For well over a decade, Medeski, Martin and Wood (henceforth referred to as “MMW”) has been to acid jazz what Crosby, Stills & Nash is to folk-rock. A group at the top of the heap consisting of three extraordinary talents, and whose main releases are richly supplemented with temporary configurationRead More

A little more than a month ago I covered a self-released album by a Vancouver, British Columbia-based jazz-pop vocalist by the name of Heidi McCurdy. Heidi’s music is a prime example of the great singing and composing talent out there still unsigned and undiscovered by a record company. Fickle MindRead More

by Pico In the last three or four years, Georgia native Lizz Wright has created a stir in the same folk-jazz circles that Cassandra Wilson, Nina Simone and Oleta Adams have made their names in, but with her 2005 release Dreaming Wide Awake, she moved further into Sarah McLachlan territory.Read More

Turns out, chaff from Umphrey’s McGee still makes for a tasty loaf of bread.

by Pico The first time I heard “Barbary Coast” was when I got halfway through the second side of a vinyl copy Weather Report’s Black Market I had just purchased, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with it then. In this rendering, it was a three minute one-chord bass riff decoratedRead More

by Pico Ever since Miles Davis passed away in 1991, there’s been endless Miles tribute albums by artists influenced by him whether by listening to him or even by playing with him. More recently, tribute albums have focused more on the enigmatic electric period and we even covered a fewRead More

Let’s circle back to a key moment from Larry Young, the John Coltrane of the jazz organ.

“Jazz is the sound of surprise”–jazz critic Whitney Balliett, 1926-2007 Sometimes you think you know a musician and his tendencies, or that he’s always played the kind of music you’ve known him to play. Over the course of pursuing my curiosity about certain artists, I’ve stumbled upon some rather peculiarRead More

Back when I was a young man in my twenties, I had frequent cravings for testosterone-driven jams—just like any young man does. But while some of my buds got their fix through the likes of Van Halen, AC/DC or Metallica, I often turned to McCoy Tyner. McCoy Tyner? Absolutely, whyRead More

Ever since Stan Getz, João Gilberto and Charlie Byrd have introduced American audiences to the Brazilian-flavored cool-jazz sounds of Antonio Carlos Jobim, bossa nova has assumed a permanent and prominent place in jazz history. For generations now, people have danced, swayed and just chilled out to the distinctive, 8/4 timeRead More