Music Reviews: Jazz

Herbie Nichols, who died of leukemia in 1963 at the age of 44, was a jazz composer-pianist of vast talent, wit, and virtuosity, but little luck. He recorded just four albums (three for Blue Note, one for Bethlehem), none of which sold well; his music may have been at once too formalistic and too quirky for its time. He had a playful style, not unlike Thelonious Monk's, who was a friend and contemporary, though Nichols' sense of structure and harmony was... Read More

The obi says the Adderley/Evans "reunion" was "Cannonball"'s idea, something I didn't know when I picked up a Japanese repress for $3.98 at Record Surplus back in the mid-80s during the era of the great "vinyl record replacement dump"—and what a great time it was for those who recognized the CD folly for what it was!The cover shot doesn't have Julian appearing all that happy posing with his horn in front of some art that... Read More

If the task is to compare five releases of an album, which it is here, at least it should be an album worth repeated listenings, and of course Ballads is, though it's not up there with Coltrane's greatest recorded achievements. It can't be beat as a Coltrane intro record for non-jazz fans who need the melody. For the rest of us, while Coltrane's playing is straight ahead and wonderfully lyrical, McCoy Tyner center stage wraps his fingers around the... Read More

Trio Fascination: Edition One—a 1997 piano-less trio session, newly mastered on two LPs as part of Blue Note’s Tone Poet series—is a magical album. First, the trio itself—Joe Lovano on various reeds, Dave Holland on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—was a one-time-only combo, the likes of which remains nearly unparalleled. Second, the music (all but one track composed by Lovano) is original, almost inexplainable, yet very accessible. Finally, the fact that this reissue... Read More

In his annotation for this 1969 Milestone release, Down Beat writer Alan Heineman makes a good case for why back then (and perhaps even now), the late Joe Henderson, whose sound, both sweet and gruff is instantly recognizable, was an underrated tenor saxophonist. No matter the reasons then, today he's far better appreciated as a leader and sideman on Blue Note albums (leader on five including Inner Urge, sideman on more than two dozen including Larry Young's... Read More

The story behind this "forgotten" release and re-release is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the music, which is a refreshing turn in a world of "undiscovered gems" that often turn out to be undiscovered for good reasons and not gems at all. Downbeat critic Ira Gitler gave Matador a well-deserved very positive review when it was first released in 1963 (Dorham was also for a time late in his life a Downbeat critic). Two things... Read More

In a recently published New York Times piece titled "The Worst Masterpiece: 'Rhapsody In Blue at 100" the pianist/composer Ethan Iverson pilloried the popular Gershwin piece as "naïve and corny"—and those were among the nicer things he wrote about it. The online comments are worth reading but one published letter is wroth quoting here: "By calling the work 'the best cheesecake,' Mr. Iverson aligns himself with a long line of... Read More

Andrew Hill was one of the most remarkable jazz pianist-composers, a rare true original. His music is ripe with strange intervals, dissonant harmonies, and off-centered rhythms, yet the resulting sounds are riveting, often gorgeous. Imagine the lush tonal colors of Gil Evans, combined with the fierce cadences of Mingus and the jagged precision of Monk, and you get some idea of his music’s odd pleasures. Hill led a dozen recording sessions for Blue Note in the... Read More

While Rhino's "High Fidelity" series lacks a clearly identifiable direction or purpose—it seems to meander around the catalog without regard to time, place or purpose—there's one consistent strategy: each two record release has a rock title and a jazz title. Credit Rhino with chance-taking guts this round. Marquee Moon isn't exactly mainstream rock (though the reissue gives it that sound), and Ornette Coleman's music scares a lot of... Read More

The three Heath brothers, Jimmy, Percy and Albert formed their short-lived group in 1975 a year after The Modern Jazz Quartet gave its "final" performance at Carnegie Hall, November, 1974. Of course like many groups and solo artists, it wasn't really the MJQ's final performance and the group had been performing its "farewell" tour around the country all year, but for the time being following the Carnegie Hall appearance bassist Percy... Read More

That Swing Thing! by The Terry Gibbs Quartet (Verve V6-8447) released in 1961 was the record that got me on the vibes bandwagon. I bought it that year at E.J. Korvette's in Douglaston, N.Y. of the Long Island Expressway. I was too young to drive of course, so probably was taken there by my mother or sister. It's also where I heard for the first time Bobby Timmons' "Moanin'"— over a pair of Korvettes' XAM "housebrand"... Read More

Nat Hentoff's notes get directly to how this musical experiment might have easily gone awry: the unflappable, cerebral MJQ vibraphonist Milt Jackson meets Peterson's "abundant" style. Jackson never broke a sweat on stage, Peterson probably would have had he played the Arctic circle.Yet Jackson and The Oscar Peterson Trio seem made for each other on this musically satisfying, sonically enjoyable set. I've been listening to the original pretty... Read More

Phineas Newborn Jr. was one of the greatest jazz pianists, possessing an astonishing technical ability, a deep bluesy swing, and a complete mastery of jazz harmony. Pianist George Wein wrote, “the only pianist who has as great or greater command of the piano is Art Tatum.” Gene Harris, pianist of the Three Sounds, told Downbeat that Newborn was “…the greatest pianist playing today. In every respect, he is tremendous.” Teddy Wilson and Ray Bryant said his technique was... Read More

This past summer, I raved in this space about Craft Recordings’ vinyl reissue of the Bill Evans trio’s 1961 classic Waltz for Debby, hailing it as the best-sounding of all the album’s many pressings. Now Craft has released an LP of the companion recording, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, as, once again, part of the label's Original Jazz Classics series. It too is a great album, and the Craft reissue is very much worth getting; but this time around, comparisons... Read More

The Miles Davis Sextet was in San Francisco and had off the night of June 25th, 1962. Wes Montgomery was in town and with the rhythm section of Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, plus tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, played to a full house at Tsubo in Berkeley, California.The great recording engineer Wally Heider set up his gear in a storeroom behind the club, which, thanks to newspaper articles and word-of-mouth, overflowed with fans anxious to witness the... Read More