Music
With so many cooks, flaws were inevitable. But the effort was noble, and hearing Terence Blanchard’s beautiful trumpet sound in Symphony Hall was a transcendent experience.
Roger Clark Miller’s latest solo electric guitar ensemble album showcases him at his best, blending avant-garde experimentation with familiar guitar rock textures.
Everyone who loves jazz, or makes a living somewhere in its world, owes a debt to many of the hard-working and under-paid writers of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA).
What is most striking here is Paul Bley’s patience as a pianist, his practice of playing a chord or even a couple of notes and letting them hang in the air as if he were an outside observer, listening to their gradual fading.
Chicago singer-songwriter and pianist Neal Francis has been riding a smooth retro groove since the late 2010s, thanks to his stellar fusion of funk, soul, R&B, and psychedelic rock.
Here’s hoping that Adam Sherman and Robin Lane remain a creative item and continue to write and record new material. Both are in late-career resurgences and have devoted fans that fill the smaller clubs they typically perform in to the brim.
“When I think about blues music, I think about the musicians that came before me and what they had to say, all of those amazing guitar players. They were really playing a form of protest music.”
A pair of pleasant traversals of the French master’s complete piano music, or thereabout, from the still-relative-newcomer Seong-Jin Cho and the established Jean-Efflam Bavouzet.
Violinist James Ehnes and the BBC Philharmonic supply some truly great performances; violinist Benjamin Schmid revels in composer Friedrich Gulda’s freewheeling sense of play.
Semyon Bychkov supplies an extraordinarily well-played account of Mahler’s Third; Paavo Järvi’s version of Mahler’s Fifth avoids the more idiosyncratic excesses of Leonard Bernstein’s superb 1987 Vienna recording.
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