JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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This collection gathers some of the early material of Machito and His Afro-Cubans, before Machito’s brother-in-law Mario Bauza started bringing in notable jazz performers as guests in the band, so the music has glints of big band jazz circa 1940, but most of the time, it’s pretty much straight up Cuban […]

WORTH A LISTEN
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Frank Kimbrough brings an unusual improvisational and compositional strategy to Lullabluebye (on the Palmetto label). He mostly sticks to pentatonic scales, diatonic scales, and passing tones, eschewing altered scales for the most part. His attack is also very unconfrontational. He tends to gently swing, leaning into his phrases. There is very little […]

DON’T BOTHER
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Regular readers of this site are probably well aware of my admiration for both Dave Liebman and Gil Goldstein. Dave Liebman has been one of the most important post-Coltrane saxophonists since the mid-70s. Gil Goldstein has distinguished himself mostly as an arranger, especially in his work with Michael Brecker (Wide Angles) and the SF […]

DON’T BOTHER
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Listening to You’re Under Arrest (on Columbia Records) is an enervating, depressing experience. The grooves are robotic and lame. On covers like Human Nature and Time After Time, Miles is reduced to doing soft core R&B covers of pop tunes. I mean, we’re talking about Miles Davis, who was consistently in the center of […]

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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In jazz festivals these days, programmers always face a quandary. Young musicians naturally want to showcase new music, but audiences respond to familiarity, in the form of standards. The SFJazz Collective has come up with an ingenious solution to this dilemma. During their first year, they focused on the works of […]

WORTH A LISTEN
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Chick Corea is a bit of a puzzle to me. If you listen to any of his recent records, it’s obvious that he has not lost any of his chops. He plays as well as he ever has. But for a long time now, he has exhibited weird lapses in taste, both […]

DON’T BOTHER
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Have you ever watched a movie and really grooved on the soundtrack, only to find that later on, when you bought the soundtrack and listened to it in isolation from the images, it wasn’t all that great? That’s a bit what it’s like to listen to Elevator To The Gallows (Ascenseur Pour l’Échafaud).
Mind […]

DON’T BOTHER
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Tutu (on the Columbia label) barely counts as a Miles Davis album. More accurately, it’s a Marcus Miller date, with Davis being the principle soloist. Most of the instruments are played by Marcus Miller. All but one of the arrangements are by Marcus Miller. Six out of eight of the tunes were written […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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First off, I should point out that the title of this Miles Davis release is a little misleading. Half of the tunes on Live Evil (released on the Columbia label) were recorded in the studio. The other half were indeed recorded live at The Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. I suspect that […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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After Jaco’s tragic death, the market was flooded with posthumous releases. Most of them were pretty terrible. The Birthday Concert (issued on the Warner Brothers label) is a notable exception.
To a large degree, The Birthday Concert duplicates the set list of Invitation, the official live set that was put out while Jaco […]