Jazz
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..
To this listener, the quartet generates a drama of gradual enlightenment, as if extroversion signified some sort of illumination.
This album offers a Baedeker of pianist Ran Blake’s cinematic effects, the mis-en-scene for a narrative musical imagination unlike any other.
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