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All About Jazz Articles |
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All About Jazz Feature Articles
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Kenny Burrell: Every Note Swings
Kenny Burrell has appeared on so many essential jazz recordings that jazz history and his story seem irretrievably intertwined. m: Billie Holiday's valedictory rumination Lady Sings the Blues (Verve, 1956)? m: Jimmy Smith's epochal funk throwdown Back at the Chicken Shack (Blue Note, 1960)? m: Tony Bennett's Carnegie Hall debut? Kenny Burrell played guitar for them all. Even m: Jimi Hendrix once famously remarked, "Kenny Burrell--that's the sound I'm looking for...
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Cultural Politics and the Jazz Discourse, or Mama Said Knock You Out
Jazz, as an art form given birth in the United States by descendents of the formerly enslaved, has a complicated relationship with race. Although race, as a popular idea, has no basis in biology, many people mentally adhere to the idea of dividing groups of people based on "race" as opposed to understanding how groups of people evolve (or regress) via culture, so very real social dynamics and results exist based on the belief in race...
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Bob Brookmeyer: Jack of All Trades, Master of Valves
m: Bob Brookmeyer, a Renaissance man among jazz musicians who died December 15, 2011, four days before his eighty-second birthday, will be remembered as many things: composer, arranger, musician, educator, outspoken arbiter who brooked no nonsense and wasn't shy about letting others know when he believed they were not giving the music he loved the best they had to offer. What I remember best about Brookmeyer was the lithe, ever-swinging valve trombone that complemented such luminaries as m: Stan Getz, m: Gerry Mulligan, m: Zoot Sims, m: Jimmy Giuffre, m: Clark Terry and others during the 1950s and 1960s, epitomizing his Kansas City heritage in a series of memorable albums that sound as fresh today as they did more than half a century ago...
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Take Five With Walter Ehresman
Meet Walter Ehresman: Called "The quintessential Austin DIY artist" by famed disc jockey Charlie Martin (host of KOOP radio's Around the Town Sounds), Walter Ehresman has been a consistent, eccentric presence in the Austin music scene since the mid-'80s. A prolific songwriter and recording artist, he is equally at home presenting a delicate acoustic ballad in an intimate club as he is busting out screaming lead guitar with a full rock band in front of festival crowds. However, he's just as likely to be holed up in his Snipe Bog Studios, surrounded by gear and recording strange, unclassifiable experimental music at 4am with a big grin on his face. The consistent factor is a restless musical spirit, always looking for something new, coupled with fearlessly honest lyric-writing. He's released 13 solo albums since 1989, three with his old band Snipe Hunt, and one more recently with the band Delphi Rising...
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Keith Waters-Sax -- The Rotten Apples: Beach Party at the Orchard
The Rotten Apples, "the tightest out-of-tune band in the world," had an antecedent in guitarist Keith Waters' Belmont High School band (Belmont is a town just north of Boston). Even that early evolutionary ancestor of the current band blew effortless attitude in the face of the powers that be. Waters remembers playing a party at the Romney estate in town. "We didn't like the party and we didn't like Romney's kids, so we left early and got back in our van." The van was boxed in on the driveway, though. "We tried getting around the car in front of us but there wasn't enough room." They ended up leaving the vehicle on the grass and coming back for it the next morning...
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