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Gordon Grdina: Prolific Independent
by Doug Collette
The more Gordon Grdina works, the more clearly he follows his own course(s) of action. Following in fairly short order the releases of the Nomad Trio (Skirl Records, 2020) and a septet effort, Resist (Irabbagast Records, 2020), the guitarist/oud master initiates his own label imprint, Attaboygirl Records, with two simultaneous releases (and another to come in ...
Willie Nile, Howlin' Rain and Divine Horsemen: Hey Hey, My My...
by Doug Collette
Whether or not Neil Young was being ironic or sarcastic in 1979 when he intoned ...'rock and roll can never die...' the descriptive musical term may indeed be outdated after so many years of arbitrary categorizations, hyphenates and glib marketing labels like 'Americana.' Yet that eclectic mix of roots, often referred to as 'mongrel music,' still ...
Satoko Fujii: Aural Abstracts
by Doug Collette
Pianist/composer Satoko Fujii had already released one of the year's most notable albums Piano Music (Libra Records, 2021) by the time Underground and Mosaic came out. And yet these two titles, conceived and executed in markedly different ways, reaffirm the woman's ingenuity as much as her prolific nature (along with close to another handful of records ...
The Persistence of Big Bands
by Geno Thackara
It's faintly amazing to be able to talk at all about big-band recordings--plural--emerging during an ongoing pandemic with no end in sight. Nonetheless it's a milieu that still enjoys plenty of devotion, and musicians (especially jazz players) are no strangers to realizing ideas that seem practically impossible. Here we have scores of them willing to keep ...
New Spins On Old Masters
by Jerome Wilson
Dave Brubeck and Charlie Parker were two of the most influential jazz figures of their eras. Many musicians have interpreted their work over the years but these two albums take more liberties than usual with their compositions to good effect. Mark Zaleski Band Our Time: Reimagining Dave Brubeck Origin Records
Vince Guaraldi’s Classic Peanuts Soundtrack Music Reissued on LP
by Mark Sullivan
When television producer Lee Mendelson heard jazz pianist/composer Vince Guaraldi's hit single “Cast Your Fate to the Wind" on his car radio, he thought he had found the right composer for the soundtrack to the documentary on Charles Schultz's cartoon series Peanuts that he was working on. Guaraldi indeed turned out to be the perfect man ...
3x3: Piano Trios: November 2021
by Geno Thackara
Ayumi Tanaka Trio Subaqueous Silence ECM Records 2021 Ayumi Tanaka isn't kidding with this impressionistic title. The music here isn't very far removed from silence, and its ebbing and drifting has just the formlessness you'd expect from life at the bottom of a sea or lake. Pretty sparse and abstract ...
Solo Piano - Yin and Yang
by Geno Thackara
Cornelius Claudio Kreusch Transformer Self Produced 2021 Though it's easy enough for a player to find a home niche, Cornelius Claudio Kreusch sounds like he won't really be satisfied until he's practically tried them all. Classically-trained and having whirled through fusion, funk, Latin, African, film scores and probably too much else ...
October 2021
by Pat Youngspiel
The Source But swinging doesn't bend them down Odin Records 2021 This new release by Norwegian jazz outfit The Source arrives 15 years after the quartet's self-titled ECM debut and makes up for lost time with angular swing, unconventional rubato and offbeat contemplation. The four protagonists--each a pillar of the ...
From An Island: Ches Smith & We All Break and Dominican Jazz Project
by Mark Sullivan
Haiti and the Dominican Republic both occupy the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. But the two nations could hardly be more different. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere; the Dominican Republic has the largest economy in the Caribbean and Central America. Haiti was occupied by France in colonial times, famously winning its ...
