Latest posts
-
Miles Davis and the Birth of Infinity: The Story of Kind of Blue and the Modal Jazz Revolution
Before Kind of Blue: When Harmony Became a Cage By the end of the 1950s, Miles Davis had reached a point that great improvisers eventually confront: mastery of an existing language had begun to reveal its limitations. Bebop and hard bop had expanded jazz harmony to extraordinary levels of sophistication, but that sophistication came with…
-
Weather Report: The Jazz Fusion Band That Changed Modern Music
Before Fusion Became a Formula Weather Report did not begin as the sleek electric band most listeners associate with Heavy Weather, “Birdland” and Jaco Pastorius. When Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitouš formed the group around 1970, their original idea was considerably more open and difficult to categorize. They were emerging from a period…
-
John Taylor: The British Jazz Pianist Who Shaped European Jazz
A Pianist Who Never Needed to Dominate the Room John Taylor occupied an unusual position in European jazz. He was admired intensely by musicians, recorded with some of the most important figures in British and continental jazz, became central to the sound world associated with ECM, composed music of remarkable harmonic sophistication and spent decades…
-
Ray Barretto: The Latin Jazz Legend Who Redefined the Conga
Between Harlem, Puerto Rico and the Language of Jazz Before Ray Barretto became one of the defining percussionists of salsa, before Fania Records turned New York Latin music into an international phenomenon, and before albums such as Acid, Barretto Power, Indestructible and Rican/Struction established him as a major bandleader, he was a young New Yorker…
-
Hiroshi Suzuki: The Japanese Jazz Master Behind Cat
The Trombonist Behind a Japanese Jazz Cult Classic Some jazz records become famous immediately. Others disappear into catalogs, circulate quietly among collectors and only much later find the audience that seems to have been waiting for them all along. Hiroshi Suzuki’s Cat belongs unmistakably to the second category. Recorded in Tokyo in October 1975 and…
-
Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes: The Visionaries of Spiritual Jazz and Cosmic Funk
Before the Cosmic Echoes Long before Expansions became a jazz-funk anthem, before the Fender Rhodes seemed capable of turning a recording studio into an imaginary landscape, Lonnie Liston Smith had already lived several musical lives. His later reputation can make his career appear almost inevitable: a keyboardist discovers the electric piano, forms a group called…
-
Tomasz Stańko: The ECM Trumpeter Who Redefined European Jazz
A Trumpet Voice Born Behind the Iron Curtain There are trumpet players whose identity is established through velocity, range or technical spectacle. Tomasz Stańko followed another path. A few notes can be enough to recognize him: a rough-edged attack, a tone that seems simultaneously fragile and resistant, phrases that frequently leave as much meaning in…
-
Roy Ayers Ubiquity: The Jazz-Funk Collective That Changed Modern Music
Before the Sunshine For many listeners, Roy Ayers begins with sunlight. A slow electric-piano figure. A bass line that seems to move without urgency. A synthesizer hovering in the background. Voices repeating a phrase that feels less like a conventional chorus than a state of mind. Then the vibraphone enters, bright but never intrusive. “Everybody…
-
Eberhard Weber: The ECM Bass Pioneer Who Redefined European Jazz
A Bass Sound That Seemed to Come From Somewhere Else There are musicians whose importance can be recognized within a few notes, before a composition has revealed its structure or an improvisation has gathered momentum. Eberhard Weber belongs to that category. His bass sound—sustained, resonant, unusually lyrical and often surrounded by spacious reverberation—became one of…