by Nick DeRiso With a shout — and a persona — to match this barrel-house presence, Big Joe Turner lived up to his outsized name every night. Turner’s emergence was tied to those brawny blasts, since Joe came of age in a time when singers had to project past bigRead More

by Nick DeRiso Masterpieces seem to come at us all at once, like epiphanies and summer storms. But the making of such things is more a journey than a lightning bolt, with ideas and elements to mix and match along the way. That’s the case with Dave Brubeck’s superlative 1959Read More

by S. Victor Aaron Jeff Beck has long been at or near the top of a lot of people’s greatest guitarists lists and it’s not hard to see why. He’s a master technician, and possesses a highly unique, blues-based style that no one has even really come close to duplicating.Read More

by Pico For the second time in a year, we’re here looking at an Avishai Cohen album, but from two different musicians. Because, while both are jazz artists who hail from Israel, the one we examined earlier specializes in acoustic bass. The one we looking at here is a trumpetRead More

NICK DERISO: Best to fasten your seltbelts, and put your trays in the upright position. “Git It” is a frenetic, fun-filled journey, this breathless moment of in-concert glory that comes and goes so fast that it remains sadly emblematic of the meteoric rise of Beau Jocque himself. During the lastRead More

photo: Dario Villa“Erik Friedlander can do things with a cello that should have a reasonable listener fearing for her life.” That quote came from not the Lester Bangs of whack jazz Mark Saleski, but from none other than Pitchforkmedia.com. There aren’t that many cellists—much less whack jazz cellists—who get anyRead More

This is perhaps Weather Report’s most honest record. You just have to lean in closer to appreciate it.

A rakish character, to be sure, Sonny Boy Williamson II wore a bowler hat and custom-made two-tone three-piece suit, often regaled the crowds with a hands-free harp solo, even took the name of a once-more famous predecessor in order to jump start his career. Williamson, then, was the perfect AmericaRead More

Arild Andersen may not be the first name that comes up when one thinks of the greatest living acoustic bassists, but he’s at least earned the right to be considered somewhere on that list. A player of expansive range, lyricism and velocity, Andersen’s list of credits as a sideman readsRead More

Jazz just lost an all-world trumpeter. Indianapolis’ Frederick Dewayne Hubbard — who died Monday morning from complications following a heart attack a month earlier at age 70 — may not have shaped jazz as the great trumpet men before him like Armstrong, Gillespie and Davis did, but his mastery ofRead More