Music Reviews: Jazz

The problem with records like this is that they tell you how mediocre sounding many of your records are—unless your collection consists only of "audiophile" records, of which there are two kinds: "sounds great, less filling", or more rarely, "sounds great, is filling". For younger readers, that's a play on the old Miller Lite commercial: "tastes great, less filling".McIntosh Sessions celebrates the company's 75th... Read More

Based on some of the comments on this site under the original announcement of these UHQR Bill Evans releases you might think the subtitle quote was someone's reference to Analogue Productions Chad Kassem, but it's actually from annotator Ira Gitler's original liner notes for Sunday at the Village Vanguard. His point was that being a jazz critic doesn't mean he can't melt into the music and drop the analytical side of his reviewer brain. These... Read More

In need of a feel good story? Here it is. There's even a hi-fi system tie in. The story as told in the booklet by Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum (and author of three Armstrong biographies) begins almost a year after this BBC performance with Louis at home recuperating from two hospital stays playing for guests his new Tandberg reel to reel tape recorders his wife Lucille had installed as a surprise while he... Read More

On 1974's Court and Spark Joni Mitchell cautiously dipped her musical toes into the jazz pool, adding some studio players like Milt Holland, Wilton Felder and Tom Scott to the arranging mix and capping the record with a sly, startling cover of Wardell Gray and Annie Ross's "Twisted" found originally on Lambert, Hendricks & Ross!: The Hottest New Group in Jazz (Columbia CS 8198). Cheech and Chong added some of their zany comic commentary to the... Read More

It may seem odd for Blue Note to reissue Jason Moran’s Ten on two LPs as part of its Classic Vinyl series. For one thing, it was recorded in 2010, a bit recent to be deemed a classic. For another, contrary to the “hype sticker” (and unlike most titles in the series), it was not “mastered from the original analog tapes,” as the album was recorded digitally. (Blue Note has since acknowledged the error.) Nonetheless, the album fits the category. The sound quality, though... Read More

Hi-Fi has long been very good to Duke Ellington, beginning in 1950 when long playing records and tape recording allowed him to finally deliver Masterpieces by Ellington an album of previously impossible to release to the home listening public, live concert length arrangements of his most popular and enduring compositions. Until then only attendees of his live concerts got to hear them.Finally Ellington was freed from the constraints of the three minute 78rpm... Read More

If you’re looking for 35 minutes of riveting calm, this is the album for you. And if “riveting calm” strikes you as oxymoronic, well, the album fits that in several ways. It consists of duets between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Amina Claudine Myers, both 82 years old but as youthful in spirit as anyone around. They’re veterans of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), known for its avant-garde jazz artists, but Myers has long... Read More

Bill Minkowski's excellent annotation sets the stage. For various reasons both musical and otherwise Jaco and Joe Zawinul had a falling out and Jaco chose to devote more time to his Word of Mouth big band project (referred to a few times in the notes here as the "World of Mouth" big band). There's more detail in the annotation but the main result of the falling out was that Weather Report went one way and Pastorious (and drummer Peter Erskine) went... Read More

The "Ben Webster Quintet" was really Webster plus the Oscar Peterson Trio of Peterson, Herb Ellis and Ray Brown—a grouping Peterson once said was "the most stimulating"—plus Stan Levey on drums. It was a busy time for the Peterson Trio, which had played the previous day with Louis Armstrong in a session that probably resulted in Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson, though for some reason that wasn't released until 1959. The next day the trio... Read More

In October 1957, Sonny Rollins was booked for a two month gig at New York City jazz club, The Village Vanguard. Though widely regarded as the most innovative and important saxophonist in jazz, Rollins was, in his own words, "so disillusioned with myself that I was afraid to hear myself." At the Vanguard, he was leading his own band for the first time and searching for a way to play jazz that was freer and more expressive than the bebop style of harmonic... Read More

Jazz is to New York as port is to Portugal or coal is to Newcastle, yet there are great musicians who live elsewhere, many of them obscure in the metropole because they live elsewhere, and that’s a shame for us all. Kahil El’Zabar is one of those great musicians, a composer and percussionist who dwells mainly in Chicago, except when he travels through Europe, where he’s better known than he is in New York, even though he and his main band, the Ethnic Heritage... Read More

Charles Lloyd is a wonder: 85 years old, still near the top of his game, his tone on tenor sax and flute clear and strong, not at all averse to risk-taking—in fact, keen to leap into new routes and approaches. Rather than hiring bandmates well suited to merely comping behind his solos, as some old masters do, Lloyd recruits the best musicians he can, to ensure a flow of adventure in the interplay. This has been true ever since his first major album as a leader, Dream... Read More

According to Ashley Kahn's outstanding annotation for this Rhino High Fidelity release, a few days before stepping into Phil Ramone's A&R studios to record Olé—his final session for Atlantic Records— John Coltrane had been at RVG's in Englewood Cliffs, NJ recording his first Africa/Brass session for Impulse! Kahn writes that the relatively new A&R was handling "overflow" for Atlantic, which is fortunate. It meant that Olé would be both... Read More

Ella backed by a small jazz combo was an unusual musical setting for Ella in the studio, which makes this album recorded and released in 1961 a catalog standout. Pianist Lou Levy leads the quartet that also features guitarist Herb Ellis, bassist Joe Mondragon and on drums Stan Levey. Clap Hands...is also highly regarded for its excellent sonics, recorded somewhere in Los Angeles. Since producer and Verve founder Norman Granz was also Ella's long time manager and... Read More

When Norman Granz organized and produced in 1980 The Trumpet Summit Meets The Oscar Peterson Big 4 (Pablo 2312-114), Peterson was fifty five years old, Ray Brown was fifty two, Bobby Durham was forty three, Joe Pass was fifty one, Dizzy Gillespie was the "elder statesman" at sixty three and Freddie Hubbard was the youngster at forty two. By today's age standards none of them were "old", but jazz at that point—at least the kind of jazz these... Read More

Maria Schneider is the preeminent big-band composer and leader of our time. She’s been at it for a little over 30 years, recorded nine albums in that span, and this, her 10th, Decades—a lavishly packaged, limited-edition three-LP boxed set, on the Artist Share label—is a celebration, a sort of best-of anthology tracing her evolution. It also marks the first time any of her work has been pressed on vinyl, in this case 180-gram vinyl, the lacquers cut by Chris Bellman... Read More