by S. Victor Aaron As one of the seminal jazz-rock bands of the seventies, Weather Report has been plenty celebrated and covered. And yet, most of the recognition covers the 1976-1982 period in which the groundbreaking bassist Jaco Pastorious was in the band. Truth is, WR was a great bandRead 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

There are some lines of business where the odds are stacked heavily against you if you decide to go into it. The restaurant biz is notorious for a high failure rate, for instance. The same could be saying about starting an independent record label; they come and go in massiveRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Know any good music in Baltimore? I do. The city that has spawned or raised such diverse, quirky talents such as Cab Calloway, Frank Zappa and David Byrne is currently the home to a new one: Quartet Offensive. Formed just two years ago, Quartet Offensive playsRead More

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