By: Edward Blanco One of the top-tier saxophonists of our time, Bob Sheppard is not just one of the finest musicians in Los Angeles; he is a jazz luminary with an international reputation. Close Your Eyes not only brings to the fore Sheppard’s talents as a composer and arranger, but …
Glenn Astarita With her impressive 2011 debut as a leader “Devil’s Dress” (TOAP Music) and involvement in various European projects, highly-educated trumpeter Susana Santos Silva looms as a nascent voice within progressive-jazz circles. Here, the Portuguese artist works within the trio format. It’s a democratic engagement modeled on structure and …
by LARRY RENI THOMAS Jazz is a term that was given to American classical music around 1900, by the New Orleans aristocrats who after visiting the whorehouses and hearing the black musicians play the sounds of freedom, sought to deny it its dignity when they realized that they couldn’t play …
Kansas City musicians riff on proposed label for a favorite genre. Special to The Star By BILL BROWNLEE Not a single note was played in the creation of the most consequential jazz-related story of last year. A furious torrent of incendiary blog posts and tweets by musician Nicholas Payton is …
“No music is my music. It’s everybody’s who can feel it. You’re here… well, if there’s music, you feel it–then it’s yours too. You got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It’s that way with music too.” “Jazz isn’t just me. It isn’t just any one person …
Henceforth, please refer to the genre as “Black American Music.” By Victor Fiorillo Last Thursday, while I rocked out in Greenwich Village to the white-people music known as Van Halen, Philadelphia-based pianist Orrin Evans–recipient of the $60,000 Pew Fellowship for the Arts–was a quick ride up the A-C-E in Hell’s …
2nd – 7th May May 2012 sees the return of the ever-popular and ground-breaking Cheltenham Jazz Festival, one of the country’s most celebrated musical events and an absolute highlight of the arts calendar for spring this year. Always a hit with both audiences and artists, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival prides …
by Bill Donaldson Unusual, yes. Unknown, no. Lorraine Feather’s most recent album, Tales of the Unusual, with full-blown oddness takes listeners even deeper into spookiness than her previous ones suggested. Feather’s interests, which are explored endlessly in movies and novels but not so much in music, involve those known but …
Glenn Astarita These celebrated musicians offset the conventional or perhaps anticipated stylizations of jazz piano trio fare by personalizing, reconfiguring, and injecting a host of enchanting events into the grand schema. As the story goes, the premise for these compositions are based on the exchanges the musicians had with master …
IAN MARTIN BARGH (pianist) was born on January 8, 1935 in Prestwick, Scotland and passed away January 1, 2012. By the age of 17, he was playing classical piano and working with jazz groups and dance bands all over the Midlands, England and Scotland until 1957. It was then he …
By John Stevenson In a year of countless remarkable recordings, Radio Jumbo will be remembered as one of 2011’s most distinctive jazz recordings. London is known for its staggering array of cultures and genres of music. However, accomplished London-based, Dominican-born guitarist, Cameron Pierre, has certainly helped to place the French …
Glenn Astarita American trumpeter Russ Johnson and Swiss saxophonist Co Streiff certainly abide by the press release statements, indicating the musicians’ cross-cultural inferences and recurring use of melody within the progressive-jazz and improvisational realm. Recorded live, sans the final piece “Confession,” the quartet toggles between feathery light grooves and pulsating …
