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Duck Baker: Spinning Song
by Laurel Gross
If you have to ask who Duck Baker is, don't beat yourself up. Not a fixture on the New York scene, this accomplished acoustic finger-picking guitarist, composer and improviser--who has devoted himself to free music, modern jazz, swing, blues, gospel, Appalachian fiddling, Irish and Scottish folk song and other influences that were absorbed within these borders--isn't ...
Fred Katz
by Elliott Simon
Fred Katz is generally credited with being the first musician to explore the possibility of the cello as a jazz instrument. He accomplished this while an integral member of drummer Chico Hamilton's influential '50s quintet and through his own solo works such as Soul-o-cello (Decca, 1957), Fred Katz and His Jammers (Decca, 1958) and Zen (World ...
Remembering Jimmy Blanton
by Scott Pollard
The saga of Duke Ellington's orchestra is an epic that lasted from the 1920s to the 1970s and has spanned the history of jazz itself. It is not only the story of a man and his music, but of the musicians that he wrote for and that interpreted his songs. Ellington prided himself on knowing his ...
Cachao: Mambo Man
by Ernest Barteldes
At 89 years of age, Israel “Cachao Lopez continues to perform the mambo, the Afro-Cuban rhythm that he helped create with his late brother, multi-instrumentalist Orestes Lopez; a genre that gained international fame through the efforts of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz and ,principally, Perez Prado, among others. Cachao, however, did not enjoy the initial fame of ...
Matthew Shipp: Tripling the Play
by Lyn Horton
When Matthew Shipp was a teenager, he had a job as a cocktail pianist. His motivation was to sound “like any old jazz pianist." He did “what any other jazz pianist would do, that is, study everything you can get your hands on to get a backlog of material which means learning standards." A “religious" inner ...
Satoko Fujii: Defying Expectations
by Kurt Gottschalk
Satoko Fujii is a rare breed. The pianist and composer manages to continually defy expectations while remaining solid and eminently musical in her work. She puts out new recordings at an almost ridiculous rate, rarely repeating a composition, but doesn't simply toss any live session to whatever label will take it. Each new disc (she's released ...
Joe Hunt
by Matthew Miller
It's been a long time since drummer Joe Hunt called New York home, but you wouldn't know that to talk with him. “I want to spend more time in New York," intoned the veteran drummer over the phone during a recent interview between reminiscences of Ornette, The Five Spot, Bill Evans and the whirlwind pace of ...
Tim Berne: Mind Over Friction
by Celeste Sunderland
Alto saxophonist Tim Berne likes to make a small group sound big. “I like the intimacy and the fact that everybody's really involved all the time. Mind Over Friction, a reissue of a live album of his band Science Friction, recorded in Switzerland in 2003, features lengthy passages where Marc Ducret's electric guitar and ...
John Roney: Il Penseroso of the Piano
by Robert J. Lewis
Far too often in jazz, a musician posing as a songwriter decides to immortalize a catchy sequence of notes or simple chord progression by inverting, converting, coloring, varying, flipping and reformulating it. But however dazzling is the musicianship, the acrobatics are not to be confused with composition. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis states unequivocally, “One of the problems ...
The Indefinite Version (of My Favorite Things)
by Bertil Holmgren
'How 'gainst this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?' W. ShakespeareIn connection to the newly released album The John Coltrane Quartet plays The Sound Of Music (Impulse!), this article describes the evolution of the song “My Favorite Things" up until the last ...
