Large ensembles in creative music are largely a labor of love, a testament to the musicians’ respect for the bandleader, and a tangible manifestation of a music community. The Naked Orchestra is certainly all of these, and the fact that it’s persevered for over a decade without any official institutional support speaks volumes to both [...]
There’s a strain of African-American gospel music indigenous to Louisiana in which loud electric guitars and rough-throated vocals dominate, with stomping rhythms and declamatory repetitions that sound like a sanctified blues or a proto rock ’n’ roll. Elder Utah Smith made that music—an electric guitar-toting evangelist of the Pentecostal faith Church of God in Christ [...]
And to think—just 10 years ago there were hardly any Kidd Jordan CDs available. Now, since Jordan has been embraced by the New York, Chicago, and international free jazz communities, there’s a great deal more of his music available and recordings like this one show the range and breadth of his art. For starters, his [...]
Though he’s rarely mentioned by the promoters and guardians of New Orleans culture, free-jazz saxophonist Noah Howard was born and raised here, leaving as a young man for the more receptive shores of the Bay Area’s then-burgeoning creative music scene. Then New York beckoned, and by the late ’60s Howard had recorded two powerful albums [...]
Wilco’s latest album Sky Blue Sky is one of the most subtle recordings in the group’s history, a surprise to some after the more overt experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, and even more of a surprise to those who expected a radicalized Wilco now that guitarist Nels Cline is on [...]
The Charles Mingus group of 1964 was one of his best, with two of his strongest musical soulmates—longtime drummer Dannie Richmond and reed virtuoso Eric Dolphy—stoking the fires along with elegant post-bopper Clifford Jordan on tenor sax, the lyrical Johnny Coles on trumpet, and stride-to-modern piano compendium Jaki Byard on the keys. It was a [...]
The CaseQuarter label out of Montgomery, Alabama burst on the scene in 2003 with God’s Got It by gospel singer/guitarist Rev. Charlie Jackson. The album collected astounding archival recordings by the Baker, Louisiana-based minister and introduced this distinctly Southern raw-sounding gospel music to a new, wider audience. The label issued an excellent follow-up, You Without [...]
The late Don Cherry is likely most well-known for his association with Ornette Coleman, forming the crucial front line with Ornette that turned the music world on its ear back in 1959. After leaving that famed quartet, Cherry made amazing music of his own that is proving to be influential on later generations of improvisers. [...]
The trio of saxophonist Wagner, bassist Ozaki, and world-renowned drummer Hamid Drake had played the previous night at the Blue Nile to celebrate the release of their new CD on Valid Records, delivering two varied sets of selections from the album and nicely loose renditions of other pieces from the Wagner book. Anticipation was running [...]
