Author Archives: Mel Minter

Vintage Jazz and Blues with Riverside Jass Trio (and a Plug for Our Sponsor)

I’m beginning to think there’s a musician hiding under every rock in Albuquerque. The place is lousy with them—and good ones, too. The Riverside Jass Trio comprises an orthopedist, a
professor, and an architect. They’ve got a new CD and are planning a party to celebrate its
release. I sure hope their patients, students, and clients, respectively, are happy with their
professional services because music fans are disappointed that these guys aren’t playing music full-time.

InDesign Page 1 & 4.indd Riverside Jass Trio, That’s a Plenty (Café Jazzed Music Productions)
A Review

Richard “Doc” Rock (trombone, banjo, vocals, and orthopedics), Wayne Shrubsall (banjo,
vocals, and a Ph.D. in American studies), and Mark Weaver (tuba and architectural
structures) have each made his mark in a
musical setting completely different from his band mates.

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Three Saxophones: Two Reviews and One Preview

 

John Lurie, back then, by Hanna Hedren.

John Lurie demands reconsideration with the John Lurie National
Orchestra’s release of The Invention of Animals.
MG_6255-1r r jones

 

 

Ben Flocks makes his recording debut with an old-school sensibility.

Glenn Kostur in concert pays tribute to the late Cedar Walton with a little help from his friends.

Glenn Kostur.

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hONEyhoUSe in Concert (Updated)

hONEyhoUSe—Savannah Thomas, Mandy Buchanan, Hillary Smith, and Yvonne Perea—in concert at the Outpost in 2013.

hONEyhoUSe—Savannah Thomas, Mandy Buchanan, Hillary Smith, and Yvonne Perea—in concert at the Outpost in 2013.

When it comes to women’s voices singing three-part harmony, I am completely defenseless. The music bypasses all critical faculties and goes straight for the heart. When the harmonizing is done with the peerless joy, skill, and emotional investment that hONEyhoUSe bring to the table, well, don’t bother handing me a tissue. Just pass the whole box.

Singer/songwriters Mandy Buchanan, Yvonne Perea, and Hillary Smith come from three
different musical backgrounds—country, blues/folk, and soul, respectively. They bring three
distinctive timbres to the microphone, and they each have had success on their own. When they come together in hONEyhoUSe, though, it’s a classic “the sum is greater than the parts”
situation, and the music they make is all but guaranteed to lift you up, turn you around, and set you back down with a big old smile on your face.

This Saturday at the Outpost—with their faithful sidekicks Savannah Thomas on percussion and Maud Beenhouwer on bass—they’ll be sharing some of the new material that’s on their
forthcoming album, Sweep, scheduled for release this spring, as well as some favorites from their first two, award-winning albums. If it’s anything like their last concert at the Outpost, it will be a night to remember. The concert will be video’ed by Rolling R Productions for future video presentations, so get your glad rags on and be prepared to party.

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Guitarist Joshua Breakstone: Storyteller

Breakstone CoverJoshua Breakstone
With the Wind and the Rain (Capri Records)
A Review

Fans of old-school jazz guitar will welcome the arrival of the latest recording from Joshua Breakstone, who doesn’t just play jazz, but celebrates it in his playing. On his latest
venture, With the Wind and the Rain,
Breakstone and his longtime mates—bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer Eliot Zigmund—invite cellist Mike Richmond to join in on four of the nine tracks.

Breakstone loves the sound of the cello, which, he tells me, found its way into the jazz lexicon in the ’50s and ’60s, when a number of premier jazz bassists began featuring the instrument on recordings. As he says in his liner notes, the possibilities of the cello-augmented trio really
flowered once he began hearing the quartet as a string section with percussion, rather than as a trio with added cello. The strings play as a section on the head of three of the four tracks with cello, and as Breakstone said in phone conversation, this sort of arrangement “makes you
attend to the music much more closely, and really brings out accents of the whole sound of the strings.”

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Clarinetist Doug Wieselman Transcribes Water

Wieselman coverDoug Wieselman, From Water (88 Records)
A Review

Last June, thanks to the kindness of the Kites, friends of ours in Portland, Oregon, Melissa and I spent a couple of nights with the Kite family in a house perched over the Pacific Ocean. Our 180º view of the watery expanse was bracketed by Cape Meares to the north and cliffs to the south, and haystacks
promenaded out into the water just below us. As expected, it was visually stunning, but what was unexpected—forgotten in the many years since we had sojourned at the water’s edge—was the sound. Constant yet ever-changing; thunderous but nuanced, with echoes bouncing off the land and the clouds, and with grace notes from wind and rain, the sound was absolutely mesmerizing and transformative. This coastal son et lumière gave me simultaneously the contradictory notions of just how vast is the ocean, and just how tiny the planet.

So when, a few months later, I got word of clarinetist/composer Doug Wieselman’s album, From Water, I was more than intrigued. All of the tunes on this 10-track album—with the exception of John Lennon’s “Julia”—are originals that were primarily made from melodies Wieselman heard in bodies of water. Add that he’s worked with some of my favorite musicians—Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, and Jenny Scheinman, among others—and I was ready to listen.

This guy has got a serious pair of ears and absolute command of his instrument.

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