by Pico Tuesday was pretty busy day for Manfred Eicher’s fabled label ECM Records, as this was a day when they are released no less than five CD’s. For this all-ECM version of Quickies, we’re going to take some fairly brief looks at three of these, the more jazz-oriented ones.Read More

by S. Victor Aaron Jon Hassell is an inventor of new forms of music – of new ideas of what music could be and how it might be made. His work is drawn from his whole cultural experience without fear or prejudice. It is an optimistic, global vision that suggestsRead 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 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

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

by S. Victor Aaron Last year we gave a testimonial to a new small-group Carla Bley album that featured a uber-talented Italian trumpeter by the name of Paolo Fresu. But as good as Fresu is, he’s not yet the king of Italian trumpeters. That’s because Enrico Rava is still wearingRead More

A couple of years ago, I posed the question: is the Dave Holland Quintet the best jazz group working today? Today, the Dave Holland Quintet has been supplanted by the Dave Holland Sextet, and with last week’s unfurling of the Sextet’s first record Pass It On, we get to assessRead More

Used to be that whenever the term “Scandinavian jazz” would come up, one could summarize it by pointing to the sterile, pristine folk-jazz popularized by Jan Garbarek and the ECM label from the seventies on. In recent times, it’s come to mean such a variety of styles and tendencies thatRead More

For more than forty years, Charles Lloyd has been the small combo leader making distinctively impressionistic and soulful kind of small combo jazz. His tenor’s delicate, almost alto-like timbre is instantly recognizable from just a single note. His prolific periods of the late sixties and since the late eighties haveRead More

From time to time I’ve mused about reviewing one of John Abercrombie’s best latter ECM recordings called November from 1992. I may still tackle that one, but I need to put that write-up aside for now to muse about another, brand-new, ECM release titled after the name of a month.Read More