CD Reviews on projects by Jazz artists
Jorge Perez-Albela – (featuring Sissy Castrogiovanni) The Time Is Now Self-released Back on Mother’s Day we brought you the wonderful album, Terra, from jazz and world music vocalist Sissy Castrogiovanni. Now it’s her husband’s turn. The Time Is Now is the debut for drummer, percussionist, educator, and now band leader Jorge Perez-Albela. Like his spouse’s […]
Event Horizon Jazz Quartet Event Horizon GRB Event Horizon Jazz Quartet is a Chicago-based group of Midwestern musicians, all educators as well, making their debut. The principal composers are reedman Jim Kaczmarek and keyboardist Scott Mertens, who between them penned the 11 originals. Kaczmarek likes to call their unit a collective as bassist Donn DeSanto […]
Tom Ranier This Way Self-released It would be difficult to find a more versatile musician than the multi-instrumentalist Tom Ranier. The veteran studio musician has performed in high profile events such as the Grammys, Oscars, Emmys, and Golden Gloves and has performed with many high profile jazz and pop stars. These activities keep him so […]
Dylan Jack Quartet The Tale of the Twelve-Foot Man Creative Nation Music Last October on these pages we covered the inventive set of covers from the duo, guitarist Eric Hofbrauer and drummer Dylan Jack, entitled Remains of Echoes which has them addressing not only jazz but rock. Any group that puts Miles and Ornette Coleman […]
Antonio Adolfo BruMa: Celebrating Milton Nascimento AAM Music Last year on these pages we brought you Antonio Adolfo, pianist/composer/arranger, one the founders of Brazilian jazz from the early ‘60s, and his Samba Jazz Alley, a tribute to early bossa nova before it became hugely popular globally. Adolfo is a multi-Latin Grammy winner and Grammy nominee […]
Dave Bryant Night Visitors SE There are plenty of free jazz, improvisational ensembles that are doing great explorative work yet some, at least for many listeners, are just not quite accessible enough. By now, if you’ve gotten this far, you know that we’ve covered plenty of free, avant-garde material, but you may not realize that […]
Azat Bayazitov The Doors Are Open Rainy Days We have touted the merits of the St. Petersburg, Russia-based Rainy Days label more than once on these pages. They consistently bring us great jazz releases. The Doors Are Open is a quintet offering from tenor saxophonist Azat Bayazitov, the follow-up to his debut If You Still […]
Swingadelic Bluesville Zoho The content on this site skews towards blues so it’s more than fitting we offer up Swingadelic’s Bluesville. The blues purists will call it jazz. The jazz folks may call it blues. Surely this is a big band that often plays at Swing 46, a dinner/dance venue in NYC’s Broadway theater district […]
Dave Douglas & Elan Mehler If There Are Mountains Newvelle Records Ostensibly this is an album review, but it is also vehicle to inform you about the special treasure, Newvelle Records. So, we’ll keep you in a bit of suspense by describing the album first. Label co-founder Elan Mehler is also a pianist, who for […]
Madre Vaca Winterreise Madre Vaca Seeing the name of Austrian composer Franz Shubert on the cover led me to believe this was some slight twist on classical music by jazz musicians. (and not the kind of music we would cover on these pages). Obviously, I was wrong. As the album unfolded it was stirring modern […]
