Get out there and hear some live music. It’s the best gift you can give to your ears.
Jazz Preview: Aardvark at 50 Sparks a Jazz Scene Sputtering Back to Life in Eastern Massachusetts
The pandemic clouds over the Boston / Cambridge jazz scene are breaking up – not completely by any means – but at last you have a broad menu of live music here to pull you away from your TV bingeing.
Jazz Album Review: Tony Williams’s “Play or Die” Gets Full Release, 40 Years On
The shadow of Weather Report looms over this groove session of consonant harmonies, the only documentation of a short-lived band that should have had the chance to burn more brightly.
Jazz Review and Conversation: Jane Ira Bloom’s Pandemic Duets
Jane Ira Bloom responded to her pandemic isolation with a CD of duets with bassist Mark Helias and a CD of duets with drummer Allison Miller. These two sessions are unique projects in her discography and beautiful testaments to her ingenuity.
Jazz Performance Review: Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner at Home
To hear this performance properly. you must do a bit more work than you might do ordinarily . . . but great art deserves such work.
Jazz Album Review: Miguel Zenón’s Law Years Band & Christian McBride’s New Jawn Band
Two pianoless quartets + two restless leaders = some of the best music of the last few years.
Music Profile: Violinist, Teacher, Composer, and Arranger Mimi Rabson — Making a Life in Art
The life of a working musician is not a second-class life, and Mimi Rabson’s is Exhibit A: “I try to get past the limits of the definitions and get to the joy.”
Jazz Appreciation/Album Review — Carla Bley, 84 and Counting
Carla Bley’s last three CDs are not a casual sequence, and hearing all of them together, as I did recently, provides a refreshing reminder of her greatness.
Jazz Album Review: “The Prospector” — A Saxophone-Bass-Drums Combination to Treasure
Nothing detracts from the essentials here – three fine players in creative conversation.
Arts Commentary: Meditations on Separation
This is what I feel can add: the perspective of a native-born son of the Rochester metro; and a view from the bridge through jazz-colored glasses.