New Recordings
The holidays have long since come and gone. Eagerly anticipated tropical getaways have been actualized. After a brief dearth typical of a year’s end, the music resumes. Here...
New Recordings: Brian Blade, Keyon Harrold, Gregory Porter, Lizz Wright
Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band: Body and Shadow (Blue Note) If you’ve read my last few review entries, you may sense a trend. If it seems like...
Blue Note All-Stars: “Our Point Of View” (Blue Note Records, 2017)
If ever there was a jazz label more entitled to proclaim some of their stable “All-Stars,” Blue Note Records would surely top that list. Likewise, if there were a...
Hiromi/Edmar Castaneda, “Live in Montreal” (Telarc, 2017)
If you think about it, the harp is just a piano with its guts strewn about. Or, to be more historically accurate, the piano is a harp with little...
Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield: “A Beautiful World” (Basin Street, 2017)
There are but a scant few variables you can count on in this woeful world: Frozen pizza is always sub-par, dogs are awesome, and New Orleans will always...
Dee Dee Bridgewater: “Memphis…Yes I’m Ready” (Okeh, 2017)
Since the days of Billie and Ella, it is nearly impossible to find a jazz singer who wasn’t a by-product of the popular music of her day. Yet for...
CD Reviews: New Orleans Flotilla, Crooner Abuse, and Hands Across the Baltic/Seine
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Various Artists: “The Passion Of Charlie Parker” (Impulse, 2017)
I’ll be honest, when I pulled this one out of the padded envelope, I thought: “It’s the answer to a musical question nobody asked.” Vocalese tributes to instrumental lions...
Joel Shapira: In Essence (2017)
The guitar, and its distant kin, the piano, are self-contained orchestras. Few other instruments possess their range in dynamics and melodic potential. If you’re going to master either, it...
DeJohnette, Grenadier, Medeski, Scofield: “Hudson” (Motema Records)
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Louis Hayes: Serenade For Horace (Blue Note)
Blue Note Records has given a home to arguably the greatest recording artists in jazz for many decades. Like all major record labels, particularly those devoted to so-called...
A Fresher Breath of Air: Natalia M. King’s “Bluezzin ‘Til Dawn” (Challenge, 2016)
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Curtis Stigers: “One More for the Road” (Concord, 2017)
© Kevin O’Connor “What the world needs now is another folk singer, like I need a hole in my head. What the world needs now is another Frank Sinatra,...
CD Reviews, Recent Themes, Part One: The Fabulous 80s
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Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau, “Nearness” (Nonesuch, 2016)
More than twenty years ago, Duke DuBois, the legendary promotional lion for Verve and GRP records, would service gleeful public radio programmers like myself with scads of beautifully...
The Bad Plus: “It’s Hard” (Okeh, 2016)
If the arc of your career is perpetually, well, arced, is it possible to come full circle? Before you answer, consider this: Twin Cities-bred jazz trio, The Bad...
Two From Blue Note: Nels Cline (Lovers) and Kandace Springs (Soul Eyes)
A few months ago I wrote about Don Was just as he was assuming command of Blue Note Records in the wake of the death of Bruce Lundvall. At...
“Sing Me Home”, Silk Road! (Sony Masterworks, 2016)
Whether as a means to showcase his diversity, or perhaps a distraction from the occasionally stoic nature of the concert hall, cellist Yo Yo Ma founded “The Silk Road...
Matt Wilson Remembers Felicia With “Beginning of a Memory” (Palmetto, 2016)
A couple of years back, tragedy struck the family of a gifted musician. Matt Wilson’s wife Felicia passed away. They were partners in the usual sense of married couples:...
Metheny: Unity Sessions, Cuong Vu Trio
This review is a “twofer.” Technically three, if you count the two discs in The Unity Sessions. Guitarist Pat Metheny seems to be an artist who has more hat...