Latest posts
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Claudio Roditi: From Rio de Janeiro to New York and the Global Language of Brazilian Jazz
From Rio de Janeiro to New York Claudio Roditi’s career does not fit comfortably into the familiar story of Brazilian musicians carrying bossa nova to the United States. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1946, Roditi belonged to a generation for whom Brazilian music and American jazz were already in constant conversation. He grew up…
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Esperanza Spalding’s Chamber Music Society: Jazz, Strings and a Breakthrough Beyond Categories
From Portland to Chamber Music Society When Chamber Music Society appeared in August 2010, Esperanza Spalding was already well beyond the stage of being merely a promising young bassist. She had released Junjo in 2006 and reached a considerably wider audience with Esperanza two years later, establishing herself as a musician whose identity could not…
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Tom Jobim and Wave: The Quiet Architecture of Bossa Nova
By 1967, Antônio Carlos Jobim no longer needed to prove that bossa nova could travel. The music he had helped shape in Rio de Janeiro had already crossed languages, oceans and cultural boundaries, entering American jazz, popular song and the international imagination with a speed that few Brazilian movements had ever experienced. “The Girl from…
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Roy Hargrove and the Neo-Bop Vanguard: Soulful Post-Bop Technical Execution, Hip-Hop Genre Synthesis, and the 2003 Hard Groove RH Factor Masterpiece
The Chronicle of an Era: The Late-Twentieth-Century Renaissance and the Soulquarian Crucible By the arrival of the mid-1990s and early 2000s, jazz was navigating a complex, deeply polarized crossroads. The “Young Lions” neo-bop movement had successfully spent a decade restoring the pristine acoustic disciplines, immaculate formal attire, and complex harmonic vocabulary of the 1960s post-bop…
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Chet Baker and the Art of Restraint: How Chet Baker Sings Redefined the Cool Jazz Voice
Before the Voice, There Was the Trumpet By the time Chet Baker began recording the performances that would form Chet Baker Sings, American jazz already knew the essential characteristics of his trumpet. The sound was light but not weak, lyrical without becoming decorative, technically controlled without advertising virtuosity, and emotionally direct in a way that…
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Tubby Hayes and the British Hard Bop Explosion: The Little Giant, High-Velocity Tenor Cascades, and the 1961 Tubbs Masterpiece
The Chronicle of an Era: The London Jazz Frontier and the West End Crucible By the dawning of the 1960s, British modern jazz was fighting a fierce battle for creative self-determination. For over a decade, London’s West End clubs had been heavily dominated by the immense cultural gravity of American import records, leaving British musicians…
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Charlie Parker and the Birth of Bebop: How Bird Changed the Language of Jazz
There are musicians who become central to the history of jazz because they perfect an existing language, and there are musicians who make the language itself sound suddenly insufficient. Charlie Parker belonged to the second group. When his alto saxophone began circulating through the clubs, jam sessions and recording studios of the 1940s, the shock…
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Milton Nascimento — Courage: The Album That Carried the Sound of Minas to the World
Before the World Knew Milton When Courage appeared in 1969, Milton Nascimento was still several years away from the album that would permanently attach his name to one of the most important musical movements in Brazil. Clube da Esquina had not yet arrived. The extraordinary network of musicians, composers and lyricists associated with Minas Gerais…
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Django Reinhardt: How a Romani Guitarist Created a New Language for European Jazz
Django Reinhardt: How a Romani Guitarist Created a New Language for European Jazz Long before the electric guitar became one of the defining instruments of popular music, Django Reinhardt demonstrated that a guitarist in Europe could alter the direction of jazz without imitating the musicians who had created the music in the United States. His…