Shamarr Allen is a born front man, the kind of artist who embraces a showy star turn. Throughout his career performing and recording with brass bands, jazz ensembles, and his recent funk-rock projects, listening to Allen perform has meant hearing his sensibilities and his powerful trumpet drive a band’s rhythms and shape its sound. On [...]
Brian Quezergue sets up his debut CD, Reflections, to highlight the bass guitar’s power and versatility as an instrument. This would be unremarkable—Quezergue is the CD’s composer, arranger and bass guitar player, and his name alone appears on the cover—but for its genre. Smooth jazz fusion albums such as Reflections tend to bury the bass [...]
The Rites of Man is the debut album from the Tom Paines, the latest incarnation of veteran New Orleans jacks-of-all-musical-trades Alex McMurray and Jonathan Freilich. They’ve collected folk songs from throughout the English-speaking world in the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th. There’s plenty new about the songs on The [...]
“We Are the People,” the 6th track on Renard Poché’s 4U 4Me, samples Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. This is quite a statement to make on a funk record. Stepping to the front from his usual spot flanking Allen Toussaint’s stage band, Poché does not mean to [...]
[UPDATED] Holley Bendtsen and Amasa Miller’s Our Songs is an album-length story about the duo’s shared history in New Orleans music. It’s quite a history. They’re best known for their work with the Pfister Sisters and the Charmaine Neville Band, but during their careers they’ve recorded and performed with a wide variety of local and [...]
[UPDATED] The Storyville String Band of New Orleans recorded its new release live at the Pavilion of Two Sisters in City Park in September 2009. It was a very well-received performance, as the CD documents. There’s applause between tracks, and sometimes after solos that’s more raucous than we might expect from the Friday evening crowd [...]
New Orleans has been a jazz piano town since, as he claimed himself, Jelly Roll Morton invented the jazz piano. Conun Pappas, Jr. is a native son and a piano prodigy, but in his journey from the jazz program at NOCCA to the Manhattan School of Music, where he is now, he has located his [...]
