Results for "Spike Wilner"

Spike Wilner

Michael “Spike” Wilner was born in New York City and started playing piano at an early age.  He was inspired by a television program about the life of Scott Joplin to learn to play Ragtime Music.  He perused this art form throughout high school and performed Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” at the St. Louis Ragtime Festival.  Although it was an informal appearance it, nonetheless, profoundly affected him and drove him to peruse a career in music.  In his high school jazz program he met pianist Peter Martin who introduced him and inspired him to learn more modern jazz. Wilner decided to enter into the New School For Social Research’s Jazz and Contemporary Music department, which was then in it’s first year

Denny Zeitlin: Live at Mezzrow

By DAN BILAWSKY

Coming up on two decades of creative engagement and evolution, pianist Denny Zeitlin's group with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Matt Wilson remains one of the most bracing, sophisticated and creatively satisfying trios on the scene. In the best of times, a set like this, recorded live at Spike Wilner's New York piano room Mezzrow, can ...

Meet Andrew Rothman

By TESSA SOUTER AND ANDREA WOLPER

Lawyer, audiophile, lifelong arts enthusiast, our newest Super Fan's life plan was to be a classical pianist, until college took him in another direction. But it was two “major epiphanies" (the first time he heard Miles Davis and, later, Bill Evans) that turned him into a jazz Super Fan--such a Super Fan, in fact, that he ...

New York Nights At Birdland Theater And Mezzrow

By MARTIN MCFIE

On West 44th street in midtown Manhattan, Johnny Valenti recently inaugurated the new Birdland Theater, which has been built downstairs, below his Birdland club. The seating is arranged with two chairs at each round table, the rearmost of which are high tops, ensuring a clear view of the well lit stage from every table in the ...

The Little Metal Buddha

By SPIKE WILNER

A short piece this time. But sometimes saying what you want, like playing what you want, in as few words--or notes as possible, is really the way to go. The Jazz Life is an interesting project I'm engaged in, writing and searching for things to say that focus on what we do in order ...

The Cry of Jay Rodriguez

By MICHAEL BLAKE

On an unseasonably warm February evening I set out from Brooklyn to catch the multi-instrumentalist Jay Rodriguez's band at Le Poisson Rouge. While walking from the West 4th Street subway station to the venue on Bleecker Street I recalled taking this exact route over 30 years ago to play a jam session in the ...

Jazz Education: The Next Generation, Part 2

By KARL ACKERMANN

Part 1 of Jazz Education: The Next Generation explored how the early days of music and--specifically--jazz music was approached through various channels of formal education. The long, arduous process of creating an accepting environment for jazz education necessitated moving the art form from a vaudevillian status through a firewall of academic elitism and prejudice to a ...

Koan

By SPIKE WILNER

Label: Posi-Tone Records
Released: 2016
Track listing: Iceberg Slim; Koan; Warm Valley; I’ll See You Again; Hot House; Monkey Mind; Gypsy Without A Song; Trick Baby; Three Ring Circus; Young At Heart; Lonely Woman; Blues For The Common Man.

Spike Wilner: Koan

By MARK CORROTO

I have an idea that pianist Spike Wilner has read Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery: Liberating The Master Musician Within (1996), because Koan emulates Werner's lessons in surrendering one's self to music. Werner's teachings on enlightenment flow through this trio recording, Wilner's sixth as a leader. As a disciple of Harlem stride and ragtime, ...