Music
Pianist Billy Lester is an amusingly dry fellow who is also a deeply serious, idiosyncratic musician.
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Wading in the deep end of the Tool pool.
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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.
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Oscar Peterson always seemed at his best live, which is how we find the pianist in this beautifully recorded, newly issued set.
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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..
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To this listener, the quartet generates a drama of gradual enlightenment, as if extroversion signified some sort of illumination.
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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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David Bowie’s Toy is a solid, enjoyable, and buoyant effort from an artist who never failed to stay interesting and vital well into his later years.
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A major release by a pianist who, just in his mid-thirties, is already one of the most intelligent and satisfying musicians on the circuit.
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The composer of Cavalleria rusticana brought his sense for characterization and drama to the all-too-plausible tale of a woman victimized by a cad.
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