Results for "Ted Curson"

Mixed to Unit Structures Revisited

By Cecil Taylor

Label: Ezz-thetics
Released: 2021
Track listing: Pots; Bulbs; Mixed; Steps; Enter, Evening (Soft Line Structure); Unit/Structure / As Of A Now / Section; Tales (8 Whisps).

Charles Mingus: An Essential Top Ten Albums

by Chris May
July 26, 2021

Charles Mingus was rarely a happy man and yet his music possessed a power to uplift listeners unlike that of most other composer / bandleaders before or after him. It still has that power in 2021, four decades after his passing and on the eve of his hundredth anniversary in 2022. In his personal life, too, ...

Cecil Taylor: Mixed to Unit Structures Revisited

by Chris May
June 22, 2021

This story has been revisited before, in the context of an Albert Ayler review, but good stories bear repeating, particularly when they are instructive ones. So here it is again... During a May 2021 interview with All About Jazz, the reed player Shabaka Hutchings was asked to name six albums which had made a more than ...

Consequences Revisited

Label: Ezz-thetics
Released: 2020
Track listing: Sound Barrier; We We; Consequences; Rufus; Crepuscule With Nellie; Trio; Where Poppies Bloom (Where Poppies Blow); Like A Blessed Baby Lamb; Consequences.

Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter

by Chris May
July 23, 2020

Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.

New York Contemporary Five: Consequences Revisited

by Mark Corroto
June 27, 2020

This 2020 reissue of the New York Contemporary Five recordings from 1963-64 can't help but draw one's attention to the social unrest occurring in America in 2020. In 1964 the riots in Harlem and Philadelphia over police brutality were followed by similar riots a few years later in Watts, Newark, Detroit, etc. In the growing civil ...

Prestige Records: An Alternative Top 20 Albums

by Chris May
June 9, 2020

Along with Alfred Lion's Blue Note and Orrin Keepnews' Riverside, Bob Weinstock's Prestige was at the top table of independent New York City-based jazz labels from the early 1950s until the mid 1960s. Like those other two labels, Prestige built up a profuse catalogue packed with enduring treasures. Originally a record retailer, Weinstock ...

Ted Curson

Born: June 3, 1935

Theodore "Ted" Curson (born June 3, 1935, died November 4, 2012) was a jazz trumpeter. He was perhaps best-known for recording and performing with Charles Mingus. Curson got interested in playing trumpet through the fact that the local newspaper salesman had a silver trumpet that he was playing on the streets while selling newspapers. Curson's father could not afford a trumpet and besides, he wanted Ted to become an alto player like his idol, Louis Jordan. Finally, when Ted was 10 years old, his father found an old trumpet for him in the Navy Yard. He soon after formed a band, the Bebop Trio, with friends from the neighbourhood

Tommaso Starace: Narrow Escape

by Angelo Leonardi
September 26, 2019

Com'è noto Tommaso Starace opera prevalentemente nel Regno Unito, dove s'è trasferito a 19 anni diplomandosi al conservatorio di Birmingham e poi conseguendo il master alla Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Da allora è trascorso un ventennio e oggi il sassofonista è tra i migliori jazzmen d'oltremanica, con all'attivo alcuni dischi da leader e decine ...

Cykada: Cykada

by Chris May
March 12, 2019

Cykada has been making waves on London's genre-melting alternative-jazz scene since 2017, but has yet to acquire a profile akin to those of some of the other bands with which its musicians are involved. These include spiritual-jazz septet Maisha and the Afrobeat-infused Ezra Collective. The release of Cykada, however, is going to strap a booster rocket ...