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Roberto Juan Rodriguez: El Danzon De Moises
by Elliott Simon
The Cuban rhythmic roots of percussionist Roberto Juan Rodriguez’s, El Danzon De Moises (Tzadik), are not in Afro-Cuban bongo/conga stylings. They lie instead in the statelier Euro-Cuban danzon and folksier Spanish-Cuban guajira modes. While the graceful guajira is guitar based Eastern Cuban folk music, danzon’s ancestry is in the cultured French contradanza that arrived in Cuba ...
Meet Steel Sensation Robert Randolph
by David Lott
Before a performance in Birmingham, Alabama, AAJ had the opportunity to speak with pedal steel prodigy Robert Randolph about the pedal steel guitar, the church, improvising, and writing music. As he is seated before his pedal steel guitar, the energy mounting during Robert Randolph's performance seems to increase exponentially. It is only a matter ...
Fred Anderson Finally Gets His Due: And His Records Back In Print
by Todd R. Brown
Next door to the Velvet Lounge in Chicago's Near South Side neighborhood is Fitzee's Bar-B-Que, a chicken joint whose counter sports a bullet-proof window separating the kitchen and dining room. Across the street is a recently constructed LaSalle Bank branch, complete with ritzy landscaping. Walking down the street on a recent Saturday night, you might not ...
Meet Tomasz Stanko
by AAJ Staff
Jazz of the '50s and '60s shared the overtly political side of much music from the period. Black musicians in the States and expatriates in Europe used their music as a platform for radical ideas that would reach a presumably sympathetic audience. Going back even further in history demonstrates the role jazz played in both breaking ...
Buddy Childers
by Robert Spencer
The Big Band sound of legend, the Big Band sound of Duke and Basie and the Thundering Herd, the Big Wide Enormous Fat Sound, is alive and well. The Big Band sound is alive and well and living in the horn of Buddy Childers. Mr. Marion Childers turned 75 on February 12, and from ...
Antoine Silverman
by Joel Roberts
Antoine Silverman's singular gifts as a musician, as well as his choice of the violin as his musical voice, lend his work both a freshness and a familiarity that reaches well beyond a traditional jazz audience. “The violin is such an unusual instrument for jazz that it almost inherently lends itself to new approaches ...
Cynthia Sayer
by Robert Spencer
Time was when every self-respecting jazz band had a banjoist. The legendary Johnny St. Cyr did duty in both Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers and Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, and he was just the preeminent member of a hearty and considerable band. Listen to the banjo breaks on those great early sides, and you get ...
Carl Grubbs
by Robert Spencer
Carl Grubbs is an alto and soprano saxophonist from Philadelphia with a singularly distinctive family tree: his cousin is Naima herself, who as John Coltrane's wife inspired one of the most beautiful ballads in jazz. Coltrane was close to Carl's section of the family, and he was quick to teach Carl a thing or two on ...
Anthony Ortega
by Robert Spencer
Here is a man who has played with Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson, Paul Bley, Quincy Jones, Don Ellis, Dinah Washington, and {{Ella Fitzgerald. Here is a man whose alto saxophone playing has been compared to Charlie Parker's and Ornette Coleman's--both with just cause. Here is a man whose Sixties sessions, long out of print ...
Charles Gayle
by Robert Spencer
Charles Gayle blew down with hurricane force--the pun is too obvious--out of Buffalo. He drifted in and out of the first great free jazz scenes of the Sixties, playing with Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and other trailblazers. But he says now that his sound then was even more fiery and forceful than it is now, and ...
