Tuesday, January 31 2012
Jazz Triumphs of 2011 That Only a Fool Could Miss
Critics can be fools, particularly in their own eyes. Here are five jazz discs from 2011 that should have been on my top ten list but slipped from view, then. It's not too late to dig them.
Tuesday, January 10 2012
Remembering Paul Motian: The Drummer Who Quietly Shook Things Up
It may seem odd to call a drummer “quiet”, but Paul Motian was Mr. Subtle. From the start of his career until the last months of his life, he was shaking things up. Quietly. Brilliantly.
Tuesday, November 22 2011
Sympathetic Vibrations
There's a renaissance for the vibraphone in jazz, even though many folks don't even know this instrument exists.
Monday, September 19 2011
A ‘Dear John’ Letter to Jazz: To Hell with Loving You
Jazz is unpopular, pretentious, sexist, a window-dressing for those seeking "class", and more. Why shouldn't I give up loving it?
Monday, August 22 2011
The Off-Handed Cool of Michael Franks
Is he just a "smooth jazz" hack? Or is Michael Franks a real jazz singer whose best work from the '70s remains a viable way to sing today?
Monday, July 11 2011
Does ‘Treme’ Hate Modern Jazz?
Watching Treme, one might get the impression that modern jazz is the soundtrack for the soulless, and therefore has no place in New Orleans, pre- or post Hurricane Katrina.
Thursday, June 9 2011
Sorry, Parents of All Those Little Prodigies Out There, Jazz Is Not for Amateurs
Don’t you think that a 14-year-old singing “My man don’t love me, treats me awful mean” is kind of screwy?
Tuesday, May 17 2011
Jane Ira Bloom’s Sinuous Soprano
It's embarrassing that jazz is so sexist. Jane Ira Bloom, however, breaks the mold, playing with feminine style but not a hint of schmaltz.
Thursday, April 14 2011
An Infectious Case of Jazz Fanaticism
What happens when you take two friends who know little about jazz to a club for a night of totally spontaneous "eek-onk" music? The results can be surprising.
Monday, March 7 2011
The Blessing and the Curse of the Grammys
Bieber Fever raged when Esperanza Spalding bumped the boy aside to claim the 2011 Grammys Best New Artist award, but do jazz fans really give a damn about the Grammys?
Wednesday, February 16 2011
Clean Feed Records and Mary Halvorson: Promises of Good Things to Come in Jazz
The promise of great jazz for the next year, or ten, was struck in 2010 by guitarist Mary Halvorson and Clean Feed Records.
Monday, January 3 2011
Modern Guitar Stripped Bare: An Interview with Rez Abbasi
The Pakistani-American jazz guitarist reflects on playing beyond cliché, playing acoustic, finding unity, and making a living.
Wednesday, December 1 2010
Rebirth in the Tremé: New Orleans Ascendent
When the band broke into the repetitive horn line of “Hurricane”, the Tipitina’s crowd went utterly and gloriously berserk, joining the band in screaming “Heeeay!” after certain particularly ripping runs.
Tuesday, October 26 2010
Cedar Walton and Jazz for the ‘Young and Foolish’
The journey into the history of jazz can be a serious thrill ride. Still young, sometimes still foolish, the old stuff happens to remain seriously exciting if you just find the right time and place to listen.
Friday, October 1 2010
Steve Coleman: Saxophone Funkmaster, Musical Philosopher, Shaman, Baffler
If Steve Coleman didn't turn out to be the lovechild of James Brown and Charlie Parker that I first thought he was, then he ultimately turned into someone more interesting, if less fun.
Monday, August 9 2010
Ten Reasons to Love Jason Moran
With his new recording Ten, pianist Jason Moran marks a decade of playing by his great Bandwagon trio. Listeners should count themselves lucky.
Tuesday, June 29 2010
Jazz Ain’t Dead, But Charlie Parker Is—So Let’s Move On, Shall We?
If Charlie Parker rose from the dead I have no doubt that he'd cheer on the hip hop orchestras and Bugge Wesseltoft's piano thumping electronica. He would definitely be a fan of Esperanza Spalding.
Wednesday, June 2 2010
Nikki Yanofsky: Forever Young
The 16-year-old Canadian singer Nikki Yanofsky is taking the jazz world by storm. She wants to be more than just a phenom or a jazz singer. Has she got what it takes?
Thursday, April 22 2010
It’s Not Who You Know, It’s What You Do with Who You Know
Bassist and composer Dave Holland has been making adventurous, melodic jazz for 40 years with the likes of Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton, Stan Getz, Pat Metheny and many others.
Wednesday, March 17 2010
The Nonchalant Brilliance of John Pizzarelli, Jr.
John Pizzarelli is cool enough to be modern but hot enough to be 'old' -- and he knows what he's doing with that voice, even if he's no Sinatra.
Thursday, February 18 2010
Celluloid Dreams: How to Film a Melody
How do you paint a picture of a melody? How do you tell a story about a D-major-7 chord or a C-minor-melodic scale? How do you make a film about harmonic innovation or the division of a measure into overlapping polyrhythms?
Tuesday, January 12 2010
Overlooked Jazz Gems of 2009
The year 2009 was a such a good one for jazz that even some music that had been neglected stands out as stellar. Layman catches up with music he never should have missed.
Wednesday, December 16 2009
Reviewing Jazz of 2009: Wherefore Art Thou, Blue Note?
The best jazz of 2009 did not come, even a little bit, from the storied "major labels" of jazz. What happened to Blue Note and Verve this year?
Tuesday, November 24 2009
Spinach and Broccoli Music: An Interview with Composer and Drummer John Hollenbeck
John Hollenbeck recombines the familiar in compositions that are startlingly new. His new Eternal Interlude is among the best jazz of 2009. Here, he explains his quirky, fresh methods.
Thursday, October 22 2009
Is there Virtue in Virtuosity?
Two recent releases by leading saxophonists Chris Potter and James Carter raise the question of the utility—or the misuses—of virtuosity in jazz.
Wednesday, September 16 2009
Jazz Cellist Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’
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.
Thursday, August 20 2009
Hip-notized by a Male Billie Holiday
Discovering the first collection of duets between popular singer Tony Bennett and jazz pianist Bill Evans popped my top and buttered my bread.
Wednesday, July 22 2009
Jennifer Lee: The Bay Area Diana Krall
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.
Thursday, June 11 2009
Great Vibrations: An Interview with Gary Burton
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.
Friday, May 15 2009
Some Sing with Swing
With spring comes a rush of jazz vocalists and some of them can actually sing. Others ... not so much.
Friday, April 10 2009
Long Live Blossom Dearie
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.
Thursday, March 19 2009
Songlines: Small Is Beautiful
Songlines has its finger on the pulse of the most important improvised music being made in North America these days.
Thursday, February 19 2009
Ravi Coltrane: The Son Also Rises
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.
Friday, January 23 2009
Middleman: Joshua Redman and Jazz’s Vanishing Division
"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.
Thursday, December 18 2008
No Piano No Problem
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.
Thursday, November 6 2008
R.I.P. Smooth Jazz, Round Two
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.
Thursday, October 9 2008
Selling the Melody
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.
Thursday, August 21 2008
Looking Back at Brubeck
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?
Thursday, July 17 2008
Double Standards
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?
Friday, June 27 2008
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
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?
Thursday, May 29 2008
Tangled Up in Blue Note
"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.
Thursday, April 17 2008
R.I.P. Smooth Jazz, 1985-2008?
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?
Tuesday, March 11 2008
The Gap: Charles Lloyd
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.
Thursday, January 31 2008
The Gap: Bix Beiderbecke
It's never too late to get hip to a good thing. I've finally opened my ears to '20s-era Bix Biederbecke.
Thursday, January 3 2008
The Gap: Paul Bley
Paul Bley seems to be that rare jazz musician who has made a romance with the avant-garde seem easy on the ears.
Thursday, November 15 2007
A Laughing Dilemma, Revealed
Jazz and its fans have grown all too serious. The genre could use a clown prince or two.
Wednesday, October 17 2007
Bass Reflections
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.
Thursday, September 20 2007
Swept off My Feet by “Newcomer” James Carney
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.
Friday, August 10 2007
A Critic’s Grab-Bag
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.
Tuesday, May 22 2007
Playing Pop in the Jazz/Soul Shadow
Layman shares Thai food with the band, and discusses the wonderfully uncategorizable music of The Jen Chapin Trio.
Friday, April 13 2007
The Little Label That Could: An Interview With Cryptogramophone’s Jeff Gauthier
"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.
Friday, March 9 2007
Celebrating John Coltrane, Personally
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.
Thursday, December 21 2006
How an Unremarkably Wonderful Work Is the Most Successful Jazz Album, Ever
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?
Thursday, November 2 2006
A Reluctant ‘Jazz’ Hero: An Interview with Trumpeter, Composer, and Arranger Steven Bernstein
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.
