Boston Globe, May 18, 2008 A ritual of summer takes on a jazz flavoring this year, as perhaps the season’s most anticipated reunion tour is the one featuring the classic lineup of Return to Forever, one of the most iconic jazz units of the ’70s. The four-man electric band led by pianist Chick Corea was […]

Boston Globe, May 16, 2008 NEW YORK – When he was about 12 years old, Pete Robbins knew he wanted to learn a wind instrument so he could play in his school band. And he worried that his original choice, the clarinet, simply wasn’t cool. So his father – a nonmusician but an avid jazz […]

Boston Globe, April 11, 2008 As the passage of time inexorably thins the ranks of living jazz masters who were present at the birth of bebop, so too risk fading the memories of that key moment in the shaping of what would eventually become known as “America’s classical music.” In the 1940s and early 1950s, […]

Boston Globe, March 14, 2008 One of the most interesting recent albums to beam back from the frontier where jazz, rock, electronica, and free improvisation intersect was David Torn’s “Prezens.” It’s a digitally enhanced quartet led by a guitarist-producer whose career has taken on the most abstract projects as well as some of the most […]

Boston Globe, February 24, 2008 In the Japanese tradition, the ronin is the masterless samurai. The consummate free agent, he rejects conventional authority and moves through the world with defiance and dignity. In jazz today, Ronin designates something no less rigorous and idiosyncratic. It’s the name that Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch chose for his quintet, […]

Boston Globe, February 8, 2008 Improvised music never happens in a vacuum. It’s the product of an encounter, when musicians listen and respond together in a way that none could have achieved alone. The deeper the encounter, the more fully present the players, the greater the liberties they can take with conventions and still produce […]

Boston Globe, January 25, 2008 When John Coltrane passed away in 1967, he was just a few years into the spiritual quest that his later albums document, with titles like “Om” and “Interstellar Space,” and the liberation they reflect from conventions of jazz form and expression. Coltrane was only 40 at his death, and no […]

Boston Globe, December 21, 2007 Of all the great expressive traditions in jazz, the male vocal is one that has had difficulty maintaining its position in the music’s evolving marketplace. The shortage of prominent male singers is especially pronounced when it comes to African-American voices. For all the reinvigoration of jazz today, few if any […]

Boston Globe, September 28, 2007 NEW YORK—Few life stories in jazz have been as fulfilling as that of George Wein, the pianist and promoter who virtually invented the jazz festival at Newport in 1954 and went on to become the music’s most iconic and influential impresario. Now, two years since the death of Joyce Alexander […]

Boston Globe, September 23, 2007 NEW YORK—When Herbie Hancock embarked on making “River: The Joni Letters,” his new album out Tuesday based on the music of Joni Mitchell, he quickly found himself treading at once on familiar and unfamiliar ground. Familiar, because Hancock, the great jazz pianist, has known Mitchell since 1979, when he and […]

Boston Globe, September 14, 2007 One of the most complete jazz pianists around and also one of the most engaging, Michel Camilo has spent the past few years working outside the trio format that has been the anchor of his three-decade career. Now, the Dominican-born virtuoso is returning to the trio re-energized by his recent […]

Boston Globe, August 10, 2007 Sometimes a jazz musician appears on the scene with a recording that is both so unique and so well-crafted that you wonder where he or she has been all your life. That kind of revelation came a few months ago with the release of “A Long Story,” the debut of […]

Boston Globe, August 3, 2007 NEW YORK—The jazz violin community is a small one; even its stars, like Regina Carter, Billy Bang, or Mark Feldman, are little known beyond hard-core music circles. But paradoxically, this obscurity has helped to make the violin a vehicle for some of the most interesting new music today. Perhaps one […]

Boston Globe, July 13, 2007 As befits an art where experience forms more through apprenticeship with the masters than through sheet music or book knowledge, jazz has always honored its elders. Still, among the senior figures of the music, some icons stand out as especially monumental and command the greatest reverence. One of these today […]

Boston Globe, June 15, 2007 Jazz at the electronic frontier produces music that’s all over the map: The encounter of acoustic instruments with computer technology can yield soupy fusion or aggressive avant-garde noise, but it has also opened new evolutionary paths for straight-ahead jazz and created new platforms for brilliance. For proof, look no further […]

Boston Globe, May 27, 2007 Drummers are rarely bandleaders in jazz, mainly for the simple reason that they are too busy drumming; the best ones are in high demand and therefore overextended, or end up tightly identified with a particular leader’s group and channel their creative energy there. Historic exceptions apply, of course, such as […]

Boston Globe, May 18, 2007 The new album from bassist Reuben Rogers is an easygoing set that brims with positive energy. On a program of mainly Rogers’s compositions, a roster of high-flying buddies like trumpeter Nicholas Payton and saxmen Joshua Redman and Ron Blake drop in with bright, clean contributions. You feel the warmth even […]

Boston Globe, May 11, 2007 There is an aura of difficulty that hangs over creative improvisation – an art form at the confines of jazz, in which musicians expound together and in the moment, often with no predetermined structure or plan. It’s difficult to perform: It demands that each musician combine self-assured technique with the […]

Boston Globe, May 4, 2007 The peculiar burden of saxophonist Ravi Coltrane has been to balance his own creative development with the real and symbolic duties that come with carrying one of the most important names in American – or world – musical history. Coltrane, who visits Scullers this weekend, is the son of the […]

Boston Globe, April 13, 2007 The guitarist Pat Metheny has long been an ambassador for a big-tent jazz sensibility in which technical virtuosity is put in the service of texture and melody. The combination of raw force and lyricism places his work at a crossroads where instrumental rock meets improvisational creative music, which accounts for […]

Boston Globe, March 23, 2007 NEW YORK—When fully expressed, the human voice has such potential that instruments are crafted to imitate it, not the other way round. In fact, whole traditions of music honor the voice above all other instruments. Seen this way, a song can be a terribly limiting thing. Verses and refrains shackle […]

Boston Globe, February 9, 2007 In the universe of jazz ensembles, the piano trio – made of piano, bass, and drums – is one of the classic forms. It is also, potentially, one of the most hermetic. It lacks the marshalling, directing effect that a horn appears to provide; in fact, it sometimes seems to […]

Boston Globe, February 2, 2007 The Berklee College of Music is a Boston jazz treasure not just for the quality of education it dispenses but also for the chance it affords the general public to get in on the action. Among the city’s best-kept secrets, the school’s concerts feature students on the verge of graduating […]

Boston Globe, January 26, 2007 Whenever Jason Moran, Tarus Mateen, and Nasheet Waits take the stage, one of the tightest units in jazz is about to get cooking. Many consider Moran, 32, the foremost pianist of his generation, with seven albums as a leader on Blue Note since “Soundtrack to Human Motion” in 1999. Bassist […]

Boston Globe, January 21, 2007 For all the creativity on display in jazz, there hasn’t been much room for the violin in the genre, at least not since the birth of bebop six decades ago. Violin, cello, and viola found themselves relegated to the occasional string section, and in the 1960s, while “out” musicians took […]

Boston Globe, November 24, 2006 Joe Lovano is everything all at once: renowned saxophonist, Berklee College of Music professor, stalwart of the New York jazz scene, and prolific music maker whose recent albums as a leader include trio, quartet, and nonet work, and even a program of songs from the opera great Enrico Caruso. Lovano’s […]

Boston Globe, November 24, 2006 NEW YORK—To properly unpack the layers of musical and cultural meaning in “African Tarantella,” the latest album from the brilliant vibraphonist and bandleader Stefon Harris, it would require a longer article than these columns permit. So here’s a summary. A tarantella is an Italian dance whose frenzied execution was once […]

Boston Globe, November 17, 2006 NEW YORK—Sparked in the ’60s, the conversation between jazz and the East was always a serious matter. While the interest of hippies came and went, jazz musicians found in Indian, African, and Arabic music limitless material for inspiration and research. Yet today, the musicians at this crossroads fall in no […]

Boston Globe, September 17, 2006 NEW YORK—Icarus flew too close to the sun. Orpheus unwisely looked back. Persephone was tricked by Hades. These and other Greek myths portray the aspirations and foibles of the human condition with such clarity that artists have returned to them for centuries, a creative feedstock that cannot be depleted. Now […]