Bailey's Bundles

The common element between Sara Serpa's Aurora and Christine Correa's Down Here Below is obviously pianist Ran Blake. Enigmatic to a fault, Blake has made a potent name for himself among improvised music enthusiasts. Blake is an intellectual amalgam of pianists Thelonious Monk and Martial Solal distilled to a dissonant essence.

A long time professor at ...

Piano reductions of orchestral and vocal scores are a tradition meeting two ends. First, for the transcriber to show off his arrangement and performance abilities. Franz Liszt made a cottage industry of this. Second, to produce sheet music that could be played by the amateur in their perfectly appointed parlor before tea time (queue Beethoven's Symphony ...

Not everything stopped while World War II raged. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic regularly performed and recorded until quite late in the war (when their concert hall was bombed), producing some of the most controversial and provocative Beethoven of the period, if not ever. Considered here is one recording of Schubert's Winterreise taped as ...

The spirit of trumpeter Miles Davis remains very much a creative quasar furnishing a certain gravitational pull to a considerable population of bodies orbiting it. On the outer edges of this quasar's orbit are the (relatively) young trumpeters who emerged after the pedantic eclipse of Wynton Marsalis occurred. Three of these orbiting horn players have released ...

Violinist Lara St. John is not the only noted fiddler from the friendly climes of Canada. The past few years have seen the emergence of two exceptional violinists, Aisslinn Nosky and Julia Wedman, who intersect one another in multiple places, including: Tafelmusik, the Eybler String Quartet and the Baroque chamber group, I Furiosi. Outside of Tafelmusik, ...

The “Sacred Steel" tradition born in the House of God Church some 80 years ago employed the pedal steel and lap steel guitars as the centerpiece of their message. The steel guitars, long an eloquent staple of country and western music are used to a much grittier effect in this largely African-American mode of worship.

In ...

Singers singing songs. Times are good for choral music when stalwart Chanticleer and relative newcomers Cantus and Seraphic Fire produce new music in such close proximity. Chanticleer releases a collection of concert highlights while Cantus expands the choral acreage on all four sides and Seraphic Fire looks backward with an instrumentally strip-down of an old favorite. ...

Solo horn recitals are nothing new. Both Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy produced several each. Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins released a sparking The Solo Album (Milestone, 1985), while Bobby Watson's alto wailed solo on This Little Light of Mine (Red Records, 1993). No other format allows the horn player more freedom than playing solo. Here are ...

Six strings or seven...twelve frets give or take a couple. That is what the guitar is. Mark Kleinhaut and Hristo Vitchev are two guitarists whose vision expands the role of the guitar in both composition and improvisation. They explore, Kleinhaut with immediate improvisation and Vitchev with directed performance, the length and breadth of guitar playing with ...

Pianists/vocalists Dena DeRose and Elizabeth Shepherd illustrate different sides of the same coin with Travelin' Light--Live in Antwerp, Belgium and Rewind. The former is a sturdy statement of standards presented solo live in the cozy and organic confines of a European venue. The latter is a studio marvel by an inventive risk-taker walking on a jazz ...

Pianist Hank Jones (1918-2010) was the senior member of musical siblings that included trumpeter Thad Jones (1923-1986) and drummer Elvin Jones (1927-2004), both of whom he outlived. Jones was a musician of impeccable elegance and a holy grace who could be compared with Teddy Wilson and Tommy Flanagan had he any peers. Everything bassist Charlie Haden ...

The vocal ensemble Seraphic Fire hails from the warm climes of southern Florida. Brainchild and progeny of Patrick Dupré Quigley, the group assembles a passel of singing smarty pants who have been making their way through the standard vocal repertoire since their founding in the early 2000s. Since that time, the group, recording for the Seraphic ...

If pianist Bill Evans came after Bud Powell and Art Tatum, who came after Bill Evans? Fred Hersch did. It was from Hersch that Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson came as his students. Evans' language captivated jazz pianism for decades and needed evolutionary stimuli to further develop. That stimuli was provided by Hersch, who has quietly ...

Art Pepper (1929 -1982) is the story, but an important subtext is his widow, Laurie Pepper, who, since 2006, has been expanding the saxophonist's discography with unreleased live recordings from the 1980s. At the time, Art Pepper was enjoying his comeback, which began in 1975 with the release of Living Legend (Contemporary), hitting its stride in ...