Jazz
This cooperative music is deliberately international in instrumentation and personnel and theme, proffering its own characteristic, and often quite beautiful, mix of sounds.
Jazz Concert and Album Review: Vincent Peirani and Emile Parisien — Bringing Culture to the Colonies
The communication between Vincent Peirani’s accordion and Emile Parisien’s soprano sax was effortless, empathetic, and flawless.
This is free jazz perhaps, but it never sounds frantic, wild, or abandoned.
Blues singer Beth Hart wields the hammer of the gods with easy finesse but also deep emotion.
With their shifting textures and compositional variety, the relatively short pieces show the ways — in this case mostly gentle and lyrical — five musicians can fruitfully interact.
If you are not familiar with Wadada Leo Smith as an artist or as a thinker, you could start with The Chicago Symphonies and know that you are engaging with some of his finest work.
Pianist Billy Lester is an amusingly dry fellow who is also a deeply serious, idiosyncratic musician.
Others may hear a painfully flawed Latin jazz album, but what I heard was a brilliant postmodern ironic jam session in the mode of Ornette Coleman. I’m probably wrong, but I don’t care, because this album is a blast.
Oscar Peterson always seemed at his best live, which is how we find the pianist in this beautifully recorded, newly issued set.
Prodigy, post-Parker junkie, dead by homicide at a young age (1938-1972). Whatever. The myth shouldn’t crowd out the player. Musically, trumpeter Lee Morgan was a muthahfucka..
Theater Commentary: Theater for Young Audiences — What Role Can It Play In Saving Our Democracy?