Cold Jazz

For All We Know

2012-09-11T11:26:00.000-04:00

As I delve into the world of freelance writing, I'll be taking an indefinite break from this blog. I owe a lot to Cold Jazz -- we've been through so much together. But as you've probably noticed, I haven't really written anything of substance here since, I'd say, last November, when I mused about Christmas songs and the Jews who wrote them.

I have another homepage now, where I'll be posting links to my writing -- which may or may not have to do with jazz (though a lot of it will, I imagine). If you'd like to get in touch, my email is matthewkassel88@gmail.com.

I'll leave you with Dinah Washington singing "For All We Know," a rendition I hadn't heard of until I read a lovely tribute to the late art critic Robert Hughes by Leon Wieseltier.

I hope we meet again.

Joe Alterman

2012-07-16T11:45:00.002-04:00

My review of a new album by the pianist Joe Alterman was just published in The Forward.

Here's the first bit:

The pianist Joe Alterman is only 23 years old, but on his new album, “Give Me The Simple Life,” he’s managed to round up an impressive array of jazz veterans to play by his side. Houston Person, the soulful tenor saxophonist, joins in on four tracks while bassist James Cammack and drummer Herlin Riley — who both play in Ahmad Jamal’s stellar trio — accompany Alterman throughout.

It’s a lovely record, full of romantic ballads and medium swing numbers — the kinds of standards that are the sine qua non of a traditional piano trio outing like this one.

Read the rest here.

Oliver Jones

2012-07-12T22:31:00.002-04:00

Last week, I went to Montreal to write about the magnificent pianist Oliver Jones for NPR. He performed at the jazz festival there, and I got the chance to speak with him a couple of days before his show. You can read the story I wrote here.

Bruce Barth

2012-06-27T13:24:00.005-04:00

My review of Bruce Barth's new album, "Three Things of Beauty," was just published in The New York City Jazz Record.

Here's the first half:

The pianist Bruce Barth wrote six of the ten songs featured on his new album, including the title track, a dream-like waltz more noteworthy for its long, lyrical, cascading solos than its melody. Most of the tracks on this album are like that, shaped by the drama of a soloist’s decisions. In this case, Barth and the vibraphonist Steve Nelson make some really good ones.

They’re backed by bassist Ben Street and drummer Dana Hall, who put down sure, swinging rhythms. The music is relatively straightahead, but it doesn’t feel perfunctory nor do the musicians submit to the vice of jazz jam egalitarianism. This means that Nelson and Barth act as arbiters, in the forefront. (Street takes two short solos by this reviewer’s count while Hall is featured once toward the end of the second track, “Final Push”, a Barth original.)

Read the rest here (page 18).

Dr. Lonnie Smith

2012-06-26T21:33:00.001-04:00

I wrote a listing! It’s appearing in the July issue of Hot House Jazz magazine, alerting readers to the organist Dr. Lonnie Smith’s upcoming run at the Jazz Standard.

You can read half of it here, if you’d like:

The organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, a living testament to the durability of the soul jazz tradition, turns 70 this month. Dr. Smith comes from Buffalo, a jazz organ town, and he has never abandoned his roots. He is a commanding improviser and a master of dynamics on his hulking B-3, digging deep into simmering ballads with feline grace or coming at you with a gritty, gutbucket phrase on a scorching funk number.

Dr. Smith is performing at the Jazz Standard on July 3 and 5-8.

Béla Fleck and Marcus Roberts

2012-05-23T20:56:00.000-04:00

Béla Fleck, on banjo, with Marcus Roberts

The New York City Jazz Record just published my review of a new album by the Marcus Roberts Trio, with Béla Fleck, called "Across the Imaginary Divide."

Here's the first two paragraphs.

As much as jazz is about self-indulgence - consider all the soloing - it’s also very much about wise restraint. The banjoist Béla Fleck embodies those two poles: he’s a virtuoso but he seems to know when to step back, to let some space into the music. This is an important attribute for a banjoist who immerses himself in jazz settings. In "Across the Imaginary Divide" Fleck joins the Marcus Roberts Trio and he adapts well, which is to say the patterns he picks out on his instrument do not make the music too busy.

The excellent pianist Roberts - who got his start playing with Wynton Marsalis in the mid ‘80s - is another sort of virtuoso: of awkwardly refined expression. (You can trace his style back to Ahmad Jamal and Thelonious Monk and the stride pianist James P. Johnson.) How Roberts and Fleck navigate their own differences is what makes this album interesting.

Read the whole thing here, on page 16.

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood

2012-04-29T22:06:00.001-04:00

John Scofield

A review I did of an album by Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood was just published in The New York City Jazz Record. It's a live recording, called "In Case The World Changes Its Mind."

Here's some of the review:

In 1998, guitarist John Scofield released the album "A Go Go," which he recorded with Medeski Martin & Wood (MMW). It grooved hard, skirting jazz and blues and rock and funk. It wasn’t until eight years later that the musicians put out another album, "Out Louder," under the name of Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood. It didn’t groove as hard as the first but when the band took the songs from both albums on the road in 2006, the differences between the two didn’t really matter.

MMW, which could be called a ‘jazz trio’, usually acts more like a jam band live and it shows on "In Case The World Changes Its Mind," a collection of recordings from that 2006 tour. The tracks go as long as about 13 minutes, there’s a lot of extended noodling, ideas take shape slowly. Neither bad nor good, you might do better with studio takes if you haven’t heard them yet.

Read the rest here (page 18).

Wes Montgomery

2012-03-31T21:00:00.002-04:00

My review of "Echoes of Indiana Avenue," an album of recently unearthed Wes Montgomery recordings, was just published in The New York City Jazz Record.

The first two paragraphs:

These nine tracks, the earliest known recordings of Wes Montgomery as a leader, don’t tell you much that you didn’t already know about the guitarist. It’s not surprising that Montgomery, who died in 1968, was about as well-formed as a soloist, accompanist and interpreter of melody as he was on recording dates that took place several years after these.

We’re told in the liner notes to "Echoes of Indiana Avenue" that the tracks are from 1957 and 1958, though that can’t be verified; it’s not known who made the recordings. Producer Michael Cuscuna acquired them in 2008 from guitarist Jim Greeninger, who had them digitized in 1990 and that’s as far back as the lineage goes. But educated guesses reveal that most of the recordings took place in clubs in Indianapolis, Montgomery’s home turf. We’ve never heard him in this environment before.

Read the whole thing here.

Shalom.

The Value of Chaos

2012-03-20T22:53:00.004-04:00

Aaron Novik's "Secrets of Secrets"

The Jewish Daily Forward just published my review of clarinetist Aaron Novik's new album, "Secrets of Secrets."

Here's the opening chunk:

“Secrets of Secrets,” a new album by clarinetist Aaron Novik, has an air of doom about it.

The album takes its name and inspiration from a five-book series written by the Jewish mystic Rabbi Eleazar Rokeach, who lived in Worms and in 1196 witnessed crusaders slaughter his wife and children.

This isn’t the first time Novik has incorporated written sources into his music. “Floating World Vol. 1,” released last year, paid tribute to the poetry of fringe artists of the Mission District area in San Francisco, where Novik is based.

But “Secrets of Secrets,” composed of five tracks all longer than 11 minutes, is more abstruse than that. The music can be hard to listen to: tense and muddy and violent and powerful.

You can read the rest here if you'd like.

Edward Simon

2012-02-25T11:19:00.002-05:00

Edward Simon

The New York City Jazz Record just published my review of "Danny Boy," pianist Edward Simon's latest album.

Here's the opening half:

Venezuelan pianist Edward Simon writes on the inside flap of Danny Boy that he had never played Irish music before this recording. He explains that the “simplicity and beauty” of the music “resonated deep within” him. With that in mind, it is a shame that only the first and last pieces - the title track and “She Moved Through The Fair” - are Irish songs, because they are some of the loveliest on the album.

Simon opens the title track playing, slowly and pensively, with bassist Philip Donkin. Until drummer Stephen Keogh enters eight or so bars in and this becomes a straight-up piano trio album, the song brings to mind Hank Jones and Charlie Haden’s wonderful duo recording of hymns and folk songs, Steal Away. Based on that opening snippet, you get the sense that this could have been a different album - a more focused one.

Read the whole thing here.

The next review I'm writing for the paper will be of "Echoes of Indiana Avenue," a recently unearthed Wes Montgomery record. Haven't received it in the mail yet, but I look forward to listening.

Jazz Photography

2012-02-18T19:08:00.003-05:00

Louis Armstrong, Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., ca. Apr. 1947

Over at Business Insider, you'll find a little slide show I put together which showcases the jazz photographs of the great William P. Gottlieb. All 1,600 of his photos are now being featured on Flickr, courtesy of The Library of Congress.

If you haven't done so already, you should check them out. Most of the images that you have in your head of jazz in the late '30s through to the late '40s were probably taken by Gottlieb. As I say in the introduction to the slide show, jazz, and jazz photography, would not be the same without him.

The night before I wrote that introduction, I happened to have started Geoff Dyer's great book, "But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz." In an introductory section to the book, called "A Note on Photographs," Dyer writes, toward the end: "The best jazz photographs are those saturated in the sound of their subject." I loved that quote, even if it's not true.

So much so that I put it into my introduction.

Hendrik Meurkens

2012-01-27T20:00:00.001-05:00

Hendrik Meurkens

The New York City Jazz Record just published my review of Hendrik Meurkens's new CD, "Live at Bird's Eye." Go to nycjazzrecord.com and download the paper to read it. If you live in New York, you can pick up the paper at basically any jazz club in the city.

Here's the opening paragraph:

Hendrik Meurkens, the German-born harmonica and vibraphone player, has an affinity for Brazilian music, samba and bossa nova particularly. He spent some years in Rio de Janeiro in the early ‘80s playing gigs around the city and honing his craft. His latest album is an assemblage of tracks played by his Samba Jazz Quartet - Misha Tsiganov (piano), Gustavo Amarante (bass) and Adriano Santos (drums) - and recorded, from two different nights (oddly about two years apart), at the Bird’s Eye Jazz Club in Basel, Switzerland.

The next CD I'm reviewing is "Danny Boy," by the Venezuelan pianist Edward Simon. It just came in the mail today. I listened to the opening track before I wrote this post and found it quite lovely.

Chucho Valdés

2012-01-20T21:56:00.015-05:00

Now that I live in New York, seeing live music is much less of an ordeal than it used to be. I went to Winter Jazzfest a couple of weeks ago, staying out until three a.m. one night. I took the subway straight home from the West Village. No NJ Transit, no car ride. It felt too easy. Tomorrow night, I'm going to Carnegie Hall to see Chucho Valdés perform with his septet, the Afro-Cuban Messengers.

Before I moved here from New Jersey, I was writing arts and entertainment previews for a local monthly paper called the Princeton Echo. For one preview, I was lucky enough to interview Mr. Valdés in anticipation of a concert he is giving tonight, at McCarter Theatre, in Princeton. I figured I'd rehash it here as it also pertains, in some ways, to tomorrow night's show. It was my first interview with a translator involved.

Piano Legend Offers a Little Taste of Cuba

The Cuban jazz musician Chucho Valdés is, by many accounts, one of the world’s greatest pianists.

Born in Havana in 1941, Valdés grew up amid the pulsating vibrancy of the Cuban popular music scene. His father, Bebo Valdés, a formidable pianist in his own right who helped develop the mambo, was the musical advisor to the Tropicana, Havana’s storied nightclub, throughout most of the 1950s.

Valdés, who turned 70 last October, cites the influence of many American jazz musicians and their styles: Duke Ellington attracted him first. After that came Art Tatum. Then Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano, McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor. The list goes on—including the staples of many developing jazz musicians.

For the first ten years after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Valdés explains, it was hard to get information about the music scene in the United States.

“We used to hear jazz on shortwave radio, the Voice of America ‘Jazz Hour,’ hosted by Willis Conover,” Valdés said in Spanish, through a translator, from Málaga, Spain, where he has lived for about a year. He moved from Havana to be closer to his father, now 93, who spends most of his time in Sweden but winters in the warm, Mediterranean city.

Listening to jazz on the radio, Valdés heard for the first time the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner.

“I would write out transcriptions of the music on paper for myself, so I could figure out what they were doing,” he said. He did this, by ear, for more than 10 years, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.

Valdés first came to the United States in 1978 for a performance at Carnegie Hall with the jazz-pop band Irakere. And in 2010, he toured the United States, for the first time since 2003, in the wake of looser travel restrictions and an important visit by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to Havana.

“I felt like I was floating in the air because of the first concert in New York after the years that I couldn’t come,” Valdés said of his most recent trip, adding: “The United States is the most important place to play jazz.”

This year, Valdés is returning to the American stage for another tour, which he will inaugurate with a performance by his septet, the Afro-Cuban Messengers, at McCarter Theatre on Jan. 20 at 8 p.m.

Valdés said he will be playing selections from his latest record, “Chucho’s Steps,” which won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album, along with new songs from a repertoire he is putting together for his next album.

The Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez will open the show, playing with his trio. Valdés knows the young musician from when he was a boy in Cuba, calling him “a great talent with a huge future.”

With the Afro-Cuban Messengers, Valdés combines elements of the music of his homeland—including intricate webs of percussion and rhythmic chanting—with some of the most accessible aspects of American jazz: the easy-swinging lilt of New Orleans polyphony, the funky trumpet-saxophone voicings of hard-bop.

And through his music, the Cuban pianist expresses himself with the seemingly indefatigable force and precision of a true virtuoso.

The article originally appeared here.

A New Jazz Club in New York

2012-01-14T12:34:00.005-05:00

A William P. Gottlieb photo of Nat King Cole

So I'm working as a lifestyle writer for a website called Business Insider right now. And jazz has to do with life, right? So I wrote this short article about a new jazz club that the owner of the Blue Note, Steve Bensusan, is proposing for the Meatpacking District. It sounds like a good cause.

Check it out here.

Joel Frahm Quartet: Live at Smalls

2011-12-28T22:22:00.011-05:00

My review of a new album by tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm was just published in The New York City Jazz Record. Check out the PDF version of the paper at nycjazzrecord.com if you're interested. The last time I saw Mr. Frahm, two summers ago at the Bar Next Door in the West Village, I was studying jazz criticism with Ben Ratliff. Quite a lot has happened since then. I am now living in New York--Long Island City, to be exact--and will start a job in digital journalism in the new year.

Mr. Frahm's new album was recorded live at Smalls, one of my favorite jazz clubs in New York City. I've only been there once--two summers ago, to see the stride pianist Mike Lipskin--but I remember it fondly. I hope to visit the club many more times in my new tenure as a New Yorker.

Here's the first paragraph of my review:

The black and white snapshots arrayed on the inside flap of "Live at Smalls," tenor saxist Joel Frahm’s latest recording, show the members of his quartet in the middle of a thought, with their eyes closed: guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel is reaching high up for a note on the neck of his hollow body; bassist Joe Martin hugs his instrument in closely, wearing a look of seeming elation; drummer Otis Brown III (unfortunately listed as a pianist) swings coolly on his ride cymbal. Then there’s Frahm, hunching his shoulders in tightly, brow furrowed, drawing the audience in with his focus. You wish you could have seen the show in color, especially at Smalls, that unpretentious basement hangout in the West Village. But this live recording is intimate enough.

My Judeo-Christmas Roots

2011-12-20T23:30:00.005-05:00

I promise, this is the last post (at least for the year) about the relationship between Judaism and Christmas. A blog post I wrote about my relationship with Christmas was just published on the website of Moment Magazine, and I figured I'd share it with you.

Here's the first two paragraphs:

Christmas doesn’t mean much to me anymore, though for the first ten years of my life, it was my favorite holiday. Pretty standard, even for a Jewish child, to be drawn in with eager spirit by that yuletide festivity. But you might wonder: why only ten years?

In my fourth year of elementary school, my parents decided that our family would stop celebrating Christmas, and that abrupt halt, to me, signaled the end of an era. Why were we, a secular Jewish family, celebrating this holiday in the first place? Well, as a child, my mom adored Christmas; she celebrated the holiday every year with her paternal grandmother. (My grandfather, her dad, converted to Judaism for my grandmother, a child of Depression-era Brownsville.)

Read the rest here.

A John Zorn Christmas

2011-12-19T17:08:00.015-05:00

A young Zorn, now 58

I reviewed John Zorn's first Christmas album, "A Dreamers Christmas," for the Arty Semite, a blog over at the Jewish Daily Forward. What wonderful music it is. John Zorn is as prolific as he is omnivorous, and this album is a testament to that.

Here's the first two paragraphs:

The CD case to John Zorn’s first Christmas record, "A Dreamers Christmas," comes as a sort of stocking. Reaching into the sleeve you’ll find, along with the CD, a sheet of stickers that could represent a new line of holiday-themed Giga Pets.

You might be tempted to over-think this album, with its cute and somewhat disturbing iconography, especially if you’ve come to expect music from Zorn more agitating than these lovely tracks. You shouldn’t. Zorn released this album through his own label, Tzadik, which puts out a steady stream of avant-garde recordings. And although he only served as producer and arranger here, this jazz album is as much Zorn’s brainchild as it is the Dreamers’, the band he assembled.

Read the rest here.

And listen to a rendition of "The Christmas Song," featuring Mike Patton, from the album:

Ralston Heights

2011-12-09T19:56:00.005-05:00

The Castle at Ralston Heights

This has nothing to do with jazz, but I'm proud of it, so I figured I'd share it with you. I recently wrote a story for the Hopewell Express about an old mansion in my hometown, Hopewell, NJ, that was once the capital of a strange health cult. Its figurehead was Webster Edgerly, a weird, paranoid man who formed his own obsessive-compulsive philosophy of racial purity in the late 1800s. He planned to put his beliefs into action on Ralston Heights, where the mansion sits. There have been stories about this guy circulating in my town for a long time. That's why I was happy to do the research and reporting necessary to put it all in perspective. Here are the first four paragraphs:

Small-town stories are often apocryphal, the stuff of popular myth. However, in the case of Webster Edgerly, a bigoted health reformer who moved to Hopewell in the late 1800s to establish a utopian community based on his own principles of hygiene and eugenics, the odd and disturbing stories surrounding him are mostly true.

Next to the Lindbergh House, probably the most well-known artifact of Hopewell’s parochial history is the Castle, across the street from the Highland Cemetery on Greenwood Avenue, up a long, gravel road, and tucked snugly away in a wooded clearing dappled with tall Japanese maples and ginkgo trees.

Most Hopewell residents are told that an eccentric white supremacist once lived there; that he wanted to create an exclusive, utopian community; that he failed, and his mansion—the Castle—is all that really remains. Those details are, indeed, accurate.

And today, the current residents of the mansion—a married couple seeking to foster community involvement—serve as an intriguing foil to the legacy of the bizarre man who once haunted the estate formerly known as Ralston Heights.

Read the rest here.

Dead Cat Bounce, Again

2011-12-04T20:39:00.005-05:00

Chance Episodes

I reviewed the Dead Cat Bounce album "Chance Episodes" for Exclaim! back in October, and I liked it a lot. So much so that I chose it as one of the best jazz albums of the year for Exclaim!'s "Improv & Avant-Garde 2011: 10 Favourites" list. (Note the Canadian English, which I find so charming!) I usually feel that I lack the knowledge to make an informed decision for these lists. But the jazz editor at the magazine told me to just go for it. So I did.

Steve Martin Interview

2011-11-30T09:07:00.002-05:00

Steve Martin

Well, he's not a jazz musician, but he does play the banjo. Steve Martin is coming to Princeton in December for his first public lecture at the university, and I interviewed him for the Princeton Echo.

Ed Thigpen

2011-11-26T16:54:00.018-05:00

Ed Thigpen (1930-2010)

You can find my latest review, of drummer Ed Thigpen's record, "You And The Night And The Music," over at nycjazzrecord.com. There's also a documentary DVD that accompanies the set called "Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm and Taste." Thigpen, who died almost two years ago at 79, recorded this album with his trio in 2002, in Copenhagen, where he had lived since 1972.

Ed Thigpen played drums in the Oscar Peterson Trio from 1959 to 1965. That group was one of the first combos I came across when I started seriously listening to jazz in high school. I found Peterson's soloing immaculate, so much so that I began to expect that kind of virtuosic playing from the other pianists I was listening to. Peterson's trio was so clean, so concise, I suggest in the review, that eventually, the consistency of those qualities can become a final weakness.

I also suggest in the review that on this album, in this trio--with pianist Carsten Dahl and bassist Jesper Bodilsen--a looser, older Thigpen seems to be featuring his drums as another melodic instrument. In the video below, of a segment from the 1950s television show "The Subject is Jazz," Thigpen talks about getting new sounds out of his instrument:

"I was looking for a way in which to express myself, not only rhythmically, but musically," he says. "So I had to find tones, the sound of a tone quality, so I found that I knew I could do this on the drums."

Observing Christmas

2011-11-25T16:13:00.017-05:00

Now that Thanksgiving is over, we can all expect to hear a lot of Christmas songs for the next month or so. Even though I'm basically a secular Jew, I don't mind hearing music about the holiday I don't celebrate every year. The songs are mainly non-religious, anyway--the American ones, at least: they're all about snow and Santa and sleighs and whiteness. And that makes sense: most of them were written by Jews.

Here's a funny line from "Operation Shylock," by Philip Roth, which bears this out: “The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ--the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity--and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Those two songs are "Easter Parade" and "White Christmas," by Irving Berlin. And they're great.

I'm often surprised by the number of Jews who wrote the songs that Americans take for granted. But the Jewish sensibility (along with the homosexual, as Susan Sontag points out in "Notes on Camp") underpins a huge swath of American culture. And though I can't really imagine Irving Berlin writing a great song about Hanukkah, or Passover, or Yom Kippur, I can understand why he might have wanted to profit from that yuletide cheer.

Of course, the Jews have got some great songs from "Fiddler on the Roof," but they're mainly lugubrious and parodic--not on the same level as the Aleinu, or Kol Nidre, which was actually featured in "The Jazz Singer," though I'm not sure if many viewers at the time knew what song Al Jolson was singing.

In a 2005 op-ed piece for the New York Times titled "A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah," the Jewish writer Jonathan Safran Foer wrote, in reference to Christmas Spirit: "Window displays are always more attractive than the gifts you receive--even if you receive what was in the window. Jews engage Christmas in its ideal form: from the outside. Unspoiled by family friction, or commerce, or anxiety about the wrong gift, we can experience the purest spirit. Someone else's spirit that we compose music for. And look at from the other side of the window. Christians should envy us envying them."

He's joking, but he does have a point. I've seen it from both sides, though. Because my mom celebrated Christmas with her Christian grandmother as a child, she wanted me and my brother to experience the holiday as we grew up, too. (We also celebrated Hanukkah, which must have been quite expensive for my parents.) But when I was in fourth grade, we stopped celebrating, I think mainly because we had to choose one holiday in the end. And because my dad had once had a fit when we put decorative candles in the windows, it made more sense to stick with the menorah.

I remember waking up that first morning without Christmas and feeling this sort of emptiness. There was no anticipation; you end up just lying in bed--no presents under the tree, no tree--and then that sort of tension becomes the thing. All of your friends are celebrating Christmas, so you can't do anything. America basically folds in on itself for a day of cozy warmth. In an inverse way, though, it brings a non-Christian family together, and creates another sort of yuletide tradition, one that most Jews practice every year: going out for a movie and Chinese food.

Anyway, there really aren't any good American Hanukkah songs that I can think of. Tom Lehrer's farce, "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica," is the only tune I've been able to find--aside from the well-known children's songs, and Adam Sandler's famous number--about the holiday. And all those popular songs by Jews are good, but one of my favorite Christmas songs happens to be a jazz rendition of the German carol "O Tannenbaum."

Vince Guaraldi (not a Jew) switches the song's time measure from three to four, which makes for some sturdy swing. His solo is lush and lyrical and sweeping. You don't have to like Christmas or winter or Charlie Brown to enjoy it. You just have to like this form of jazz.

Canaille

2011-11-22T17:45:00.007-05:00

My review of a new album by the Toronto-based sextet Canaille was just put up on the website of Exclaim. This band's influences include Ethiopian jazz, Sun Ra, and the jazz-rock of Miles Davis. I liked the music, but sometimes felt that the group failed to mix all the ingredients together into a cogent whole. Nevertheless, Canaille has a good sense of humor, which is important to me, and I imagine, many others.

Still Improvising

2011-11-14T14:18:00.001-05:00


The Paul Robeson Center in Princeton, where Cafe Improv takes place every month.

If you go here, you'll find an article I wrote about a 20-year-old open mic, called Cafe Improv, in Princeton. It's nice to know that these things exist.

Patrick Cornelius

2011-11-10T09:12:00.004-05:00

Patrick Cornelius

Another alto saxophonist. Quite different from Mr. Shanker, though. Mr. Cornelius provides artist notes to the tracks on his new album, "Maybe Steps," and some of them are interesting to read. Like this one, for example, for the song "Bella's Dreaming," which he wrote about his daughter:

"When Isabella was about three months old, my wife went back to work, and I started to care for her during the day. She would nap three times a day and I would stay in the same room with her while she was sleeping. The song is a literal musical depiction of the transitions from peaceful slumber to ﬁtful REM to waking up crying and screaming."

An enchanting song from an enchanting source. I reviewed the album here.