Disc One The Jazz Singers On her self-titled debut recording for the Whirlwind imprint, Samara…
Subscribers Only
Alto saxophonist Vincent Herring nearly canceled the in-studio recording sessions for Preaching to the Choir,…
Classic rock, especially from the Woodstock era, has segued from middle age to oldies status…
It may take years before music scholars can fully access how the pandemic that began…
Starting with two sold-out performances with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in…
Her second album with producer Craig Street, New Moon Daughter was the apotheosis of Cassandra…
There’s plenty happening on Ben Goldberg’s enigmatically titled new album, which thrives on group interactions,…
During their formative years, neither Lauren Henderson nor Camille Thurman anticipated that singing would be…
Maybe it was your parents’ worn copy of Ella and Louis. Or maybe it was…
The extraordinary life of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba has been a constant…
Anna Webber has firmly established a reputation as an innovative improviser and composer whose works…
It’s clear from the opening notes of vibraphonist-composer Jalen Baker’s This is Me, This is…
The COVID-19 pandemic inspired untold thousands to take a trip to what, for many, was…
Kurt Elling had never met the members of Butcher Brown before he stepped on stage…
Bessie Smith’s blues moan. Billie Holiday’s searing rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Abbey Lincoln’s riveting directness…
This third disc from Alchemy Sound Project revels in flow, but it opens with a…
Even on first listen, Strata evokes a feeling of familiarity so rich that it bleeds…
Cochemea, Vol. II: Baca Sewa (Daptone) Cochemea Gastelum has forged his own brand of transcendental…
No musician in the jazz world seems to connect with listeners as viscerally as the…
There is no easy way to describe Tree Falls, pianist Taylor Eigsti’s first album as…
Eigsti’s new burst of musical energy illustrates the stylistic fluidity of what can constitute a modern jazz album, and he has potent allies in genre-flexible collaborators such as drummer Eric Harland (whose label/studio GSI was home base for this project) and vocalists Gretchen Parlato and Becca Stevens. The prodigious, accessible pianist has kept busy over the years, but waited for a ripe moment to unleash a carefully considered album that doubles as an artistic statement.
Instrumental and vocal aspects, as on the infectious jazz-infused R&B tune “Play With Me,” easily intermingle. On tracks like “Sparky” and “Bandwiches,” feisty post-fusion energies — albeit with a fervent grand piano in the driver’s seat — mix it up with lyrical, heart-on-sleeve melodicism. Occasional homespun “field recordings” counterbalance elegant visitations from selective string parts.
Not incidentally, echoes of jazz historical depth also logically figure into the DNA here, as with Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark,” revisited in a cool, complex, freely re-harmonizing mode. And, on the stunning, post-Joni Mitchell-esque tune “Plane Over Kansas” — a duet between the leader and Becca Stevens — the singer slyly name-checks the standard “But Beautiful” in the flow of poetic text.
Somehow, the varied directions and flavors contained here cohere into an impressive tapestry and portrait of an artist emerging from a 10-year hiatus. — Josef Woodard
https://youtu.be/-kPP1W-M5UY