This installment of Quickies is aimed at introducing to you, Dear Reader, some amazing jazz musicians who may not have shown up on your radar screen yet: Jake Hertzog Chromatosphere Here’s a guitarist who is a 2007 graduate of Berklee, won the Montreaux Jazz Guitar Competition the prior year, cameRead More

Like Dave Holland, Derrick Gardner is following the axiom of “more is…” more. Allow me to explain… One of the hottest jazz combos of the last decade has been the Dave Holland Quintet. Recently, Holland decided to shake things up a bit and expanded his quintet to a sextet. TheRead More

by S. Victor Aaron John Scofield isn’t regarded as the top two or three jazz guitarists of the last couple of decades just because he’s such a great guitar player. The thing that sets him apart from almost all the others is his ability to play a different style ofRead More

by Nick DeRiso  To think, we almost never heard Carmen McRae sing these songs. Even though she was an early acolyte of Billie Holiday, McRae was at first better known as a pianist. (In fact, upon meeting her, Holiday was said to be so impressed that she recorded McRae’s “DreamRead More

by Nick Deriso  A remarkably open and spiritual recording, “Then Sings My Soul” reveals the most touching of sentiments for the deeply religious Ronnie Milsap. Gone is the brassy everyman bravado of familiar country-soul and pop hits like “Stranger in My House,” “I Wouldn’t Have Missed It for the World”Read More

by S. Victor Aaron Late last year I covered a new release by David Weiss’ New Jazz Composers Octet, The Turning Gate. The names found in this band aren’t household names, but the high level of musicianship and composition writing savvy by every member of this collective nevertheless makes thisRead More

Cassandra Wilson, unlike so many, never turns a cover tune into a math problem — trying to get it too note perfect, or make it add up. Instead, her hypnotic, sensuous contralto transforms other people’s work, often giving it a power and meaning never dreamt of before. That’s writ largeRead More

by Pico We’ve been long overdue for another “Quickies,” as there’s been way more new releases to talk abput than there’s time to talk (as usual). Nonetheless, the show must go on and the word has to get out. This variation has a certain theme. Well, sort of. We startRead More

Will Sellenraad is a member of a newer generation of jazz musicians who have that ability to fold in elements of rock, soul and folk into jazz without diluting the jazz component at all. His guitar playing style has a full, rounded tone that can best be described as unaffected,Read More

NICK DERISO: With “New Orleans Meets Harlem,” pianist Marcus Roberts explores the connections between two of jazz music’s most elemental tributaries — building on familiar ideas put in place by Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. The record, Roberts’ first in eight years, hitsRead More