Brooks Geiken

Latin Jazz Album Review: The Blustery, Bellowing, and Bluesy Sound of Dave Schumacher and Cubeye

April 16, 2024
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This is my kind of music, a tight latin jazz outfit that embraces great horn charts and explosive percussion.

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Jazz Album Review: Gustavo Cortiñas’s “Live in Chicago” — The Culmination of a Decade’s Worth of Music

March 6, 2024
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Throughout this superb live album, percussionist Gustavo Cortiñas allows his fellow band members an enormous amount of space, and that is welcome because of their high level of musicianship.

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Book Reviews: The Novels of Argentine Author Claudia Piñeiro — More Than Mysteries

January 8, 2024
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A death is routinely at the center of Claudia Piñeiro’s fiction, but the corpse sparks provocative questions about the way things are, not just an investigation into finding the murderer.

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Jazz Album Reviews: Winners from Roy McGrath, Chembo Corniel, and Big Band Leaders Marcos Fernández and Arturo O’Farrill

October 2, 2023
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Big band leader Arturo O’Farrill points out that “Santiago Brooklyn Santiago” makes a forceful argument that the embargo between Cuba and the United States should be done away with.

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Book Review: “Dead Men Cast No Shadows” — A Thriller That’s an Act of Political Courage

September 2, 2023
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Dead Men Cast No Shadows is an enormously entertaining novel about responses to perfidy in high places by one of the most prominent writers in the Spanish-speaking world.

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Jazz Album Review: System 6 Goes Outside and Inside, Splendidly

August 11, 2023
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System 6 is an adventurous contemporary ensemble whose music will appeal to lovers of the free jazz movement of the ’60s.

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Rock Album Review: The Latin Dead’s “Eyes of the World” — Revolutionary Pop/Rock/Latin Fusion

May 28, 2023
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Until this album, I had no idea that the Grateful Dead and salsa could blend together with such force and fun.

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Jazz Album Review: Pianist, Arranger, and Composer Oscar Hernández — Master of Latin Jazz

April 2, 2023
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These superb recordings provide ample proof that Oscar Hernández is at the pinnacle of his career as the leader of two divergent musical aggregations.

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