CD Reviews (11563)
Find full CD and individual track reviews of your favorite jazz artists right here, and hopefully you also discover some new artists to add to your collection as well.
Children categories
Visual artist, pianist, vocalist, and composer Meredith d'Ambrosio has quietly been releasing critically acclaimed recordings since 1978. Never one to push recordings on her fans, By Myself is her first release since 2006. This new 2011 recording features, exclusively, the songs of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz and is framed…
Read more...
Tosh Sheridan likes to play nylon-string acoustic guitar, and this album displays that in abundance. Now, before you dismiss this as wine bar or bookstore music, give it a listen. You may be surprised at his versatility, his technique, or his evident charm. He takes a baker's dozen of standards,…
Read more...
If I lived in Boston, I would have already heard of Yoko Miwa. She is a mainstay of the jazz scene there, and her teaching at the Berklee College of Music places her in the center of musical activity in Boston. She also plays dynamite piano, with a left hand…
Read more...
Ron Hart and Gary Fitzgerald are old friends from the 1970s when they worked in a quartet together playing clubs in Cleveland, Ohio. The years of familiarity bring a relaxed and comfortable collaboration on this set of five standards, five originals and one creative jazz makeover of an old Percy…
Read more...
Versatile alto saxophonist Pete Robbins enjoys recording his ensembles within the live format. His sixth album as a leader also represents his third consecutive live recording, influenced by his residence and subsequent visits to Copenhagen. Moreover, his European band aka the Transatlantic Quartet, imparts the open-air architectures often evidenced by…
Read more...
One of the more exciting and inventive improvising artists, Slovenian guitarist Samo Salamon's stylistic modus operandi, coupled with massive chops has earned him prominence within global, progressive-jazz circles. He seems comfortable with the flexibility of smaller ensembles, highlighted here with the dual bass-less trio formats, performing with like-minded and revered…
Read more...
The Italian band names itself after a popular plum brandy, to correlate the refined or perhaps slick components that augment its broad repertoire. With its third album, the artists' continue on a path that integrates memorable storylines within a homogeneous old school/new school line of attack, where Eastern and Western…
Read more...
Spanning several decades, progressive-jazz and improvisational icon Anthony Braxton has been no stranger to duet settings amid his large and small ensemble aggregations. Therefore, this 2-CD program recorded live in 1989 is the artist's fruitful collaboration with bassist Buell Neidlinger, noted for his work with Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, and…
Read more...
Based in Washington D.C., the musicians bring varied experience to the table amid stints with notable free-jazz artists, nouveau rockers, and prominent jazz-based improvisers. The duo's second album is an exploratory, yet affable excursion into parts unknown via the improvisational nature of the program. With fuzz-toned atmospherics, staggered flows and…
Read more...
Ido Bukelman is an active Israeli free jazz performer, recording artist, composer and co-founder of OutNow Recordings. He plays with a sense of serious exploration, without frivolity, whether the tune is melancholy or frenzied. Cracked Song is one of four recordings Bukelman released in 2011, this one unique in that…
Read more...
In the liners, producer Martin Davidson provides anecdotes, interview quotes and other relevant information surrounding the premise for these vintage tracks, recorded under the leadership of the late soprano saxophone great Steve Lacy. Spanning previously unreleased and reissued material from 1967 through 1973, Lacy performs with iconoclastic modern jazz artists…
Read more...
With such a geographically visual image for an album title, vibraphonist Tim Collins leads his quartet through six original compositions and two covers where one's mental imagery can conjure various sublime locations through the tonal colors that this ensemble strives for and attains. Collins' quartet – pianist Danny Grissett, bassist…
Read more...
Perhaps one of the more important drummers in global improvisation circles, Tom Rainey's discography as a sideman, for example, could read like a history of postmodern jazz, spanning conventional and nonconforming practices. He's a fluid drummer who subdivides the rhythmical element into fragments while tap-dancing across the kit, shaded with…
Read more...
One of the premier modern jazz trumpeters, Wallace Roney's Home fuses postmodernism with a classic 60's Blue Note Records stylization and touts the best of many jazz worlds on this superfine 2012 release. Over the years, Roney has developed a stylistic realm of sound amid inferences to Miles Davis's bluesy…
Read more...
With persuasive sonic assaults, ping-ponging stereo effects, and a web-like maze of improvisation, this trio tenders a modern psychedelic soundscape with avant-garde like tendencies. They shade the proceedings with a renegade New York City downtown aura, featuring phased-out guitar parts, booming bass ostinatos, pumping rhythms and dabs of chaos via…
Read more...
I was concerned when I saw the front of the CD, "Paquito D'Rivera Presents Alex Brown, Pianist." It's nice for a big-name musician to help out the new kid, but does he really need an endorsement? Is he that bad? Fortunately, I was dead wrong. Brown is one of the…
Read more...
Rarely, only very rarely, is a recording released that brings together a host of the greatest jazz musicians on which they all play to the highest of standards. There have been more than a ton of recorded amalgamations of all-star jazz groupings going all the way back to the Jazz…
Read more...
Composer and pianist Michiel Braam has largely remained under the radar here, but he's a big-time figure in Europe, where he has led the notable Bik Bent Braam band and several other groups. His latest effort is the ensemble Hybrid 10tet, which makes its recording debut with On The Move,…
Read more...
Vocalist Rene Marie's seventh CD as a leader, Voice Of My Beautiful Country, borrows heavily from Americana as well as, what appears on almost every jazz vocalist's recording recently, a number of standards drawn from the wider rock world. The best part of the recording is how Marie proves there…
Read more...
This is an album that the aficionados of bop will thoroughly enjoy. The ensemble gathered here are first class musicians who ply their trade with both joyful abandon and sensitivity. The session was done in a day giving it the feel of extemporaneous 'swing' as the glorious bands of Bird…
Read more...