poetica
by Howard Mandel
I tried to write words freed from rhythm... Yet the song came, of itself, in the right measures, And whatever I tried to write was poetry. Ovid, Tristis IV, 24-25 More than 2000 years ago Ovid captured the essence of spontaneous improvisation in a stanza--as the collective of Elma Kais, Knox Chandler, Daigo Nakai ...
Ed Cherry: Are We There Yet?
by Andrew Scott
In debates between Kenneth Miller, Richard Dawkins, and the late Stephen Jay Gould, the “stay in your lane" boundaries that separate science from theology/philosophy become particularly porous, revealing the frequency with which individuals intellectually “drift" in order to hold onto seemingly contradictory opinions of truth (empirical, scientific) and belief. Jazz, no less an ideology, ...
