JAZZBO NOTES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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It’s hard to explain why Up All Night is a bit of a letdown.
Up All Night (on the Verve label) is the follow up to Uberjam, one of my favorite John Scofield records. Both feature the same band. As on Uberjam, Scofield uses modern R&B rhythms borrowed from hiphop as […]

DON’T BOTHER
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Okay, here’s a question for you. Imagine that you’ve come across a date you’ve never heard of before with the following personel: Jim Pepper on tenor, Larry Coryell on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass, Keith Jarrett on keys, and Bob Moses on drums. Would you be interested? Hell, yeah!
Sucker.
I’m always in favor 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 […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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Around the time Sweetnighter came out on the Columbia label, Joe Zawinul was frustrated. He had initially put together Weather Report as a unique combination of free jazz and through composed tunes, in which it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. When it worked, it was […]

DON’T BOTHER
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If the inclusion of multiple musical genres and thematic cohesiveness were enough to make a piece of music a masterpiece, Bob Moses’ The Story of Moses would surely qualify. A cursory analysis of The Story of Moses would reveal hip hop, funk, salsa, rock, and traditional Yiddish musical influences. No less an authority […]

WORTH A LISTEN
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Lord knows John McLaughlin has been responsible for any number of classic recordings, but Electric Dreams is not one of them, despite the wonderful cover art by Hypgnosis.
It sure isn’t the fault of the band: Stu Goldberg on keys, Fernando Saunders on bass, Alyrio Lima on percussion, Tony […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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Natural Elements (issued on the CBS label) is the third and final Shakti release from the original group (John McLaughlin put together a new version of Shakti in the late 90s). It differs quite a bit from it’s predecessors in that the tune lengths are quite short. There is a lot […]

JAZZBO NOTE HIGHLY RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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Native Dancer (on the Columbia label) was the start of an enduring friendship between saxman Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento, one of the great popular singing stars of Brazil.
Shorter had previously shown his interest in Brazilian music as early as his cover of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Dindi on his Blue Note release […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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Omar Sosa is up to his old tricks on Free Roots, trying to cram the entire African diaspora into every tune. Amazingly, it doesn’t just sound like a freeway pileup, which is due to Sosa’s amazing skills as a pianist, composer, and arranger.
For example, on Travieso, hiphop collides with Latin, Afrocuban […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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I’ve written a lot about Eberhard Weber as a bandleader elsewhere on this site. Pretty much any of his work with reed player Charlie Mariano and keyboardist Rainer Bruninghaus is well worth owning, and Silent Feet is no exception.
All of this work is basically Eurojazz. It doesn’t have a lot of […]