Jazz

Jazz Album Review: Anna Webber’s “Idiom” — Free Improvisation as Potpourri

May 20, 2021
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Descriptions of Anna Webber’s music might make it seem intimidating. It is not — her compositions are stirring, amusing, and delightful, particularly in the shell games they play with variety and coherence.

Jazz Performance Review: Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner at Home

May 17, 2021
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To hear this performance properly. you must do a bit more work than you might do ordinarily . . . but great art deserves such work.

May Short Fuses – Materia Critica

May 9, 2021
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Jazz Album Review: A Splendidly Spiritual Conversation — “Promises” with Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders

May 7, 2021
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Dedicated to experimentation and creative collaboration, Promises delivers an otherworldly, dreamlike experience.

Jazz Album Reviews: James Brandon Lewis and Vijay Iyer — Discoveries and Searches

May 4, 2021
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New discs from James Brandon Lewis and Vijay Iyer merit serious attention from admirers of improvised music.

Arts Coverage Commentary: A Conversation with Ted Gioia About New Approaches to Publishing

April 26, 2021
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“I don’t work the system anymore, except as a last resort: I aim instead to bypass it. The better I have gotten at circumventing gatekeepers, the more successful my writing career has been.”

Arts Remembrance: At 40, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays’s “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls” Still Enthralls

April 23, 2021
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Nothing that guitarist Pat Metheny had done previously hinted at this sprawling 1981 masterpiece.

Jazz CD Review: Jim Waller Big Band — “Bucket List”

April 19, 2021
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This is one of the best traditional big band records you’ll hear this year, or maybe this decade.

Jazz Album Reviews: Pianists Masabumi Kikuchi and Theo Walentiny — Poetic Solo Flights

April 13, 2021
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Two albums, from a late master and a newbie, are notable additions to the current wave of introspective solo piano excursions.

Jazz Album Review: Miguel Zenón’s Law Years Band & Christian McBride’s New Jawn Band

April 12, 2021
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Two pianoless quartets + two restless leaders = some of the best music of the last few years.

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