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Jazz Musician of the Day: Sun Ra
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 ...
The Unstoppable James Brandon Lewis
by Eric Gudas
Tenor saxophonist, composer, and writer James Brandon Lewis is driven by a restlessness that makes him one of his generation's standout players of, and thinkers about jazz. Although he was voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in the 2020 DownBeat Magazine International Critic's Poll, most might say, after listening to his recent releases, that his star has ...
Billy Bang: Lucky Man
by Karl Ackermann
When he performed in Germany, they called him the “black devil violinist," his frenetic playing wrapped in a gyrating, trance-like state. For Billy Bang, who believed he had schizophrenia, the epithet bore a resemblance to his inner turmoil. He was born William Walker in Mobile, Alabama but grew up in the South Bronx. He studied violin ...
Makram Aboul Hosn: The Spirit Lives
by Ian Patterson
Music does not have the power to right the wrongs of the world, but when it works its magic, it can soothe troubled souls and uplift battered spirits like few other things. Lebanese bassist/composer Makram Aboul Hosn's second album, Transmigration (Self Produced, 2021) is proof of that. It is a fine album, steeped in ...
Instrumental Duos
by Karl Ackermann
The early days of jazz were not always harmonious. Converted dance orchestras often sounded like unbalanced acoustic junkyards; a single violin, cornet, trombone, clarinet, tuba, drums, banjo, and piano, all fighting for attention. The piano was meant to be the glue holding the shrill and boisterous elements together. In 1921 a prodigy pianist named Zez Confrey ...
Rinascita a Chicago: le gemme dell’etichetta International Anthem
by Angelo Leonardi
Non è casuale che l'etichetta indipendente più innovativa nell'attuale panorama jazzistico (e non solo) sia nata e operi a Chicago. È noto infatti che la metropoli dell'Illinois è una delle capitali del jazz, avendo svolto un ruolo centrale in tutta la storia musicale afro-americana, talvolta paritetico con quello di New York. Nel 2014 ...
Tony Adamo Receives Permission To Rename And Write Lyrics To A Future Sun Ra Song
Tony Adamo wrote about and released music on Eddie Harris, B.B. King, Eddie Henderson, Art Blakey, James Brown, Mark Murphy, Eddie Gale, Jack Kerouac, and Sun Ra, the song entitled “Sun Ra Goes to Mars.” The Eddie Harris estate gave Adamo permission to write spoken word to his “Listen Here.” Adamo renamed it “Listen Here Listen ...
Sinatra In Vegas With Sun Ra Discovery
by Arthur R George
Atomic! Sun Ra and Frank Sinatra at The Sands, a previously unknown 1966 recording of the Intergalactic Navigator onstage with The Chairman of the Board, was released today in a joint venture by Blue Note and Mobile Fidelity. “We didn't know if it was real when we first found these recordings. Had we been had? Or ...
A Different Drummer, Part 2: Royal Hartigan
by Karl Ackermann
Drums of Life--Drums of DeathThe ruins of the Anasazi people stand undisturbed in the cliffs between the high mesas and the canyon floors of the southwest. Dating to 2500 B.C., the multi-story adobe pueblos and stone cities were the sites of the ancient indigenous peoples of North America. Archeologists have uncovered an assortment of percussion instruments ...
Logan Richardson: To Boldly Go Where No Jazz Has Gone Before
by Chris May
In a 2016 interview, Kansas City-born alto saxophonist Logan Richardson said: “Jazz will constantly change because there's constantly a new us, new times. There will always be a fight from the conformists--but they don't represent where the tradition is coming from." Richardson was talking not long after the release of his adventurous Blue Note album, Shift, ...
