Michael Ullman
The magazine’s jazz critics look back over the past year and highlight their favorite albums.
The magazine’s jazz critics look back over the past year and highlight their favorite albums.
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
This Craft reissue is welcome for the presence and distinctness of its sound, and for the state-of-the-art playing. Art Pepper will be going through my head for days.
The magazine’s jazz critics look back over the past year and highlight their favorite albums.
Jazz, in particular, seemed to not merely satisfy Justin Freed’s inner cravings for beauty, but it led him outwards, to others, eventually inspiring some of the key relationships in his life.
The music comes out of an extended personal crisis; the compositions found here are a testament to a musician regaining his voice.
The advantage to listening to the recorded Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite is that on disc pianist Jason Yeager writes beautifully for septet: the textures he evokes in his arrangements are curiously varied and invariably moving.
Vince Guaraldi isn’t the heaviest of jazz pianists: he played at a time when McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans were omnipresent. But his tunes, his gently humanist approach to music, meant that he reached listeners that others couldn’t or didn’t.
Music Feature: The Best Jazz Albums and Live Shows of 2023
The magazine’s jazz critics look back over the past year and highlight their favorite albums and live shows.
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