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

> by Pico Jam bands seem to come in all kinds of flavors. The Allman Brothers took blues-rock, mixed it with soul and jazz and stretched it out. Grateful Dead was into a psychedelic kind of folk while Phish was known for their eclecticism and thrived on absurdity. Virtuosos DerekRead More

by Pico This selection goes back a ways with me; I’ve saved only a handful of vinyls from my once somewhat-vast collection and this vintage ABC-Blue Thumb double LP was spared from that dreaded garage sale. It’s also one of the few expensive import CD’s I was begrudgingly willing toRead More

Ahhhh, Friday night. As R.L. Burnside would say, “I know godd—ed well it’s party time.” But the blues isn’t the only place you’ll find the Good Lord’s name uttered in vain. Thanks to Les McCann, you can also find that commandment broken in a soul-jazz ditty that he made aRead More

by Pico From Stanton Moore we make a short hop to his Garage A Trois bandmate Charlie Hunter. Even among eccentric acid-jazz musicians, Hunter stands out. First of all, for all the soul-jazz, funk and world fusion he paints on his canvas, he is a bop man at heart; mostRead More

With the outstanding ‘Flyin’ the Koop,’ Stanton Moore leaves little ground uncovered in his search for the rare groove.

by Nick DeRiso Was grooving to a 2002 reissue of the titanic groovefest ‘Power of Soul’ tonight, and got to thinking about Idris Muhammad – a funk and jazz drummer of the first order, born in New Orleans as Leo Morris. He started out, of course, playing in soul bands,Read More

Much as Neil Young was the elder godfather to the grunge bands of a decade ago, guitarist John Scofield now enjoys a similar stature among the numerous funk-jazz jam bands that have sprouted up in the wake of the emergence of Medeski, Martin and Wood in the mid-nineties. Many ofRead More