John Scofield: Grown-up Jazz Guitar
Listening to John Scofield's 1998 collaboration with Medeski Martin & Wood, A Go Go (Verve), you might suspect that the veteran electric guitarist was putting a midlife crisis on record. Here was a...
View ArticleGraham Haynes: Pilgrim’s Progress
Graham Haynes is a pilgrim. The young cornetist always seems to be in search of some way to play music that's rooted in jazz, relevant to current urban pop and consistent with his generally utopian,...
View ArticleKronos’ Caravan Travels Well
As the black-box density and sheer quality of their 1998 25 Years (Nonesuch) retrospective makes clear (10 CDs, no filler, no fat), the Kronos Quartet have built their very own musical world. The...
View ArticlePlaying It Straight With Bill Charlap
Ella Fitzgerald's cut of "Fascinating Rhythm" was blasting through the hallways when 35-year-old jazz pianist Bill Charlap let me in the door of his cheerful wood-frame house in Maplewood, N.J. "That's...
View ArticleAll Rise: Cocksure Marsalis Redeems Himself as Pasticheur
Consider the odd case of Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Pulitzer Prize–winner and Ken Burns poster child, who over the past decade has consolidated his position as the...
View ArticleYoussou! That’s My Baobab! Super Sounds from Senegal
"World music," a term for music made by everybody who doesn't happen to look or sound like us, is a convenient but patronizing expression that comes in for a fair amount of high-minded abuse. But the...
View ArticleMonk, Eisenberg and Banhart: Oh Me, Oh My, They’re So Unusual
It was Meredith Monk as much as anyone who taught New Yorkers that it's possible to open the mouth and make music without having to sing. In the mid-60's, Ms. Monk was a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate...
View ArticleJust Remember These: Most Desirable Discs of 2002
The boy bands, the Britney clones and even the original navel-barer-all started their slow parade to the digital bone yard this year. And that wasn't the only reason to celebrate. There was a lot of...
View ArticleNew Orleans’‘Hot Men’ Keep Jazz Cooking Forward
As the music critic Francis Davis writes in his Like Young: Jazz, Pop, Youth, and Middle Age , today's business-as-usual jazz can hardly compete with rap when it comes to offering a young white...
View ArticleJazzers Solal, Gustavsen Shine In Age of Really Good Pianists
Like a lot of jazz fans, I suspect, I was first drawn to the sound of the saxophone like that RCA dog to his master's voice, my ears pressed against the bell of the horn courtesy of classic recordings...
View ArticleSonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short … Lovano 52nd St. by Way of Cleveland
Sonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short Sick of wading through 70-minute compact discs with only 40 minutes worth of decent music on them? Old-guard vanguardists Stereolab and Sonic Youth feel your pain....
View ArticleJohn Scofield: Grown-up Jazz Guitar
Listening to John Scofield's 1998 collaboration with Medeski Martin & Wood, A Go Go (Verve), you might suspect that the veteran electric guitarist was putting a midlife crisis on record. Here was a...
View ArticleSonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short … Lovano 52nd St. by Way of Cleveland
Sonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short Sick of wading through 70-minute compact discs with only 40 minutes worth of decent music on them? Old-guard vanguardists Stereolab and Sonic Youth feel your pain....
View ArticleJohn Scofield: Grown-up Jazz Guitar
Listening to John Scofield's 1998 collaboration with Medeski Martin & Wood, A Go Go (Verve), you might suspect that the veteran electric guitarist was putting a midlife crisis on record. Here was a...
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Too-Tame Gatsby Disappoints
The Great Gatsby is the great American modern novel-the book that expressed more vividly than any other what it has meant to be alive in the 20th century in a country where hope springs forever and...
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A French Guitarist’s Hard-Nosed Sound
French electric guitarist Marc Ducret’s most recent release L’ombra di Verdi, is a hard-nosed calling card for his impending visit to the city. (Mr. Ducret plays with Tim Berne in both the trio Big...
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Piazzolla Done Right
If there is such a thing as a soul that survives physical death, then Astor Piazzolla, Argentine composer, bandoneon (button accordion) player and single-handed inventor of the “new tango,” has got to...
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Peruvian Singer Dances in Shadows
The title of Peruvian singer Susana Baca’s excellent new album, Eco de Sombras ( Echo of Shadows ), suggests that she’s singing about something that somehow doesn’t really exist. That would be the...
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Sonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short … Lovano 52nd St. by Way of Cleveland
Sonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short Sick of wading through 70-minute compact discs with only 40 minutes worth of decent music on them? Old-guard vanguardists Stereolab and Sonic Youth feel your pain....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Best-Selling Author Matthieu Ricard May Be the Hardest Working Man in...
A harmonic convergence of sorts took place on Tuesday, June 16th, when neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a pioneer in research on Buddhist meditation and the brain, and psychologist Daniel Goleman,...
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