Following by mere months the release of Streets, Charles Gayle’s return to his sax/bass/drums trio format, Look Up is a document of a live date in the same configuration from eighteen years earlier in Santa Monica, California. You May Also Like: How Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle Saved ‘One FromRead More

Each of the year’s four Satoko Fujii records made our Best Of 2010 List. by Pico With the more accessible types of jazz out of the way in Part 3 and Part 4, this Best of 2010 series concludes with the least accessible stuff, the experimental and avant garde stuffRead More

by S. Victor Aaron There’s jazz and and there’s whack jazz, that label I assign to jazz that is unrestrained, unconventional and sometimes, rude. The kind of jazz that you wouldn’t play at any party, but boy, they sure are fun to listen to when you’re really engaged to theRead More

For this installment of the 2009 roundups, we lasso those stray cd’s of jazz that’s really “out there.” Hmmm, I think there’s a term for that kind of music. Despite hard times—and it’s really hard for those musicians who choose to play music entirely for art’s sake as these guysRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Joe Morris is fresh-minded guitarist whose uncommon ideas about improvisation, interaction, time, harmonics and phrasing collectively combine to form a unique sound even within the “seen it all/done it all” world of New York’s improvised music scene. And he does it with a tone that’s clearRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Oftentimes the battle for getting the recorded music of experimental and forward-thinking musicians out to the public is largely undertaken by hundred if not thousands of tiny record labels. These labels are not founded by those with the idea of making a lot of money, butRead More

This is Part Four overall, but the last part of the “Best of Jazz” trilogy. While the last section focused on fusion, here’s where we’re gettin’ wiggy with it because this section is devoted to whack jazz. Looking back, I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t cover that many newRead More

by Pico The topic of this review is yet another ESP-Disk release, and I’ve often wondered if ESP is an acronym for “not for the faint of heart” in Esperanto. I’m a lot more certain of this, though: Barnacled is a perfect fit for the label, which seems to relishRead More

Paul Bley’s sixty year career has been primarily one where he’s worked with some of the biggest names in the vanguard of jazz in the quest for experimentation and many times he’s marched to the beat of his own drummer. For a good part of that career, it was alsoRead More

 In 1966, attorney Bernard Stollman founded the ESP-Disk label in New York City. Less than three years later, with orders dried up from established record labels bootlegging their better-selling records, the label was driven out of business. This is a familiar story followed in some variation by thousands of start-upRead More