You might say that top-notch jazz pianist Orrin Evans has become a fixture here at SER. It all got started four years ago when we noted his participation in Robin Eubanks’ EB3 unit that made the phenomenal double-CD Live, Vol. 1 of 2007. Early last year we salivated over Evans’Read More

Sean Jones does something with No Need To Words” that’s sorely needed: Talk about love in a complete way. Not just the romantic part, or the passionate part (though that’s here, too) but the other parts — the angry parts, the melancholy parts. The part where you thank a parentRead More

On this special edition of Something Else! Reviews’ One Track Mind, we hand the reins over to Orrin Evans You May Also Like: Bill Evans – Time Remembered, The Life & Music of Bill Evans (2016, DVD) Kevin Eubanks – East West Time Line (2017) Jazz’s Best Last Records byRead More

Orrin Evans arrived amidst a wave of new jazz performers in the early 1990s. Unlike many of those young lions, however, he managed to bob up from that era’s ultimately empty retro-conservatism. You May Also Like: Johannes Wallmann, jazz pianist and bandleader: Something Else! Interview Bill Evans – Time Remembered,Read More

by Nick DeRiso Turns out, it actually does mean a thing, even if it ain’t got that swing. For something like 80 years now, that old Duke Ellington cliche worked as the clarion call of big band music, but its mantra has also become its curse. You May Also Like:Read More

photo courtesy of Posi-Tone Records by S. Victor Aaron It seems like it was not even a year since we were last here chatting up a new Ralph Bowen CD, and checking back, there actually is less than twelve months between his last one, Due Reverence and this one dueRead More

by S. Victor Aaron What a stellar year it’s been for Posi-Tone Records. They’ve generated record after record of honest-to-goodness mainstream jazz done with taste, style, with exceptional sidemen and flawless production. After reviewing zero releases prior to 2010, we’ve now given our impressions on a dozen releases, eleven ofRead More

by S. Victor Aaron In the promo video below, pianist Orrin Evans performs the first cut from his new album Faith In Action, and the camera ever so slyly captures a picture of Thelonious Monk in the background. The subliminal advertising is undoubtedly intended to suggest that Evans’ playing styleRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Since the mid-sixties, jazz musicians have sought to combine electronic instruments with jazz to create something new and fresh sounding. The most obvious result of this mix is called fusion, but others have managed to do it taking different approaches that uses these instruments to actuallyRead More