“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)Read More

Photo: Susan J. WeiandWith jazz fusion having been around for some forty years, now, it’s not so easy to be distinctive in that field anymore. Garaj Mahal manages to stick out, mainly due to massive chops by all four group members and a dizzying array of influences each group memberRead More

The sky’s the limit for Aaron Parks and he’s already several miles off the ground.

Earlier this week, Atlanta, Georgia’s own Jerry Reed passed away at 71 years old. To a lot of folks, Reed was a fixture in Burt Reynolds movies from the mid-seventies to the early eighties. But my strongest recollections of Reed go back a little further, when he was still knownRead More

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 thatRead More

Like Ahmad Jamal, Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, Ramsey Lewis is a jazz pianist who first emerged in the 1950s and is still with us today. Unlike those other cats, though, Lewis was never accused of challenging the existing conventions of jazz. With crossover hits like “The In Crowd” andRead More

It must be tough to make a name for yourself as the little brother of such a towering figure in jazz as alto sax great Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley. Nat Adderley never did quite reach the legend status that his elder sibling did, but did manage to gain acclaim as aRead More

Back in, oh, October of last year I got a wild hair and raved on a free form electrified cello performance by that late, lamented demon of the bowed bass, Tom Cora. The name of the stringed stream of conscienceness was called “Halleluhjah Anyway.” Back then, I made mention ofRead More

by Pico Jazz fusion records from the 1974 time frame are almost always going to fall into one of two categories: a few that are truly great but overly familiar, or, more frequently, simply forgettable. Transitory by Pork Pie is a unique one from that period in that it’s bothRead More

No serious conversation about old school funk-jazz can leave out this gem. “Always There” is a essentially a two chord vamp, but damn, it’s a two-chord vamp that hits squarely in the center of funk’s sweet spot. The song’s co-creator Ronnie Laws spent the first half the seventies lending hisRead More