Jon Garelick
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 whole band demonstrated an expressive variety of mark-making, as visual artists like to say: lines and squiggles and blotches, graceful or rude.
The magic in Eliane Elias’s performances is in how easily she slips from one musical dialect into another.
At the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival we tend to gravitate to the locals and other “regional acts” from around the world and hope, most of all, for those surprises — artists unlike any we’ve seen before, anywhere.
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