Travel and the heavy-baggage weight of the date made us delay a day. But listening, even in our heads, never stops…

TINY VOICES, Joe Henry; Anti, recorded December, 2002. Joe Henry is the perfect alt-rock musician, finding hooks inside musical hybrids, making something new of the traditional pop music forms of rock,…

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TIME FOR TYNER, McCoy Tyner; Blue Note, recorded May, 1968.

Harmonic serendipity from vibes and piano, ditto for the personalities. This is our favorite of Tyner periods,  beyond Coltrane and into McCoy. Cleverly arranged standards; Tyner puts the crop to the horses on “The Surrey With the Fringe On Top,” working…

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The Time of the Sun, Tom Harrell; HighNote, 2011. Trumpeter Harrell’s fourth album with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, keyboardist Danny Grissett, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and drummer Jonathan Blake is a sweet, smooth exercise in unique rhythmic accessibility and lyricism. The disc opens with sounds produced by the magnetic field of the…

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Our introduction to composer/arranger Vince Mendoza came in the early ’90s with his Blue Note albums Start Here and Instructions Inside. The recordings featured some great musicians — Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Ralph Towner, Peter Erskine and Bob Mintzer among them — and a sort of post-Gil Evans music that…

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You know the rap about symphonic orchestras playing jazz. Can’t swing. There to frame real jazz musicians in pretty strings.  Pops orchestra. Sure, Charlie Parker and Strings was great but strings without Charlie Parker? Are you kidding?

And then there’s the Netherlands Radio’s Metropole Orkest, directed by Connecticut-born Vince Mendoza. Mendoza’s had…

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Of all the electric keyboardists to come out of the fusion era, Zawinul was the most organic,  most human. His synthesizer spanned an array of natural sounds–including Wayne Shorter’s tenor–and his use of voice through the Vocoder made his music take on folklorique, even choral qualities.

This natural quality of Zawinul’s…

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Pianist Anat Fort’s work is known for its mood, sense of touch, use of space and a feel for the exotic. Her latest recording And If assumes these qualities in less obvious ways, giving the music a natural and holistic feel. In a sense, she’s brought new subtleties to her subtlety.

That’s…

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The Rabbit’s always thought the jazz-poll category “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” was bogus or, at best, mislabeled. What jazz musician, with the exception of one or two, doesn’t deserve wider recognition? Even the best of them are widely unknown to the general public.

Consider Charles Owens. A fixture on the Los Angeles…

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John McLaughlin was a 27-year-old, relatively unknown guitarist in 1969 when he arrived in the U.S. from England to join drummer Tony Williams’ Lifetime band with organist Larry Young. His background was broad and without category.  He had been brought up by a concert violinist mother to love classical music,…

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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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