Category: JAZZ WRITINGS:
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Joe Licari/Mark Shane: Swing It, Brother, Swing!!
The following originally appeared, in altered form, on the All About Jazz website. Joe Licari: Clarinet; Mark Shane: piano. Had the responsibility of naming this CD fallen to me, I would have chosen “After Hours.” Not that this small gem of an album, rooted in the sensibility and protocols of…
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A Note on Charlie Rhyner
I’ve remarked elsewhere that given the absence of any dramatic upheavals for some sixty years now, jazz has ceased to be the consistently transforming art it once was. This doesn’t mean, however, that jazz has stagnated. Hardly. A small but significant body of gifted young musicians have at once been…
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Liner Note: Ahmed Abdul-Malik—New Jazz Imagination
Available on Umlaut Records Globalization has been a fait accompli for some time now. While it continues to pose serious challenges to long-standing cultural, economic and political orders, and although—as conspicuously demonstrated by Brexit and the elevation in America of a Donald Trump to the presidency—it has ignited reactionary movements…
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7a) Photos of Cecil Taylor and Robert Levin, 2015
(Left) Cecil Taylor & Robert Levin at Taylor’s Brooklyn home, June 2015. (Right) Cecil Taylor & Robert Levin leaving Ornette Coleman’s funeral service, June 27, 2015. Robert Levin, Cecil Taylor, Matt Gaetano Levin (2015)
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Liner Note: Liquid Krystall Displayed
Now available from K2B2 Records! Marty Krystall, reeds, with Calvin Keys, guitar, Jerry Peters, piano and Hammond organ, Buell Neidlinger, bass, and Peter Erskine, drums K2B2 4269 www.k2b2.com I’ve written elsewhere that, in my judgment, Marty Krystall is the very best of the post-Coltrane reed players. And for anyone still…
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Liner Note: Marty Krystall’s Mojave: Gunsmoke
NOW AVAILABLE FROM K2B2 RECORDS! K2B2 4069 K2B2 Records 1748 Roosevelt Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90006-5219 k2b2.com Marty Krystall is a genuine rarity—at once an accomplished and practicing studio musician, and a tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist who Nat Hentoff could rightly call, “one of the most passionate, powerfully swinging,…
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Liner Note: Buell Neidlinger with Steve Lacy
Buell Neidlinger Quartet Live at Ravenna Jazz ’87 with Special Guest Steve Lacy K2B2 Records 3969 K2B2 Records 1748 Roosevelt Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90006-5219 k2b2.com Recorded at the Ravenna, Italy jazz festival in 1987, and including some of Thelonious Monk’s classic compositions, this exemplary demonstration of post-bebop jazz…
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Photo From a Red Rodney Recording Session, 1957
L to R: Ira Gitler, unidentified, Red Rodney, Robert Levin, Ira Sullivan. From a Red Rodney recording session for the Signal label at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack, NJ studio. The photo is by Don Schlitten.
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Notes from a Season at the Center of the Universe: Cecil Taylor at The Take 3
Originally published on the All About Jazz website. In the summer of 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3 coffee house on Bleecker Street. A large, nondescript room with a stage at the back end and several dozen tables of various shapes and sizes, The Take…
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Introducing Anthony Braxton
From Jazz & Pop Magazine, 1970 To anyone still questioning the validity of the systems and methods at which Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman arrived, I would first of all recommend that he listen more attentively to the work of those men. But I’d also suggest that he make it…
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The Emergence of Jimmy Lyons
From Jazz & Pop Magazine, 1970 Since 1960, when he began working with Cecil Taylor, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons has been developing from a somewhat diffident musician into one of the more potent voices in the New Music. In recent recordings and appearances with Taylor, Jimmy has been playing with…
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Cecil Taylor: “This Music is the Face of a Drum”
From Jazz & Pop Magazine, April 1971. As an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, Cecil Taylor has finally been able to realize a long-held ambition – the command of a large orchestra. Comprised of fifteen of his students (and augmented by Jimmy Lyons, Sam Rivers, Leroy Jenkins and Andrew…
ROBERT LEVIN 