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All About Jazz CD Reviews
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Will Bernard: Blue Plate Special
Blue Plate Special is San Francisco Bay Area guitarist Will Bernard's fifth release as a leader and his second for Palmetto Records, following the star-studded groove-fest, Party Hats (2007). Dispensing with the additional horns and guest instrumentalists of previous releases, this session features Bernard as the leader of a stripped-down quartet. The relatively spare setting allows greater focus on his highly rhythmic approach to the guitar, with an emphasis on the empathetic interplay with his principle sideman, keyboardist John Medeski...
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Trevor Dunn: Four Films
Bassist Trevor Dunn is a witness-to-history kind of guy. A survey of his recordings finds him showing up in everything that has happened since the mid-1980s in both New York and on the West Coast. His bass can be heard anchoring important recordings from Mr. Bungle, the various and many projects of John Zorn, Graham Connah, Junk Genius, Rob Price, Jenny Scheinman, and Beth Custer. This mostly solo project features many more facets of Trevor Dunn, in the scoring of three films by Peter Bolt: Dandelion Man, Cameron Vale, and White Noise, together with Holly S. Neuberg's Glendale Blvd...
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Carver Trio: Broken Sleep
Here in the UK, roughly once a year, an album emerges from the cross-genre margins with enough novelty appeal to attract a mainstream audience and enough integrity to interest jazz listeners. Last year it was the Portico Quartet's Knee Deep In The North Sea (The Vortex, 2007), whose novelty appeal came with the inclusion in the line-up of two hangs (Swiss-born offspring of a Balinese gamelan gong and a Chinese cooking wok), and whose depth was provided by the quality of composition and improvisation. This year it could be the Carver Trio's Broken Sleep...
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Kenny Garrett: Sketches of MD: Live at The Iridium
Kenny Garrett continues his relationship with tenor legend Pharoah Sanders from Beyond the Wall (Nonesuch, 2006), but ditches some of the gravitas for Sketches of MD: Live at the Iridium. An album of unabashed blowing and multiplicity of stylistic references, it's the closest Garrett has come to his seminal Standard of Language (Warner Bros., 2003). Were it not for one misstep, it would be the closest thing to perfect that Garrett has released...
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Karel Velebny: SHQ
Multi-instrumentalist Karel Velebny was known as the father of modern jazz in the former Czechoslovakia. Besides playing the tenor sax, bass clarinet and vibes, he was also a composer, arranger, teacher, and the leader of Studio 5: one of the leading bands in the 60's. He died in 1989.
For the most part, Velebny finds his inspiration in mainstream jazz and bop. The terrain is well defined by the approach of the band, who play with undeniable power and spirit. But he also nods towards folk idioms and free expression and in acknowledging them along with his mainstream calling, turns in an exciting, solid piece of work...
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Dee Cassella: I'm Here Now
There is some advantage in being a late bloomer. Late bloomers are able to garner more nourishment and life experience. In the case of Dee Cassella this means knowing how to sing a song. Cassella has had several other lifetimes before finally committing to a singing career and her first CD. Backed by Dena DeRose on piano, Jed Levy on sax and flute, Martin Wind on bass, Matt Wilson on drums and Gene Bertoncini on guitar, she sings her way through an even dozen standards that have not been overdone. Cassella has interesting vocal qualities and (yippie!) great diction. She has a voice that sounds like a little girl at times and a mature woman (which she is) at others. On two of the uptempo tracks, “Lady Bird” and “East Of The Sun”, she does some nice scatting riffs in unison with DeRose but it is on the ballads that she really gets to show all of the warm shadings of her voice. At her CD release party in August, 2008 at New York's Metropolitan Room (where she performed most of the songs from I’m Here Now) Cassella really shone on the slower numbers both in vocal quality and interpretation, projecting her warm personality. Notable on both the CD and the live performance was Cassella’s rendition of the Leslie Bricusse song “When I Look In Your Eyes” and Lerner and Lane’s “Too Late Now” (a song originally sung by Jane Powell in the movie Royal Wedding). DeRose does a great job as musical director, arranger and accompanist and Levy’s flute work on “There’s No You” hits the spot. Bertoncini is, as usual, tastefully delicious. Wind speaks well on “Speak Low” and drummer Wilson delivers a steady and conversational drumming performance all the way through...
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John Zorn/George Lewis/Bill Frisell: News For Lulu
This is another reissue of the 1987 album that found this avant super-trio in what was (and still is) unlikely territory, not only playing bebop, but also pouncing on a less than obvious repertoire. Four composers were selected, their hardboppin’ tunes more or less equally divided, with around four numbers each from trumpeter Kenny Dorham, tenorman Hank Mobley and pianists Freddie Redd and Sonny Clark. These recordings were made during the peak period of Zorn’s Naked City thrashcore band (which also featured Frisell) and even though these two had regularly toyed with the jazz mainstream, it was particularly unusual to find Lewis in such a setting without dismantling his trombone or feeding its sounds through a computer program...
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Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble: Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler
The words ‘flute’ and ‘vocals’ on the back of a jazz record can suggest something fairly specific, something that is, well, fine for those who like it. But the combination needn’t necessitate an easy listen and if anyone in recent memory was likely to break the mold, it was Chicago’s Nicole Mitchell...
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Joe McPhee / Lisle Ellis / Paul Plimley: Sweet Freedom - Now What?
The older you grow, the more conservative you get and the safer the parameters you set yourself; or so conventional wisdom has it. Now within a whisker of his 70th birthday, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee doesn't so much defy the cliche as explode it; still stretching his music, still protesting against injustice...
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Corey Christiansen: Roll With It
If jazz is America's soundtrack, periodically updated by tonal seismic shifts, then Corey Christiansen's third release, Roll With It, is one such shift. Imagine a Grant Green-Jimmy Smith-Stanley Turrentine 1960s triumvirate (had one existed) buffed to an early 21st Century digital sheen, greasy easy on the pork fat, hard on the omega-3s and what you get is guitarist Corey Christiansen's soul-jazz world view...
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John Pizzarelli: With a Song in My Heart
The American Songbook. There are times when those three words make a music listener cringe: Oh no, another album of old songs. That's not the case with John Pizzarelli. There's something about his guitar, his vocal style and the arrangements that make his recordings fun and interesting. That's doubly so on With a Song in My Heart, Pizzarelli's tribute to one of the great writers who contributed to the songbook: Richard Rodgers...
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Philip Catherine: Guitars Two
Sometimes it's not a good thing to get branded too early in your career. Called "the young Django" by Charles Mingus and operating in the same fusion sphere as John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell, Belgian Philip Catherine was pegged in the '70s as a firebrand guitarist, albeit an unabashedly lyrical one. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Catherine's career, now nearing its sixth decade, has always been about a lot more than powerhouse fusion chops, something Guitars Two demonstrates in spades...
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 Monday, 06 October 2008
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