One was a teenaged hippie hobo who once toiled at an organic farm in Maui, the other a finance grunt for a white-collar firm. But a shared desire to create and play music brought Kenny Liner and Cris Jacobs together from polar opposite worlds to form The Bridge. You MayRead More

Posi-Tone Records, the label that has done more than anyone else lately in putting out records by the brightest new talent in mainstream and modern jazz, introduced the pianist and composer Noah Haidu to the world last week. Slipstream went on sale March 22, a debut that doesn’t present mereRead More

Steely Dan explore the idea of people succumbing to their worst tendencies again and again, a theme that will get many return visits.

Yesterday, Atlanta, GA bassist Michael Feinberg put out his second album, With Many Hands, a part of a quiet revolution taking place in jazz today. The twenty-somethings like Feinberg and his band who are plying their trade in this hallowed American institution of jazz didn’t grow up listening to onlyRead More

Some time ago…two years and three months ago to be more precise…we raved on the double-bass mastery of the Norwegian ECM Records mainstay Arild Andersen, and noted then that he “may not be the first name that comes up when one thinks of the greatest living acoustic bassists, but he’sRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Kingston, Jamaica’s own Monty Alexander looms as large a figure in Jamaica’s jazz world as Bob Marley does for its homegrown reggae. A virtuosic pianist in the Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson tradition, Alexander often melds Tatum and Peterson with the dancehall, calypso and reggae idiomsRead More

by S. Victor Aaron It’s become a late winter tradition for three years running: covering a new release by the most successful electric blues artist of late, Joe Bonamassa. In ’09 it was The Ballad Of John Henry, then ’10 brought us Black Rock. The short story on the reviewsRead More

Steely Dan stuck with me through the years, because this brainy, Jack Kerouac-type hipster band remained appealing even as my tastes in music evolved.

Yet another product from Moppa Elliot’s Hot Cup Records, which already says a lot about a record that shares the same label as Bryan And The Haggards, Puttin’ On The Ritz, and Mostly Other People Do The Killing. But we were already saying things — nice things — about Lundbom’sRead More

  by S. Victor Aaron For a lot of us, our first exposure to jazz was those Charlie Brown TV specials featuring the piano trio music of Vince Guaraldi. Then again, some Disney films like 101 Dalmations, Lady And The Tramp and especially The Aristocats contained jazz or jazz-y tunes.Read More