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AAJ articles |
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All About Jazz Feature Articles
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Les Disques Victo
Victoriaville is a small prairie city 100 miles northeast of Montreal in Quebec. Its name--or the diminutive "Victo"--has become synonymous among a legion of faithful with the diverse music festival that happens there every May. It might not be the biggest festival the town of 40,000 sees every year--the summer "Retro" '50s fest probably pumps more money into the town--but Victoriaville native Michel Levasseur has built a small empire there. The festival and associated record label, Les Disques Victo, rival any North American festival for diversity and professionalism...
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Irene Atman at the Slide Bar, Sydney, Australia
Irene Atman Slide Bar Sydney, Australia April 15, 2008
Slide Bar, Oxford Street is a difficult venue for a jazz vocalist. Blessed with a hi- tech sound system but hindered by a somewhat small and an almost too close stage to audience set up , it is a venue that for the inexperienced could prove a conundrum. But for the Canadian vocalist Irene Atman's only Sydney gig it proved to be no folly. She's no inexperienced vocalist, having sung with the Stan Hiltz Orchestra, The Boss Brass Big Band, as well as Tony Bennett. And she has just released a self-titled CD to rave reviews around the globe...
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Z-U, The Drum Arts Centre, Birmingham, U.K., April 13
Z-U The Drum Arts Centre Birmingham, U.K. April 13, 2008
Where were you? That's the question to the people of Birmingham following an evening of excellent music witnessed by a small but enthusiastic audience of approximately thirty people.
The concert was part of "Live Box," a series of twelve wide-ranging gigs centred at The Drum and curated by Birmingham-based alto saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch. Jazz, soul, r&b, rap, hip-hop and poetry have all been featured in a diverse and stimulating series of programs. Tonight the spotlight was on contemporary jazz with a performance by Z-U, a trio nominally led by bassist Neil Charles, who appeared tonight exclusively on bass guitar. Charles has played with trumpeter Abram Wilson and with the group Empirical, rising stars of the British jazz scene...
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Sattamassagana For Rosie
Grief, desire, memory. When utilized properly, they can serve to provide a sort of forward motion. Even if only down the street for that last drink of the evening. From somewhere nearby can be heard the faint tinkling of a piano as it has a conversation with itself.
What do I have, what do I want? I close my eyes to make the here and now waiver. Her kiss, no, it is just the coolness of an ice cube now left alone in an empty glass...
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Norwegian Jazz 101: JazzNorway in a Nutshell 2008
Since the early 1970s, the Norwegian music scene has received increasing international exposure, first through the German ECM label, but over time with an increasing number of Norwegian labels including Odin, NorCD, Curling Legs, Rune Grammofon and Jazzland. For a country of less than five million people, what is perhaps most remarkable is the sheer number of exceptional musicians, as well as the degree of sophistication that can be found, even amongst young players still in their teens...
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Harold Mabern at Smoke, NYC
Harold Mabern Smoke New York City December 22, 2007
Harold Mabern performed with his piano trio three nights at Smoke, on New York's Upper West Side, the weekend before Christmas, 2007. The one-time sideman for luminaries such as Wes Montgomery, Lee Morgan and John Coltrane was accompanied by a suited white bassist and a white crew-cutted drummer. Former Mabern cohort tenor saxist George Coleman was in attendance, though he did not play (he preceded Wayne Shorter as tenorist in the Miles Davis Quintet, in the early 1960s)...
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Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop
Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop Jeremy Yudkin Indiana University Press ISBN: 978-0-253-21952-7 184 pages
More books have been written about trumpeter Miles Davis than any other jazz musician, leaving authors who want to tackle him with little option other than to present their own unique take on his legacy...
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Ben Wolfe -- If I can make it here...
By Ben Wolfe
In late October of 1985 I loaded my car with my string bass, electric bass, Polytone amp, record collection, some cassettes a friend gave me for the drive, a boombox, my clothes, a thermos for the enormous amount of black coffee I would drink, a full-length down jacket which I would use for a blanket when sleeping in my car at night and a pile of blankets that would be my bed in Brooklyn. With my belongings loaded I started my journey to New York City. I still remember the strange feeling of excitement I had driving down a familiar 37th Avenue in Portland, Oregon and having no idea of what lay ahead. New York was a very romantic idea to me; it represented jazz--you had to go there if you were serious, you had to go there if you really wanted to learn to play. I moved to New York to play jazz and to learn how to play jazz. That was it. It wasn't for fame or fortune or anything else. At that point in time, at 23 years old, nothing else seemed to matter to me. Jazz music was my life. The drive was basically five days. I arrived through the Holland Tunnel Sunday morning Nov. 3rd and immediately felt the energy of New York City. I had been here before, having come for a month to study with Cecil McBee, but coming here to live was an entirely different feeling. I knew a friend of mine from Portland, drummer Alan Jones, had needed a roommate and that solidified my decision to move...
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Ahmad Jamal: It's Magic
When asked what he's thinking about when he's at the piano, NEA Jazz Master and Kennedy Center Jazz Legend Ahmad Jamal replies, "Those songs that come up on my recordings or my concerts, sometimes I pull some things that are very distant and written years before I was here, things written by Mozart. That's the wonderful thing about music, the ability to interpret the good things beyond the wildest dreams of the composer. I'm doing what I do based on three different eras of music. The first era was as a fan, as a kid listening to Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford. Then I was also in my teenage years, listening to the revolutionary works of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Then I'm still around in the so-called electronic age. So I am drawing on a great body of work. The greater the body of work, the broader the results...
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Herbie Hancock -- Herbie's Take on Joni Mitchell, and the Value of Gigging
Herbie Hancock, winner of the 2008 Album of the Year Grammy for River: The Joni Letters, took the stage with collaborator and inspiration Joni Mitchell when he taped a show for Nissan Live Sets that debuted April 1 on Yahoo! Music. Mitchell sang three of her songs, "River," "Tea Leaf Prophecy" and "Hana." Hancock, backed by guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist Marcus Miller, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, saxophonist Bob Sheppard, vocalist Sonya Kitchell and DJ C-Minus, also played such classics as "Chameleon," "Watermelon Man," "Maiden Voyage" and "Rockit." The performance, including video streams of 10 songs and an audience Q&A, was posted on April 1. Hancock begins an international tour in May with stops in Brazil, Europe and many dates in the U.S. and Canada, including the Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles. More info at music.yahoo.com...
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 Saturday, 17 May 2008
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