Jazz
The death of Abbey Lincoln on Saturday August 14, just a week after her 80th birthday, rewound my audio memory to 1959. By Steve Elman I didn’t have to re-listen to “Lost in the Stars,” from her Riverside album Abbey is Blue. I can replay that performance any time I wish, just by thinking about…
For a genre that supposedly expired in the 1950’s, the big band’s vital signs seem remarkably robust here in Boston. By J. R. Carroll A welcome recent addition has been the compositions and arrangements of tenor saxophonist Florencia Gonzalez, which layer vivid sonorities and intricate counterpoint atop Afro-Uruguayan candombe and Argentinian tango. She brings her…
By J. R. Carroll Violinists are a fortunate lot. Granted, many years of painstaking study and practice are required to master the instrument, but once achieved, that mastery can be taken in almost any direction–or in many directions. As part of what she describes as her “never-ending quest for new vocabulary,” Mimi Rabson has headed…
By Bill Marx “Boston is adrift in the brave new competition among big American cities vying for tourist dollars.” Maureen Dezell, WBUR Maureen made that charge back in July 2006 in an article that turned out to be one of the last posts on the late WBUR Arts Online. Now that the quote, along with…
by Bill Marx A recent study in Editor & Publisher delivers the lowdown; with its circulation down about 20% in four years, The Boston Globe is in free fall. Two major investors in The New York Times, which owns the Globe, are “challenging the company’s investment decisions, including its commitment to the struggling newspaper industry…
By J. R. Carroll This review/commentary will focus on Coltrane’s recordings with the Miles Davis Quintet for Columbia (in October 1955 and June and September 1956) and Prestige (in November 1955 and May and October 1956), as well as a variety of sideman dates and nominally leaderless sessions, many of which have recently been reissued…
Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Reviewed by J. R. Carroll During an interview in Japan in 1966, John Coltrane was asked what he would like to be in ten years. Coltrane replied, “I would like to be a saint.” Lewis Porter, author of the definitive study John Coltrane:…
It is remarkable that two prime discoveries in John Coltrane’s recording history should appear in the same year; one of them an improved elevation from the world of underground tapes, the other a total surprise.
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