This is Joey DeFrancesco‘s personal take on what’s going on in the world and his plea for freedom. With a song by Sam Cooke and a Traditional, he also wrote seven new pieces and recorded the album with his new band, comprising of Troy Roberts on tenor and soprano sax, Dan Wilson on guitar, and…
Argentinia-born guitarist Dominic Miller, who is living in the Provence region in France and has worked a lot with Sting over the years, has come up with his first album for the Munich-based ECM Records. And it turns out to be Gina’s third five-paw album of the year (after Kurt Rosenwinkel and Richard Galliano). The…
I’ve been listening to a lot of new music recently. Actually I’m constantly listening, the first thing in the morning after getting up is not walking into the kitchen to make a coffee and it is not going into the bathroom, but it is always putting on the stereo. You will only see me with headphones…
At first I thought I was listening to a new Donald Fagen album – the similarities are really significant on the opening title track to Raul Midón‘s new album where he plays guitar, sings, raps, plays percussion and is responsible for some programming, too. Except for the rap in the middle of the song, that’s…
Here is another great example of genre-crossing music where it really doesn’t matter how you want to call it. There is a lot of jazz, soul, funk, r&b, gospel, and spititual included in the new album by Jean and Marcus Baylor. I had the big honor and pleasure of seeing Jean perform live during last…
Everybody has his or her favorite Abbey Lincoln tune of course. And for me, there are dozens of it. So the question with interpreting the Abbey Lincoln songbook always has to be if the artist has something new to add to Abbey’s timeless repertoire. Atlanta-based vocalist Virginia Schenck succeeds in most parts on her new album…
In the late 70s, a lot of Jazz artists tried to incorporate other genres and styles into their music, like soul and disco of the days and most of them were heavily criticized for it. Undeservedly so, I think. In hindsight, that period is especially fruitful – at least for me who as a teenager…
Here’s another great example why the melange of r&b, soul, hip-hop, and jazz works so well. The fat bass and drum foundation of the 2:30-minute “Small Moves Interlude” has all the right ingredients and the perfect groove; complete with cool keys it just has this uncompromising sound and mood where any genre or category is…
German-born vocalist Theo Bleckmann, in New York since 1989, has recorded his first ECM album (released in January) which isn’t your regular vocal jazz album, but more like a sound experiment where the overall mood and sonic palette is one of intense beauty and calmness that is so fitting with what we’ve come to expect from the…
José James has gone back to “contemporary R&B” on his new, appropriately titled album “Love In A Time Of Madness”. He says that “there’s a resurgence of something I haven’t seen since the ’90s or ’00s, when hip-hop, R&B, and pop were converging in really thrilling ways through folks like Tribe, Erykah Badu, or D’Angelo. There’s…