A couple of years ago, I posed the question: is the Dave Holland Quintet the best jazz group working today? Today, the Dave Holland Quintet has been supplanted by the Dave Holland Sextet, and with last week’s unfurling of the Sextet’s first record Pass It On, we get to assess how good Holland’s latest incarnation is. Holland, in case you’re [...]

NICK DERISO: Jobim’s bossa nova orchestrations — marked by feather-like rhythms and a freer song structure — provide the platform for Frank Sinatra’s most interesting late-period release. “I haven’t sung so soft,” the belter once joked, “since I had the laryngitis.” Stories of the way conductor Claus Ogerman struggled to get the sensual tempo just right for both men are [...]

NICK DERISO: You have Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, playing a concert amidst some of the darkest moments of 1960s’ strife, making his own statement for racial pride. Then, as this former Miles Davis sideman repeats the song’s edgy admonition — Walk tall! Walk tall! – his band rumbles up with a friendly, familiar soul context. That’s anchored by Joe Zawinul, recalling [...]

It’s been since the beginning of August since we’ve last done a “Quickies” here, so we’re long overdue for another one. There’s been a bevy of music put out during these last eight weeks that our full-fledged reviews don’t begin to cover, and a lot of it noteworthy. Gosh, I might be back with another “Quickies” next week just to [...]

by Nick DeRiso We know Charlie Haden as the bass-playing ground wire on scores of jazz’s more important works — not least of which was his late 1950s turn with the shape-shifting improvisational genius Ornette Coleman. Later, Haden was memorably featured alongside John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, with his own Liberation Music Orchestra and then the hipster noir band [...]

Sometimes you know if a CD is going to be good even before you cue it up and start listening to it. The first thing I that caught my eye when I opened up Michael Bates’ Clockwise CD was the note that it was taped live on a two-track recorder. The second thing I noticed was that the sessions were [...]

NICK DERISO: While Rubalcaba was making troubling (if not downright boneheaded) political decisions, he was also proving to be an inspiring (and sometimes downright thrilling) young pianist. Not long after Rubalcaba said the crippling Communist regime in his native Cuba wasn’t all that bad, after all — much to the consternation of expats like saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera — he issued [...]

“The best post-punk jazz trio with vibraphone ever.” That’s the bold declaration you’ll find when you click on the link at the bottom of this article to purchase their CD. It’s also very hard to argue with that statement. James Westfall (vibes), Dan Loomis (acoustic bass) and Jared Schonig (drums) make up this intriguing combination of which to my knowledge [...]

photo by Mamoru Kobayakawa Last August 19, jazz pianist Aaron Parks released the first major label album of his young solo career, Invisible Cinema. And who is this Aaron Parks, you ask? Seattle native Parks is something of a fast learner. He skipped high school to study math, computer science and music and the University of Washington. Before long, he [...]

Used to be that whenever the term “Scandinavian jazz” would come up, one could summarize it by pointing to the sterile, pristine folk-jazz popularized by Jan Garbarek and the ECM label from the seventies on. In recent times, it’s come to mean such a variety of styles and tendencies that the jazz scene there has become every bit as complex [...]