by S. Victor Aaron The highly versatile drummer Matt Wilson has made a name as a leader of bands that straddled the fence between post-bop and avant garde with other music forms tossed in for grins ever since his headliner debut As Wave Follows Wave, which featured tenor sax veteranRead More

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 Pico Duck Baker has made his name over several decades as a virtuosic acoustic guitarist, one who prefers to play it solo. That might make him sound like another Leo Kottke, but there’s much more to Baker that makes him a compelling and interesting musician. Baker obviously craves applyingRead More

by Pico The real revolutionaries in music never seem to run out of ideas. That can certainly be said of one of the most…if not the most singular voice in improvised music today, guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil. When we first visited his work on this site, it was about a single,Read More

Last fall MMW kicked off the first part of their Radiolarians trilogy with Radiolarians I. Earlier this month, Part 2 came out. As with Part 1, Radiolarians II has many of the threesome’s astonishing range, sharp musicianship and unpredictability on display; it’s atypical nature makes it a typical MMW album,Read More

by Pico So what do these three albums getting the spotlight on this Quickies have in common? For one, they all fall on the jazz side of things (no surprise there). For another, these are all April releases. Oops, it’s already May, isn’t it? It’s still not too late toRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Using large ensembles as vehicles for improvised music is hardly a new proposition, but can be one of the riskiest ones. After all, the more musicians involved, the more likelihood that one or more them won’t be on the same page and thus the greater potentialRead More

by Pico As before, this Quickies is an opportunity to highlight new offerings by some lesser-known jazz artists out there today. The thought crossed my mind to throw in a big name like Neil Young, but we kind of covered his Fork In The Road record last week in aRead More

This installment of Quickies is aimed at introducing to you, Dear Reader, some amazing jazz musicians who may not have shown up on your radar screen yet: Jake Hertzog Chromatosphere Here’s a guitarist who is a 2007 graduate of Berklee, won the Montreaux Jazz Guitar Competition the prior year, cameRead More

by Pico We’ve been long overdue for another “Quickies,” as there’s been way more new releases to talk abput than there’s time to talk (as usual). Nonetheless, the show must go on and the word has to get out. This variation has a certain theme. Well, sort of. We startRead More