jazz

 

Gypsy king: From a stool in Brooklyn, Stephane Wrembel plays in the tradition of Django Reinhardt, and invents his own

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"There is no such thing as gypsy jazz," Wrembel said, accelerating his French accented English for emphasis, then halting. "It's 'Django.' Django was one guy, a lot of people were inspired by him, but they do different things." More

By Per Liljas

February 1, 2012 11:16 am

 

Streets of Your Town: This week's concerts, with A$AP Rocky, Thurston Moore, Björk and more

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Streets of your town is a selection of the week's concert offerings in New York. In this week's lineup, A$AP Rocky, Thurston Moore, Hospitality, Skrillex, Björk, and more More

By J. Edward Keyes

January 30, 2012 12:26 pm

 

Streets of your town: Live acts from King Krule, The Lemonheads, McCoy Tyner, and more

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If the opening weeks of 2012 are trying to teach us anything, it's not to confuse the improbably with the impossible. To wit: A presidential candidate used to holding rallies to empty rooms can suddenly surge to prominence, a band best known for occupying arenas in the '80s can turn up in a downtown folk club to play a show for 250 people, and the deep, dour, world-weary voice bellowing from behind a backdrop of rickety guitars might just belong to a 17-year old kid. More

By J. Edward Keyes

January 9, 2012 10:03 am

 

Streets of your town: This week's concert offerings, featuring Yellow Dogs, Xray Eyeballs, Slick Rick, Adam Kolker and more

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If there was a single theme to the year we just put behind us, it was unrest. Whether it was Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street, the past dozen months were among the most turbulent in recent memory; that TIME named "The Protestor" as its person of the year is an indication of how deep notions of both dissatisfaction and outright defiance have seeped into the collective consciousness. So it's perhaps fitting that the first batch of musical offerings in 2012 are themselves characterized by an unruly spirit.

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By J. Edward Keyes

January 2, 2012 1:39 pm

 

Streets of Your Town: Mingus Big Band, Patti Smith, Deer Tick, and more treats to ring in the new year

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If the run-up to New Year's Eve can be fraught with expectation, it can also be a time for reflection—looking back over the course of the past year and trying to sort out what can be learned from it. That, in a way, has been the mission of the Mingus Big Band (Dec. 26, Jazz Standard) since the jazz giant's widow, Sue, founded the group in 1991. More

By J. Edward Keyes

December 27, 2011 2:11 pm

 

The 'J-Word': In a year of controversy, the best Jazz albums tested the parameters of the term

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It's not every day that one sees an artist like Nicholas Payton, who plays brilliantly and made many fine records, publicly engage in what would appear to be an act of self-immolation. But his frustrations resonated with many musicians. They applauded his assertion that jazz was a construct that had been imposed on them by the music industry. But what would they replace it with? And would this really give them more power with club owners and label executives? More

By Devin Leonard

December 26, 2011 8:40 am

 

Composer George Lewis rages with the machines in rare Miller Theater presentation of his work

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“In my kind of doing electronic music, there is always an upfront notion of the machine's subjectivity,” he said. “You can't turn it off, you can't have it do exactly what you want. But it's obvious that it's listening, though it doesn't always imitate what you do. … It also contributes things that are nice that you want to deal with. That's a very difficult thing for some people to accept, because they're used to the encounter with machines as one in which there's a strict hierarchy, where humans are at the top. That gets smashed in my work, where basically there’s a subject relationship. More

By Seth Colter Walls

November 11, 2011 10:14 am

 

Rob Garcia trades in his 'trad' roots to become one of New York's great jazz drummers - and composers

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Garcia is a fine drummer and a gifted composer. He writes songs with unusual time signatures. But Garcia and his band members play them with a casualness that would dazzle the old masters. The beat rarely lands where you would expect, but the groove is always right there.

The drummer also writes melodies that are disarmingly simple and child-ike. They linger in your mind like those of Monk, Shorter and the Tin Pan Alley composers whom Garcia also deeply admires. More

By Devin Leonard

October 24, 2011 6:45 am

 

A crowded schedule that's worth the effort, from Anthony Braxton to Portishead to Anna Netrebko to Philip Glass

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There’s too much to hear: that’s the first empirical fact to absorb about the coming music season in New York. From a consumer perspective the problem is compounded by the amount of effort it can take to see just the best stuff: tickets purchased online weeks or months in advance, forcing you to tick a date on the calendar when you really have no idea what work will have in store for you that day; or else the intellectual endurance required while trekking to the same venue over the course of multiple nights to see a single cycle of performances. Who has the time to plan for such extravagances, let alone commit them? More

By Seth Colter Walls

September 8, 2011 11:10 am

 

Protest music: A young Brit channels the rage of Mingus, brilliantly

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The British jazz pianist John Escreet lives in a sparsely furnished apartment in Flatbush. He keeps it very tidy, for a 25-year-old. There was, on a recent visit, almost nothing about the appearance of the place that squares with his jazz persona, which produces compositions with titles like “Civilization on Trial” and “Avaricious World."

But then he picks up a book from a stack on the table that sits right beside the upright piano he works on at home. It’s the memoir of a child soldier who fought in Sierra Leone’s bloody civil war. There’s another by a self-described “economic hit man” who claims to have wreaked havoc in third world countries to benefit American corporations. Soon, Escreet is talking about how the escalating tensions between North and South Korea could spark a nuclear war that, he said, might wipe out much of the human race.

“The way people act towards each other right now, it might be for the best,” Escreet said with a shrug. “That’s what’s going to happen in the end anyway. Maybe nuking each other sounds pessimistic. I don’t fully believe that, but ….” More

By Devin Leonard

February 17, 2011 11:25 am