In this week’s episode, JAZZIZ online editor Matt Micucci joins Backstage Pass host Brian Zimmerman…
Tag: Kyle Eastwood
The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…
A beloved actor’s sprightly sophomore jazz album; a fascinating archival release celebrating a much-missed saxophonist;…
Looking for some Monday motivation? We’ve got you covered. From a recently unearthed gem by…
The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…
Kyle Eastwood – In Transit (Jazz Village) Kyle Eastwood’s nearly 20-year recording career took a…
Kyle Eastwood as featured in the Summer issue of JAZZIZ To read the full article…
The key to his liner-note statement lies in Eastwood’s quotation marks around the word “jazz.” They signify his focus on the pure stuff, the modern canon — the Rosetta Stone for his own musical dialect. On Time Pieces, he and his longstanding quintet started with a couple of certified jazz standards — Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance” and Horace Silver’s “Blowin’ the Blues Away” — and, in the course of composing new songs to surround those, found themselves exploring a sound and sensibility slightly older than even they had anticipated. “I knew I wanted to record those two tunes because they’d been songs I started putting into the set in the last year or so,” Eastwood explained between sets at Chicago’s venerable Jazz Showcase in April. “Then I started coming up with ideas for other tunes, and being a big Wayne Shorter fan, I guess some of the ideas had that influence as well. I wanted to record some modern standards, and the album took shape from there.”
One of the album’s new originals — attributed to two of Eastwood’s British bandmates, trumpeter Quentin Collins and pianist Andrew McCormack — had no title when the band began recording it. But during the session, in June 2014, they got word that Horace Silver had passed away in Los Angeles, prompting them to dedicate the song — now called “Peace of Silver” — to him. The title provides the most direct indication of Silver’s influence on Eastwood; other new tunes, notably the funky boogaloo “Prosecco Smile” and the rip-roaring “Bullet Train,” suggest that Silver’s influence runs considerably deeper. Silver created cameo masterpieces of jazz songwriting, all muscle and sinew with no fat, that remain hallmarks of his craft more than a half-century after they took shape. And while it would disserve both artists to hold Eastwood to the example of Silver, his own songs have a similarly chiseled, almost lapidarian impact.
Photo Credit: Jean Baptiste Millot