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Max Roach: Deeds, Not Words
by Richard J Salvucci
Sometimes, someone listens to a recording mostly for one track. This is such a recording. Quite naturally, it involves drummer Max Roach. If he had to stake his reputation on one extended solo, some might say Roach on “Conversation" is the one. Not all drummers, suffice it to say, are melodic. But a first-time listener can ...
Eugenie Jones: Eugenie
by Richard J Salvucci
Eugenie Jones seems to be another one of those singers who did not start out as one but got there as soon as she could. Make no mistake, she ended up in the right profession, self-confessedly in the tradition of Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln. Jones writes as well, and several of her own songs, “Starlight ...
Bill Evans: Explorations
by Richard J Salvucci
It is not easy to review a masterpiece. The celebrated American intellectual historian Perry Miller was once reduced to muttering something like “What am I supposed to say about the damn thing?" The damn thing in question being Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Professor Miller, meet pianist Bill Evans. Trying to say something intelligent about Bill ...
The Jazz Men: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America
by Richard J Salvucci
The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America Larry Tye 416 pages ISBN: 035838043X Mariner Books 2024 In 1986, a guy walked into a Post Office in South Texas--no, this is not the opening line of a joke. He lined up to buy some stamps. ...
Isaac Hayes: Truck Turner
by Richard J Salvucci
If a listener has not seen the film “Truck Turner," (1974) there is perhaps no way that any of this review can make sense. And, alas, if you have seen “Truck Turner," there is little anything anyone can do to help. This is a movie that was part of a subgenre, Blaxploitation movies, that could scarcely ...
Allyson Briggs: Promises, Promises and Raindrops
by Richard J Salvucci
Allyson Briggs describes herself as an “old soul" who connected almost instinctively to the music of the 1970s. Her models are Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, bearers of a very different musical culture than what is currently on offer. She is part of a different era, of not exactly big band singers, but of the sort ...
Doug MacDonald: Santa Monica Session
by Richard J Salvucci
Does Doug MacDonald ever sleep? Take a day off? Make a bad recording? Somehow, a listener doubts it. Originally from Philadelphia--home to a few good guitarists, right?--MacDonald moved to Hawaii, Las Vegas, and then to Southern California. His current discography is nothing if not impressive, running to at least three dozen CDs, and MacDonald performs 300 ...
Ben Webster: At The Renaissance
by Richard J Salvucci
When tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton first came up in the 1980s, his style was so, well, unusual, that a live audience would sometimes tentatively ask “Ben Webster?" Whether Hamilton regarded that as a compliment--it was--or the musicological equivalent of “Play Melancholy Baby for me" only Hamilton could have said. But the comment also acknowledged that the ...
Art Pepper: Gettin' Together
by Richard J Salvucci
Roughly about a year before Art Pepper was sentenced to 3 to 20 years in San Quentin State Prison on heroin charges, he made this recording. Miles Davis' rhythm section was briefly available in Los Angeles. So Pepper had a chance to reprise his wonderful performance in Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (Original Jazz Classics, ...
Julia Danielle: Julia Danielle
by Richard J Salvucci
Julia Danielle is a young Chicago-based singer whose debut album shows considerable promise. Aside from a limpid contralto voice, good time, and a dead-on resemblance in profile to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (it cannot hurt), she is the epitome of effortlessness and good taste in her approach to the Great American Songbook. One ultimately suspects she ...
