Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has always been celebrated for impressionism and atmospherics. But the point of his  moody, airy play was, like air itself, sometimes invisible. Not so on his latest recording Dark Eyes.  Stanko has framed his magnificently expressive play inside themes that give shape and weight to his music.…

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In his liner notes to Miles Davis’ post-Bitches Brew recording At Fillmore: Live At the Fillmore East, Morgan Ames quotes J.J. Johnson on Miles’ new direction. “If you put Miles and his new group in the studio and recorded them on spearate mikes, and then you cut the band track and…

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Spirituality has long haunted the music of guitarist John McLaughlin.  But its a different kind of spirituality than commonly accepted.  Serenity is replaced by driven purpose sometime almost furious in its speed and direction. The organic is overcome by the electric. The enlightened sense of  “taking it as it comes” …

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The Rabbit has long complained that Keith Jarrett’s standards trio, fine as it is, limited the pianist. Maybe that ’s because the Rabbit was one of those “hippies,” as one reviewer described his audience, who found salvation in Jarrett’s early solo work, beginning in 1971 with Facing You and continuing through…

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Eight years past Up Past Two Lips, composer-saxophonist Henry Threadgill continues to pare down his carnival of sound into something that’s more than a sideshow but less the three-rings his Very Very Circus bands once performed. Composition, as always in Threadgill’s music, is important and one can’t help but think…

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We’ve long had a love-hate relationship with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, loving many of his releases while finding his tone irritating to the point of distraction. After championing some of his early work (Afric Pepperbird, Witchi-Tai-To, the career-defining, one-of-a-kind Dis) we suffered mixed feelings towards what followed, even when it included great musicians…

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The implication of three, staggered releases in Medeski, Martin and Wood’s title-and-concept-sharing Radiolarians series is that the second will be an improvement on the first and that the third will be best of all. Of course, this assumption is false; no such claim is made or warranted. And the Radiolarians process–developing material…

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The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his…

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The Rabbit was slow to come to Jon Hassell’s Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. The music certainly caught the attention of our floppy ears on first preview. But it was months past the February (’09) release date when we finally gave it serious airing–I’m…

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Disfarmer is Bill Frisell’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of 26 short, impressionistic pieces inspired by the photos of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), an Arkansas photographer who captured both place and time in his starkly-lit portraits.  Disfarmer’s revealing black-and-white portraits of country and small-town folk, posed without background, are perfectly reflected…

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