by S. Victor Aaron There’s a special class of jazz record labels whereby you don’t even have to know the artist to get an idea of the kind of music that’s in store for you when you pop in that CD for the first time. If it’s an ECM, you’reRead More

by S. Victor Aaron After forty years in the business, ECM remains one of the busiest jazz labels around, and if anything, they’ve been picking up steam lately. That might be because they continue to bring on exciting new artists while continuing their amazing ability to retain so many ofRead More

by S. Victor Aaron The term “fusion jazz” has been used to refer to the melding of rock and jazz since the late 1960’s, but in truth, jazz has evolved largely by absorbing other forms of music from the beginning. I think that’s one of the very things that’s madeRead More

Today is the day Nigerian-British bass player Michael Olatuja unfurls his very first album Speak onto the world, but this isn’t the kind of record you’d might expect from a master bassist his first time out. But Olatuja is not an orthodox musician. If he was, I’d most likely wouldRead More

by Pico Tuesday was pretty busy day for Manfred Eicher’s fabled label ECM Records, as this was a day when they are released no less than five CD’s. For this all-ECM version of Quickies, we’re going to take some fairly brief looks at three of these, the more jazz-oriented ones.Read More

by Pico So far here we’ve covered a fairly wide variety of music styles, but still repped for only a handful of countries. Today, though, we’re going to add a few more countries to our slowly-burgeoning list of nations from which the talented musicians we cover come from. Most ofRead More

by Pico Fareed Haque has become one difficult dude to ignore whenever you talk about fusion these days, including world fusion. He’s come up prominently in reviews of the latest by the Dixon-Rhyne Project and the jam band supergroup he helped to form, Garaj Mahal. Of Chilean and Pakistani descent,Read More

by S. Victor Aaron The tenor and soprano saxophonist Ada Rovatti is a rising star in the contemporary jazz arena; a Berklee School of Music grad who hails from Italy, she’s performed with such jazz heavies as Joanne Brackeen, Miroslav Vitous, John McLaughlin and Randy Brecker. She’s appeared on Brecker’sRead More

Getting the word out on some of more esoteric or little-known artists and their albums is something we love doing here at Something Else, hence the name for our little tea room on the interwebs. “Quickies” is where I’ve yakked up a lot of records by musicians who are notRead More

It’s been three whole months since our last “Quickies” and in the meantime, the new releases have been piling up on my desk. They’ll be more Quickies soon after this one to catch up, but for now, we present four, new jazz-oriented offerings from last month and all by veryRead More