by Pico It’s the middle of January, which can only mean we’re about a month late on those year-end lists. Oooops. This past year, I’ve listened to perhaps a little less of the rock, pop and r&b records than in 2008, but the selections for my favorites were easier toRead More

by S. Victor Aaron In 2001, the avant garde jazz leading light Henry Threadgill had just recorded two albums he wanted released but couldn’t find a record company willing to do it. Quite a turnaround in the attitudes of the music business toward creative modern music, where Threadgill’s prior threeRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Eric Alexander is a tenor sax specialist who comes from the same generation of reed players as Joshua Redman, who he finished second to in 1991 in that career-defining Thelonious Monk Institute sax competition, when Alexander was in early 20’s. Since then, he has been extremelyRead More

by S. Victor Aaron This article makes it twenty-three albums covered in the span of eight days, which put a nice dent in my backlog, and there’s just a couple more to go before turning our attention to the year 2009 in music. The batch of records covered here drawsRead More

If you look at the list of past winners and finalists of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competitions, it’s quite impressive: Aaron Parks, Marcus Strickland, John Ellis, Sam Yahel and Miles Okazaki, just to name a few. In 2008, the winner was an alto and tenor saxophonist from the PhilippinesRead More

For this installment of the 2009 roundups, we lasso those stray cd’s of jazz that’s really “out there.” Hmmm, I think there’s a term for that kind of music. Despite hard times—and it’s really hard for those musicians who choose to play music entirely for art’s sake as these guysRead More

by Pico Before diving deeper into the stacks o’ jazz cd’s, I’d like to turn our attention toward a few records of the rock, pop & blues sides that I managed to sample over the last few months. With one exception, these are all by long-established stalwarts, falling right inRead More

by Pico The other day, I explained our lack of year-end lists that all good music review sites do by a still-bountiful stack of unexplored CD’s that deserved some checking out before I can put together a tally that looks somewhat informed. Even after this clearinghouse of an article I’llRead More

by Pico Chicago’s own Ramsey Lewis is part of a surprisingly sturdy fraternity of major jazz pianists who first started making records more than half a century ago. Like Horace Silver, Cecil Taylor, Hank Jones, Ahmad Jamal and Paul Bley, Lewis’ resilient popularity comes from doing things he’s done forRead More

by Pico In the past, I’ve gotten these year-end lists out about two weeks before the end of the year. This time, a crush of projects in the fall set me back and I’m still sorting through a stack of records. Since it wouldn’t be fair to declare the winnersRead More