ETTA JAMES had a rare voice—one that could convey a lifetime of experience without showing signs of age. Sometimes dusky, with a bit of a growl, it was also confident, powerful and clear. So a song like “At Last”, her signature tune, written in 1941 and recorded by Ms James in 1960, remains timelessly...
When performing live, Galactic makes playing funk music look easy. It isn’t. Delivering precise, tight funk is hard work, but this five-piece New Orleans band seems to power through their shows as if they could keep it all going endlessly. Their most recent album, “The Other Side of Midnight: Live in New Orleans”, captures...
Evan Parker, a saxophonist from Bristol, England, who helped shape the improv-heavy sound of European free jazz through the ’60s and ’70s, told an interviewer in 2003 that “you can make just as bad a mistake when you think you are doing absolutely the right thing as you can when you just make a...
In the late 1980s, Miles Davis once told a Canadian journalist that a lot of his paintings and drawings in that period were simply “faces and lines,” and that making art helped him relax. When asked how he compared to other musicians pursuing visual art at the time — Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell, David...
Recently caught live performances by Soul Rebels Brass Band, Get the Blessing, and Led Bib during the 2010 London Jazz Festival. Several hundred people who gathered at the Southbank Centre to see Soul Rebels Brass Band were so into it the show that they boo-ed loudly when the band did not play an encore....
Onstage, 68-year-old Mulatu Astatke is as subtle and understated as the Ethiopian jazz he created. The music, a hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music and jazz, is subdued, somewhat melancholy, and at times psychedelic. Mr Astatke, the originator and composer of songs in this canon, plays his principal instrument, the vibraphone, with a light touch....
Last summer members of The Roots performed a fiery tribute to Ornette Coleman, a free-jazz saxophone legend. With Vernon Reid on guitar and David Murray on saxophone, the show featured several generations of inventive African-American musicians on a London stage. The result was largely exciting, occasionally long-winded and certainly momentous. In a similar spirit...
Long before we debated what real punk-rock was, what true hip-hop was, or what made indie-rock authentic, jazz heads grappled with what is and isn’t jazz music. Now, the debate is whether jazz is dying off or not. America’s jazz audience is not only shrinking, it’s aging. Attendance at jazz performances has dropped 30%...
A series of recent live music performances at London’s Southbank Centre by–or inspired by–Ornette Coleman, a free jazz legend, was equal parts amazing, exhausting and surprising. Never dull. Having never seen Coleman perform live before, two things became clear to me by the end of the week: his playing oozes with the blues, and...
It’s one thing to listen to scratchy old recordings of your favorite jazz artist, but seeing filmed live footage of greats like Ella Fitzgerald or Clifford Brown ripping it is a completely different kind of treat for the real fan. For the devotee, it’s all in the details: Until I saw late ’50s television...