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Shawn Maxwell's New Tomorrow: Shawn Maxwell's New Tomorrow
by Dan McClenaghan
Chicago-based saxophonist Shawn Maxwell has produced an excellent run of straight ahead CD releases in the past decade, sets like his two self-produced discs, Originals (2006) and Originals II (2008), and Maxwell's House (Chicago Session LTD, 2010) before he changed his game up with Shawn Maxwell's Alliance (Chicago Sessions LTD, 2015), a shift away from mainstream ...
Tula's Jazz Club: A Seattle Tradition in the Making
by Paul Rauch
Life in the Pacific Northwest is hauntingly similar to jazz music itself, from that which is inward, deep in the recesses of our collective soul, to the outward expressionism as a ray of sunlight, an exaltation of joy, harmony expressed in the deep, deep blue of sentient life, and of our enlightened sky. High notes expressed ...
Afro Bop Alliance Big Band: Revelation
by Jack Bowers
Revelation is the sixth recording by drummer Joe McCarthy's sixteen-year-old Afro Bop Alliance (the last three by the big band after three by smaller incarnations), the first that has come this way for review. As McCarthy's stalwart ensemble is based in the Washington, D.C. area, the supposition is that a number of topnotch armed services musicians ...
Family Breakfast
Album: Border Crossing
By Alex Goodman
Label: OA2 Records
Released: 2016
Duration: 05:36
New Standard Jazz Orchestra: Waltz About Nothing
by Jack Bowers
Any orchestra that professes to establish a new standard had better be able to back that up. Happily for the listener, on its debut recording, Waltz About Nothing, Chicago's New Standard Jazz Orchestra can--and does. In a little more than two years, the NSJO has arisen as a worthy successor to one of the more exemplary ...
Benny Golson: Horizon Ahead
by Jack Bowers
At age eighty-seven, saxophonist Benny Golson is one of the last surviving links to the Golden Age of modern jazz, ushered in by the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and others in the early '40s. Golson came on the bop scene about a decade later and has been a force ever ...
Alex Goodman: Border Crossing
by Dan Bilawsky
Border Crossing was born of guitarist Alex Goodman's careful cogitation concerning his move from Canada to New York. It's a beautifully contemplative bridge-builder of an album, bringing together musicians from both realms and connecting classically-oriented ideals, jazz language, and modern thought into a seamless whole. In soaking in the seven tracks presented here, ...
Katabasis
Album: Altered Narratives
By Danny Green
Label: OA2 Records
Released: 2016
Duration: 06:11
Hans Luchs: Time Never Pauses
by Budd Kopman
While it does not scream downtown, avant-garde, uber originality, guitarist Hans Luchs debut recording, Time Never Pauses, is far from a vanilla, “jazz as style" offering, and, in fact has much going for it. For one thing, his band, consisting of drummer George Fludas, bassist Clark Sommers, pianist Stu Mindeman and Shaun Johnson on ...
Raul Agraz: Between Brothers
by Jack Bowers
Venezuelan-born and classically trained trumpeter Raul Agraz makes an impressive North American debut with Between Brothers, a vibrant album of Latin-oriented jazz whose harmonic and rhythmic quotients are about as strong and steady as one could wish. As is the case in other contexts these days, the term “brothers" is presumably used in a metaphorical sense, ...
