by Pico Mike Clark assured his place in jazz history for the severely funky rhythms he laid down all over Herbie Hancock’s 1974 fusion classic Thrust. His knotty beats managed to make me forget about his Headhunters predecessor Harvey Mason and they probably should have been patented. If you hadn’tRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Last year brought the welcome return of Enrico Rava’s 1975 masterwork The Pilgrim And The Stars to American shores for the first time in CD form. Only a few months later, we’re getting treated to a new set of recordings by Italy’s foremost jazz musician. NewRead More

by Pico A berim-what??? Yeah, that’s right, a berimbau. Indigenous to the northeast region of Brazil, this bad boy is a single wire-stringed percussion musical instrument that’s sort of like a bow with a hollowed-out gourd on the bottom of it and played with a wooden stick, with the toneRead More

by Pico On January 27, ECM Records presents yet another recording of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack deJohnette in concert. This will make it the fourth one…from 2001 dates alone. Prior to this performance in Tokyo, The Out-of-Towners, Always Let Me Go and one we’ve covered here previously, MyRead More

NICK DERISO: The blue-eyed soul template has been copied so many times that it can feel like a faded and calculating conceit, something singers do simply to attact a demo. Unless you’re Eric Lindell, a native of San Mateo, Calif., who not only aspires to a Van Morrison/Delbert McClinton-level ofRead More

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 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

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

NOTE: The New Jazz Composers Octet was the last backing band of jazz trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard, who passed away this morning at age 70 due to complications from a heart attack suffered on November 26. A truly major figure in jazz and one of the best trumpet players ofRead More