Jazz Today

By Will Layman

Is there Virtue in Virtuosity?

[22.Oct.09] :. Two recent releases by leading saxophonists Chris Potter and James Carter raise the question of the utility—or the misuses—of virtuosity in jazz.
 

Jazz Cellist Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’

[16.Sep.09] :. Peggy Lee—the cellist, not the late singer—is nevertheless all about singing of a sort. She talks to PopMatters about creativity and collaboration in the beautiful city of Vancouver.
 

Hip-notized by a Male Billie Holiday

[20.Aug.09] :. Discovering the first collection of duets between popular singer Tony Bennett and jazz pianist Bill Evans popped my top and buttered my bread.
 

Jennifer Lee: The Bay Area Diana Krall

[22.Jul.09] :. Jennifer Lee is not the typical, seductive jazz singer in a little black dress, holding a martini and giving you a late night wink. But she is a heck of a singer and musician, and she's ready to be heard.
 

Great Vibrations: An Interview with Gary Burton

[11.Jun.09] :. Our jazz critic talks to Gary Burton about his reunion with Pat Metheny, about starting a "gentle" jazz-rock group, and that no one seems to know what a "vibraphone" really is.
 

Some Sing with Swing

[15.May.09] :. With spring comes a rush of jazz vocalists and some of them can actually sing. Others ... not so much.
 

Long Live Blossom Dearie

[10.Apr.09] :. Blossom's music exuded a sparkling kind of elegance and quick wit. Hers was the kind of jazz you could imagine in the really good Woody Allen movies. She was the Dorothy Parker of jazz.
 

Songlines: Small Is Beautiful

[19.Mar.09] :. Songlines has its finger on the pulse of the most important improvised music being made in North America these days.
 

Ravi Coltrane: The Son Also Rises

[19.Feb.09] :. Tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane manages to look backward without seeming stale, and manages to deflect his sound off of his father's without either outright rejection or pale imitation.
 

Middleman: Joshua Redman and Jazz’s Vanishing Division

[23.Jan.09] :. "The position of not taking a side has endured." Joshua Redman talks about the hoary division between tradition and innovation, the spatial approach to doubled rhythm sections, and jazz's academic antidote.
 

No Piano No Problem

[18.Dec.08] :. Two new albums by piano-less quartets offer big doses of fun -- urgent rhythms, slabs of blues feeling, melody and invention with hardly any limit -- but also provide thrill-rides of surprise.
 

R.I.P. Smooth Jazz, Round Two

[6.Nov.08] :. Smooth Jazz truly is the music of the gesture. It is music of the pose. It is music -- maybe particularly when it is made by a skillful musician -- that hints at real music without being real music.
 

Selling the Melody

[9.Oct.08] :. From the lips of Melody Gardot -- heard in her swinging Cole Porter for an automobile -- there's another tentacle of jazz pushing forward, finding its way into our ears.
 

Looking Back at Brubeck

[21.Aug.08] :. Dave Brubeck has been incredibly popular, neither simplistic nor crass, yet critics have never much liked his music. What if you listen to him -- to his long career -- with fresh ears?
 

Double Standards

[17.Jul.08] :. What does it say about our time and place that our two boldest -- maybe best -- jazz singers, Patricia Barber and Cassandra Wilson, are returning to singing standards again?
 

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

[27.Jun.08] :. Even today there are distinctive characteristics to American and European jazz styles. Which strain of music is most forward-looking? Which suggests the most promising vanguard for a music that seems to lose listeners even as its creativity expands?
 

Tangled Up in Blue Note

[29.May.08] :. "Blue Note" means there's a certain sound to a record, a style that is tight and sharp and funky but also adventurous. If jazz is music to shout about, Blue Note records may be the most shout-worthy of all time.
 

R.I.P. Smooth Jazz, 1985-2008?

[17.Apr.08] :. With two of the US' major "smooth jazz" radio stations defunct to the fickleness of format change, the time to mourn the cheesy sub-genre is now. But what made Smooth Jazz not really jazz at all?
 

The Gap: Charles Lloyd

[11.Mar.08] :. Saxophonist Charles Lloyd enjoyed periods of critical acclaim, popular celebration, eccentric withdrawal, and general trivialization. He was easy to ignore if you came of jazz fan age after 1970, and that's a shame.
 

The Gap: Bix Beiderbecke

[31.Jan.08] :. It's never too late to get hip to a good thing. I've finally opened my ears to '20s-era Bix Biederbecke.
 

The Gap: Paul Bley

[3.Jan.08] :. Paul Bley seems to be that rare jazz musician who has made a romance with the avant-garde seem easy on the ears.
 

A Laughing Dilemma, Revealed

[15.Nov.07] :. Jazz and its fans have grown all too serious. The genre could use a clown prince or two.
 

Bass Reflections

[17.Oct.07] :. Recently, two most idiosyncratic jazz bass players, Miroslav Vitous and Eberhard Weber, released riveting, odd, ambitious recordings, suggesting the importance of the bass tradition to the larger history of the music.
 

Swept off My Feet by “Newcomer” James Carney

[20.Sep.07] :. Current musicians like Brad Mehldau or Greg Osby are the equivalents of Albert Pujols or Mariano Rivera: future legends that walk among us today. Now you're on notice: James Carney may just be a master in the making.
 

A Critic’s Grab-Bag

[10.Aug.07] :. The most rewarding work as a critic is not in evaluating the flow of big menu items from established artists, but in sampling the little dishes that come along -- like this quartet of obscure, interesting stuff from 2007's first half.
 

Playing Pop in the Jazz/Soul Shadow

[22.May.07] :. Layman shares Thai food with the band, and discusses the wonderfully uncategorizable music of The Jen Chapin Trio.
 

The Little Label That Could: An Interview With Cryptogramophone’s Jeff Gauthier

[13.Apr.07] :. "I want every album I produce to take the listener on a journey, perhaps to places they've never been before." Cryptogramophone Records founder Gauthier talks L.A. jazz, musical community, and embracing change.
 

Celebrating John Coltrane, Personally

[9.Mar.07] :. Spurred on by a couple of anniversaries, a new podcast "Traneumentary", and plenty of memory, Layman reflects on the music and meaning of John Coltrane.
 

How an Unremarkably Wonderful Work Is the Most Successful Jazz Album, Ever

[21.Dec.06] :. How can it be, in fact, that Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas is perhaps the only universally adored record in jazz history -- the Sgt. Pepper's of improvised music?
 

A Reluctant ‘Jazz’ Hero: An Interview with Trumpeter, Composer, and Arranger Steven Bernstein

[2.Nov.06] :. The prolific trumpeter talks shirking musical definitions, finding challenging middle ground between 'fake jazz' and 'real musicianship', touring with They Might Be Giants, and turning down Jay-Z.