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The Future Looks Bright for Jazz & Colors
The second annual Jazz & Colors festival in Central Park was a success for the same reasons that Make Music NY has been such a failure: time and temperature. Sometimes it’s that simple. Make Music...
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Plenty of Revelations from Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society
It wasn’t any surprise that Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society‘s first set at the Jazz Gallery Thursday night quickly sold out, and the second looked it would also. Brooklyn’s best-known big band jazz...
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The Sachal Studios Orchestra Bring Their Titanic Pakistani Reinterpretations...
[originally published at Lucid Culture's sister blog New York Music Daily] The Sachal Studios Orchestra‘s latest album Jazz and All That is more all that than it is jazz – and it is all that, most...
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The Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard: Go See Them If You’re in...
Great tunesmiths never have to look far to find good musicians. Wednesday night’s late set by the Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard may have been a clinic in cutting-edge writing for large...
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Alex Cline and Large Ensemble Reinvent an Avant-Garde Favorite
Drummer Alex Cline‘s recent release of his 2011 large-ensemble concert reworking of Roscoe Mitchell’s 1969 cult classic improvisational suite For People in Sorrow begs the question, why bother? Maybe...
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Swingadelic Reinvents and Revisits Allen Toussaint Classics
Swingadelic‘s latest album, Toussaintville mines the Allen Toussaint catalog with verve, imagination and some absolutely delicious horn charts. It has most of the expected tunes (but thankfully no...
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Winter Jazzfest 2014: The Best One Yet, At Least From a Saturday Perspective
The lure of Winter Jazzfest over the last decade or so has been the potential for serious bang for the buck: a marathon of jazz festival stars, cult heroes and heroines jammed into two nights on the...
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Mighty Majestic Brilliance from Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band
Big band jazz is not the most lucrative style of music: after paying twenty guys for the gig, you’re lucky if there’s anything left over for you. But some of the most exciting composers in jazz persist...
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Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band Smolders at Smoke
Not to disrespect everything that pianist Orrin Evans has done with smaller combos, whether as a bandleader or with tenor sax titan JD Allen, but his greatest moments so far could well be with his...
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Mighty Swing from Trombonist Ryan Keberle’s Big Band Living Legacy Project
Trombonist Ryan Keberle recently commented in the New York City Jazz Record that music educators like himself ought to spend more time figuring out how to get their students to find “the zone,” where...
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Miguel Zenon Explores Multimedia Jazz and Nuyorican Identity on His...
It’s never safe to nominate anybody as being the very best on a given instrument – unless maybe it’s something obscure like the contrabass clarinet. As long as Kenny Garrett’s around, it’s especially...
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The Cutting-Edge Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Play a Rare Weeklong Stand At Their...
This year the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra celebrates 49 years as a New York institution. They were a lot different when trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Mel Lewis founded the group in 1966 as a way to blow...
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Bassist Rufus Reid Brings His Stunningly Intense Big Band to the Jazz Standard
One of the most exciting and highly anticipated stands by any jazz group in recent months is coming up at the Jazz Standard starting this Thursday, Feb 26 when venerable bassist Rufus Reid and his big...
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Rufus Reid’s Big Band Delivers Sophistication and Tradition at the Jazz Standard
There was a lot of fun onstage last night at the Jazz Standard. There was a downwardly spiraling, menacingly chromatic Freddie Hendrix trumpet solo that might have been the higlight of the evening....
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The Brussels Jazz Orchestra Sells Out Lincoln Center with Their Edgy,...
The Brussels Jazz Orchestra wound up their stand at Jazz at Lincoln Center Sunday night with their sixth consecutive sold-out show. There’s a reason why European big bands are so popular and highly...
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Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Project Does It Again Live at the Jazz Standard
Pretty much everybody, at least in the jazz world, agreed that Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans, by conductor and Evans scholar Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Project, was the best album of...
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Todd Marcus Brings His Mighty, Majestic Middle Eastern Jazz to Brooklyn
Todd Marcus is not only one of the great individualists in jazz, he’s also a great composer. His axe is the bass clarinet, which he’s worked hard to elevate from mere anchor of the low reeds to a lead...
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The Maria Schneider Orchestra Bring a Luminous, Relevant New Album to a Stand...
To pigeonhole the Maria Schneider Orchestra‘s latest magnum opus, The Thompson Fields. as pastoral jazz downplays its genuinely extraordinary beauty and epic sweep. But a musicologist would probably...
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The Maria Schneider Orchestra Play Gorgeously Lush Pastoral Jazz at Birdland...
Sometimes you have to see a piece of music live to understand it. Beyond the endless multitask and distractions while the album or the mp3 spins – do mp3s spin, or at least wish they do? – some music...
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A Lively, Richly Arranged New Big Band Album and a Smalls Show from Emilio Solla
Pianist Emilio Solla writes colorful, rhythmic, ambitiously orchestrated music that could be called latin jazz, but it’s a lot more eclectic and global in scope than your basic salsa vamp with long...
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