Jon Garelick
Along with its slew of images — photos, sketches, and ephemera as well as album covers — WAIL offers what amounts to a compelling oral history of the mid-century explosion, not only of recorded jazz but of graphic design and, by extension, a burgeoning New York cultural scene.
Welcome back! The second half-life of the Either/Orchestra.
New albums from Billy Hart, Phil Haynes & Free Country, Pat Thomas, Kalia Vandever, and the Webber/Morris Big Band.
An occasional feature that looks at current jazz albums of interest.
At 85, Herbie Hancock can still funk it up.
Gigs by superb bands led by Mary Halvorson and Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol at the Regattabar.
The McCoy Tyner Legacy Band, in a program called “Blues on the Corner” had it all: the unrelenting, all-enveloping power that was a hallmark of Coltrane’s bands, but also an attention to dynamics, detail, and, most important, melody.
At the very least, Jerome Charyn’s considerable novelistic imagination should send readers back to any number of documentary films and, most important, to the still very real fact of Maria Callas’s vital recorded legacy.
A particular guttural sequence of phrases from accordionist Ted Reichman suggested a musical cadence, and I felt myself respond with the jazz fan’s involuntary noise of appreciation: “Unh!”
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year — Listomania! Confessions of a Bad Voter
So what am I saying? That the system is imperfect, corrupted by bad voters like me (there must be a few others who didn’t listen to even close to everything on this list — show of hands?)
Read More about The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year — Listomania! Confessions of a Bad Voter