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As the lights dim, a dog wags its tail as it looks up at its master, a tall, clean-cut man whose silhouette fills the doorway leading to the Roode Bioscoop’s cozy dressing room. The pair are tough to separate, the young pup’s presence as necessary as drumsticks to Han Bennink, the canine’s doting owner. Bennink …
Continue reading “Overdue Ovation: Han Bennink Likes to See the Horizon”
At certain points in his long and varied career, Bill Bruford has been called a rock drummer. At others, he has been called a jazz drummer. He isn’t happy about either description. “If there were a government edict that came down tomorrow that said that the words ‘rock’ and ‘jazz’ will never be permissible again, …
Nearly two decades before COVID-19 was even a twinkle in a pangolin’s eye—if in fact those endearing critters had any coronavirus connection at all—John Scofield was already messing around with looping devices to, as he puts it, “extend the sound” of his guitar. Specifically, he was playing with an early example of such gadgets, the …
Continue reading “John Scofield Talks His Solo Debut and More”
Depending on how he looks at it, Kenny Garrett’s latest album, Sounds from the Ancestors, has been out for an eternity or an instant. Recorded in November 2019, before the pandemic, the alto saxophonist’s 17th album as a leader was finally issued last summer during a brief window between COVID variants, allowing Garrett to tour …
As I delved ever deeper into the 14 albums that document the Larry Goldings/Peter Bernstein/Bill Stewart trio to prepare for our January Zoom conversation, what struck me most was their consistent excellence as they evolved from promising 20-something aspirants to 50-something established masters. From Intimacy of the Blues, their 1991 debut, through their latest, this …
The musical avant-garde is an area where creative people who have earned wisdom through a lifetime of experience can flourish. Wadada Leo Smith, who last year at age 80 released six sets of records comprising 20 albums in all, and Henry Threadgill, who won the Pulitzer Prize at age 72 and has released four albums …
Continue reading “William Parker Keeps Refining His Approach to the Bass—and Music”
Wisconsin-born and proud: For all of the avant-everything complexity Ethan Iverson has applied to his solo projects or the sounds he created in his role as co-founder of the Bad Plus, there has always been something workmanlike, in a good way, about the music that he makes. It could be in the pop references of …
Continue reading “Ethan Iverson Returns to Basics and Looks Toward the Future on Blue Note Debut”
Since releasing his debut album in 1992 for Mesa/Bluemoon, Rick Braun has established himself as one of the most popular and prolific artists within the smooth-jazz genre. The trumpeter’s albums routinely top the charts and his tours, both as a solo headliner and on co-bills with artists like Richard Elliot (as R n R) and …
Continue reading “Thirty Years In, Rick Braun Is Eponymous at Last”
When the world shut down last year, so did Alicia Olatuja. The St. Louis, Missouri-bred vocalist sat in her New Jersey apartment one day watching a video and started crying because she missed performing. The COVID lockdown had forced artists into a virtual atmosphere, in which they had to imagine the large crowds that they …
Continue reading “Alicia Olatuja Breaks Through as New Kind of Vocal Coach”
In May, during Jazz Congress 2021—held online rather than at the conference’s usual location, Jazz at Lincoln Center in midtown Manhattan, because of the pandemic—a group of lauded vocalists met to discuss the life and work of Jon Hendricks (1921-2017), whose 100th birthday was September 16 of this year. An innovator of lyric writing in …
Continue reading “Vocalists Celebrate Jon Hendricks’ Centennial”
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