The Wilson Sisters aka Heart are among long-time rock acts with an infrequent new release. by Pico Long, established rock acts like Eric Clapton and Heart have nothing more to prove and have plenty enough hits that they really don’t need to make records anymore. They still do, of course, but nowadays will go four or five years (or more) [...]
by Pico Curtis Fuller, one of the greatest living trombone players of all time declared “I predict that Michael Dease will become one of the world’s great trombone masters.” And when you hear Dease’s fluid, lush style, it’s not hard to see the young phenom as the legitimate successor to Fuller. Yet, Dease, who will turn 28 later this month, [...]
by S. Victor Aaron A guy who has helped to pioneer a fluid yet supple sound for the trombone, participated in so many classic records and performed as a member of so many prominent jazz ensembles should be a first ballot entry into the jazz Hall of Fame, if such a thing were to exist. But the only trombonist to [...]
by Pico If you’re a big ECM Records fan like I am, then you’d probably even remember your first ECM record. For a lot of those types, this one is most likely their first ECM. For me, though, it was Terje’s Rypdal’s Waves, which I picked up just a few years after its 1977 release because I once caught the [...]
By Nick DeRiso One of three jazz-legend siblings, Hank Jones was perhaps as unassuming as his brother Elvin (nine years younger, famously of the John Coltrane group) was the outsized extrovert. Feathery light, then concisely powerful at the piano, Hank concluded an intellectual, often overlooked eight-decade career on Sunday when he died at age 91. It wasn’t just because he [...]
by Nick DeRiso You hear Beatles songs remade by jazz musicians with notable frequency, some more successful (Jaco Pastorius‘ glorious reading of the oft-covered “Blackbird” from “Word of Mouth”; a just-right “All My Loving” on “Basie’s Beatles Bag”; Ramsey Lewis‘ underrated “Hard Day’s Night” from “Finest Hour”) than others (almost all of the rest of that un-Fab 1966 Count Basie [...]
by Nick DeRiso Sam Newsome, who first came into wider notice as a tenor-playing member of the Terence Blanchard Quintet in the early 1990s, takes the soprano to places both familiar and new on “Blue Soliloquy.” Subtitled “Solo works for the soprano saxophone,” it’s Newsome’s tone-poem love letter to what makes his new instrument such a freeing experience. No longer [...]
by S. Victor Aaron This installment of Quickies takes a glance at three new offerings from HighNote Records. HighNote Reocrds, in case you didn’t know, has been around since 1996, a creation of former Muse Records founder and Prestige Records exec Joe Fields. As a longtime veteran of the whole jazz record biz, Fields had been able to stock his [...]
by Pico Duck Baker, as we noted here earlier this year, is a virtuosic fingerstyle guitarist. That last release, Everything That Rises Must Converge, showcased only a very small sliver of Baker’s passions. He can get enthused for artists ranging from George Jones and Andrew Hill to Clarence White and parlay his enthusiasm on an unadorned acoustic six string guitar [...]
by Pico Greatness begets greatness. That is almost universally true in jazz, where so many of the best players of a generation got their start playing for the best players of a prior generation. Miles Davis is one the best examples of a major figure to whom many other major figures owe their success and reputation to. Chick Corea is [...]
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