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 Pico In 1939, German immigrant Alfred Lion founded Blue Note Records along with Max Margulis as a label dedicated to signing and recording jazz and blues artists. Over the years, this label became a central part of jazz history itself, as it became the home for seminal recordings byRead 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 S. Victor Aaron Jeff Beck has long been at or near the top of a lot of people’s greatest guitarists lists and it’s not hard to see why. He’s a master technician, and possesses a highly unique, blues-based style that no one has even really come close to duplicating.Read 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

photo: Dario Villa“Erik Friedlander can do things with a cello that should have a reasonable listener fearing for her life.” That quote came from not the Lester Bangs of whack jazz Mark Saleski, but from none other than Pitchforkmedia.com. There aren’t that many cellists—much less whack jazz cellists—who get anyRead More

This is perhaps Weather Report’s most honest record. You just have to lean in closer to appreciate it.

by Pico If you’ve followed this space the last couple of months, you’ve might have first noticed the warm reception that Brazilian bassist Leonardo E. M. Cioglia got here for his majestic debut Contos. And if you missed that, perhaps you detected the album’s prominent mention in the “Best ofRead 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

Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson shared a stage in one of the most satisfyingly offbeat pairings from a regimentally segregated musical era.