Allen Michie
Two debut big band albums, one traditional and one progressive, are blowing in hot in the dead of winter.
Add these four remastered Ray Charles albums to your collection and remind yourself what the real thing sounds like when it finally comes along.
This is poetry that sets its goals, finds the right language to reach them, hits hard, and recovers an ancient purpose for verse that has fallen by the wayside in recent times: consolation.
Ideally, if the verse and the music work seamlessly together, they can create a third kind of art that is neither fish nor fowl. It can stand alone on its own merits.
If any of these songs get some airplay and serve as gateway drugs to the glories of the Count Basie band, I’m all for it.
On two recent releases, trumpeter Paolo Fresu shows us exactly what he has learned from Miles Davis, and how that has expanded rather than limited his music.
Everyone who loves jazz, or makes a living somewhere in its world, owes a debt to many of the hard-working and under-paid writers of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA).
An excellent new album by the ad hoc ensemble Kenny Wheeler Legacy. It is impossible not to think of how the great trumpeter Kenny Wheeler would have sounded over these updated arrangements with such top-drawer musicians and excellent production.
The model here is clearly Ornette Coleman’s early quartets on Atlantic but, in the hands of these trios, it’s clear there’s much that’s still fresh left to explore in this 65-year-old style.
It was all intense, bracing, and urgent jazz in Austin last week. I don’t know how all y’all spoiled New Yorkers keep your heads from exploding.
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