Results for "Sun Ra"

News: Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Sun Ra

May 22, 2022

All About Jazz is celebrating Sun Ra's birthday today! Eclectic, outrageous, sometimes mystifying but always imbued with a powerful jazz consciousness, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for nearly three generations. And well it should, since Sun Ra has been both apart of and ahead of the jazz tradition during that ...

Article: Live Review

Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2022

by Peter Jones
May 9, 2022

Cheltenham Jazz Festival Cheltenham, UK April 27-May 2, 2022 A prosperous Eighteenth Century spa town in the Cotswolds, chic Cheltenham is famed for its annual festivals, which now cover everything from horse racing to science. Taking place over six days leading up to the early May bank holiday weekend, its jazz festival ...

Article: Album Review

Flock: Flock

by Chris May
May 7, 2022

One of the strengths of the alternative jazz scene which has grown in London since around 2016 is the interconnectivity of its players. Everyone knows each other and ad hoc bands constantly come together. Flock is the latest such conclave and it is something of a supergroup. On this its first album--others are ...

Article: Multiple Reviews

Miles Davis & Don Cherry: Which One Is The Grifter?

by Chris May
April 25, 2022

The Swiss-based ezz-thetics label's Revisited strand of reissues is a jazz connoisseur's dream. The label identifies outstanding albums of the 1960s, sets one of its gifted audio engineers to mastering them and makes them newly available. Earlier editions of many of these albums are hard to find and the sound on all of them is substantially ...

Article: Radio & Podcasts

Art of the Arranger

by David Brown
April 19, 2022

This week, we continue exploring the art of the arranger with large ensembles and jazz orchestras. Charles Mingus sets Meditations on Integration on a big band, The Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band presents a tone poem with traditional Japanese vocalists, we look at the Fletcher Henderson influence on Sun Ra, plus works by Satoko Fujii Orchestra ...

Article: Album Review

WE3: WE3

by Neri Pollastri
April 4, 2022

Ispirata a The Trio, storica formazione degli anni Settanta composta da John Surman, Barre Phillips e Stu Martin, WE3 ne riprende la strumentazione e ne aggiorna lo spirito in composizioni perlopiù originali, traendole in questo disco da un'esibizione dal vivo.La formazione vede all'opera Francesco Chiapperini alle ance e al sintetizzatore, Luca Pissavini al violone ...

Article: Live Review

Brilliant Corners 2022

by Ian Patterson
March 31, 2022

Brilliant Corners 2022 The Black Box Belfast, N. Ireland March 4-12, 2022 Brilliant Corners is ten. Belfast's onliest jazz festival celebrated the milestone by welcoming audiences back to The Black Box after 2021's virtual edition. When Brilliant Corners was last held here before a live audience, in March 2020, Covid ...

Article: Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited

Read "Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
March 31, 2022

The 1966 concert recording which comprises this album--here in a new, audio-improved edition--has travelled the discographical spaceways in what, when it comes to Sun Ra, is properly circuitous and confusing fashion. Eight tracks from it were scheduled for release by ESP-Disk in 1967 or 1968 as The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Volume III, complete with ...

Article: Album Review

Johan Lindvall Trio: This Is Not About You

Read "This Is Not About You" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
March 20, 2022

If you ask a jazz fan to name the greatest piano trio albums ever made, the probability is that their top twenty choices will include Erroll Garner's Concert By The Sea (Columbia, 1955), Ahmad Jamal's But Not For Me (Argo, 1958), Bill Evans' Sunday At The Village Vanguard (Riverside, 1961), Keith Jarrett's Standards Vol. 2 (ECM, ...

Article: History of Jazz

Bebop, Beats, and the Drive of Beat Literature

by Arthur R George
March 7, 2022

"Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings, Smelling vaguely of mint jelly and last night's bongo drummer... fling their arrow legs / To the heavens / Losing their doubts in the beat" of San Francisco nights, announced poet Bob Kaufman's “Bagel Shop Jazz." (Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, New Directions Publishing, 1965; Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, City Lights, ...