Jon Garelick
Put Bill Charlap in that camp of brilliant jazz originals who have plied their trade by playing songs by other people and making them definitively their own.
“PoemJazz” is a project where music and poetry reinforce each other, where the declaimed poetry works like the sung line of a song — though Robert Pinsky never sings or pretends to.
This might not be everybody’s idea of who Maria Callas was, but the film is plausible, and honest. You can watch Angelina Jolie’s Maria and think, so that’s what it was like to be her.
Most in the Berklee audience seemed satisfied with the chance to be in South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s presence, subdued perhaps, but still casting a magisterial aura.
In Godwin Louis’s music, prayer seems best expressed in dance.
If Fernando Huergo’s band of A-list Boston players sounded especially inspired, it was certainly in no small part due to what he was giving them to play.
Pianist Ran Blake’s performance was like a long dreamscape of personal reflection and meditation.
Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Lamb, with his spiritual imperative, is clearly seeking, and achieving, incantatory power.
Some at times sentimental observations of New Orleans’s “other” massive music confab, the French Quarter Festival.
Once again, here was the shock in Cécile McLorin Savant’s subversive conceptual daring.
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