Smooth Jazz USA for the week of May 30th is now online
Updated: 2010-05-30 19:56:00
: skip to main skip to sidebar The Smooth Jazz Blog News and information about Smooth Jazz Sunday , May 30, 2010 Smooth Jazz USA for the week of May 30th is now online Hey smooth : people Smooth Jazz USA for the week of May 30th is now available on the web : page http : www.jazznotes.net Select the most recent show . link No special features this holiday weekend , just lots of music and some new stuff as . well . Enjoy Stay , Smooth Steve Bauer On the radio B98 FM The Sunday Jazz Brunch 10 a.m . Noon http : www.b98fm.com On the Net , Mornings 7-9 central Smooth Jazz Now http : www.smoothjazznow.com Posted by Steve the Jazzman at 11:56 AM 0 comments : Post a Comment Older Post Home Subscribe to : Post Comments Atom Blog Archive 2010 531 May 34 Smooth Jazz USA for the week of May 30th is now
Another full house for a home-grown composer, pianist Sam Crowe, launching an album of highly individual originals, performed by a band of leaders – saxophonist Adam Waldmann (Kairos 4tet), bassist Jasper Høiby (Phronesis), drummer Dave Smith (Outhouse) – and an Oxford philosophy student (Will Davies, guitar); as an indication of the extraordinary health and vitality of the current UK jazz scene, this gig couldn't be bettered.
Tim Richards identifies 'the unique combination of freedom and discipline' as the most seductive feature of the jazz piano trio, and this album (his first trio recording since 2003's Twelve by Three) contains twelve good illustrations of the form's attractions. The material addressed by Richards and his rhythm section (bassist Dominic Howles, retained from the aforementioned previous recording, and drummer Jeff Lardner) is a mix of five originals (four by Richards, one by Howles), imaginative visits to standards ('You're My Everything', 'Love for Sale' intriguingly played over a descarga bassline), and lively versions of jazz classics...
An international jazz weekend began with the appropriately named Channel Crossing Project, a collaboration between German-Indian pianist Jarry Singla and two of the UK's most cosmopolitan players, saxophonist Julian Argüelles and trumpeter Tom Arthurs, and was completed by a debut visit to the club by an American band led by flautist Jamie Baum. 
Jim Black, like a number of New York-based musicians (John Zorn, Bobby Previte, Tim Berne and Wayne Horvitz spring immediately to mind), is the musical equivalent of a spark plug, his tireless energy driving not only the individual bands for which he drums, but also whole subgenres of the music, formed by combining elements from apparently disparate areas of jazz and rock. 
Like his recent Trio album dedicated to the music of Eric Dolphy (Gone in the Air), this fourteen-track album inspired by another 20th-century jazz great, Charles Mingus, is clearly a labour of love for saxophonist Chris Biscoe. 
A new version of Jonathan Bratoëff's quartet finds him fronting a rhythm section comprising long-time associate Tom Mason (bass) and drumer James Maddren, and sharing front-line duties with saxophonist Mark Hanslip, but the guitarist's great strengths are still much in evidence on this, his fifth album as a leader: 
Philip Clouts is perhaps best known as the pianist in Zubop, a band at the heart of the so-called 'world jazz' strand within the music that manifested itself from the 1980s onwards. On this album, on which he is joined by fellow musical traveller (in this context it is important to distinguish between tourists and travellers), saxophonist Carlos Lopez-Real, bassist Alex Keen and drummer Paul Cavaciuti, Clouts has allowed the natural beauty of his home base, Charmouth in West Dorset, to inspire his ten compositions...
Food (now whittled down from a quartet to a core of saxophonist Iain Ballamy and drummer/live electronics operator Thomas Strønen) have now made six albums of what might be termed freely impovised ambient music, but this is the first for a label that might seem to many to have been their natural home all along: ECM.
Henry Lowther (trumpet/flugelhorn), Jim Mullen (guitar), Dave Green (bass) and Stu Butterfield (drums) constitute the 'Great Wee Band' featured on this album of standards and modern jazz classics, and the name (coined by Mullen after one of their gigs) neatly sums up their no-frills, unpretentious but consistently musicianly approach. 
Centred on guitarist/composer Terje Rypdal's small group – completed by trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, Hammond player Stâle Storløkken, drummer Paolo Vinaccia – but also drawing on the impressive power and subtlety of the Bergen Big Band, Crime Scene was recorded live at Bergen's Natjazz Festival in May 2009. 
Written by Tommy Smith in 1999, with Joe Lovano in mind (and performed by the great US saxophonist, with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, during a weekend of concerts in Scotland in February 2000), Torah is a five-part suite inspired by the Pentateuch, a portion of the Bible that informs the foundation myths of all three major monotheistic world religions. 
Aptly described as a 'power trio that knows its jazz roots and takes flight from there', the Raphaël Imbert Trio (in which the French saxophonist is joined by a NY-based rhythm section: bassist Joe Martin and drummer Gerald Cleaver) is the result of a trip Imbert made to New York in 2003/04 for the purpose of studying 'spiritual influences on living and past jazzmen'. 
You came out in droves to help sell out seven of eight concerts of the 2010 Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air Portland Jazz Festival presented by US Bank. Thank you for showing the world that jazz is very much alive in Portland. Read below for the PDX Jazz story of the festival or visit the Oregonian and [...]
The Dave Stapleton Quintet – completed by saxophonist Ben Waghorn, trumpeter Jonny Bruce, bassist Paula Gardiner and drummer Elliot Bennett – have built up quite a following over the past few years, both via their sparkily accessible but considered live performances (a number of these at the Vortex) and their recordings, of which this is the third. 
Admirers of the progressive rock band Moraine (their MoonJune CD manifest deNsity is reviewed elsewhere on the site) will already be familiar both with the guitarist most prominently featured in the Seattle-based band Iron Kim Style, Dennis Rea, and with the group's drummer, Jay Jaskot.