There is a rare kind of confidence in knowing when not to play. Vibraphonist, composer, and bandleader Mike Freeman has clearly mastered that art, and Circles...
When you hear that there is something such as The Latin Side of McCoy Tyner, some thoughts of incongruency do creep in. After all McCoy Tyner...
In a world mad about Afro-Caribbean music, the name Samuel Torres may not be the first to come to mind, but it most certainly should albeit...
Chiemi Nakai displays her remarkable piano chops with the heavy left hand tumbao while still managing to be delicately eloquent. Even when she is at her...
To listen to the voice of The Dreamers struggling against a manic administration in the 2019 White House is not too much to ask for and...
The drummer Chris Smith’s dream of making music a way of life has something of a fairytale quality to it and so does the formation of...
Steven Kroon is not only living the dream as one of the frontline percussionist playing music in the Afro-Caribbean, Brasilian and Latin-Jazz styles, but he has...
Essential Albums Revisited At first blush one might feel that William Cepeda AfroRican Jazz: My Roots and Beyond might seem like an attempt to re-brand what...
This homage is enormously impressive. Freeman’s work on this album swings magnificently and ranges from a white-hot volcano of expression to pieces in which he stretches...
In the 1990s Gregor Huebner seems to have fallen into a time-warp the door of which portal opened into Argentina. There Huebner and his brother discovered...
That Ralph Irizarry’s percussion has found numerous champions attests to the timbalero’s ability to play in a well-crafted, idiomatic manner in wide-ranging, accessible and passionate settings...
Pianists who embark on Cuban music projects usually present them as traditional or modern, but rarely both. Mike Eckroth does both on his extraordinary album Piano...
The most interesting challenge in reinventing music that has already been invented in a particular idiom is not necessarily melodic. In fact it is almost certainly...
If good musical art is meant to find the listener catching his or her breath at its beauty, it is also meant to pierce the consciousness—as...
Conrad Herwig and the Latin Side All-Stars Pay Tribute to Horace Silver Conrad Herwig is no stranger to reimagining the work of seminal jazz musicians and...