Category Archives: Reviews

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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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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Omar Sosa Finds Light in Shadow

Omar Sosa, Senses (Otá Records)
A Review

Senses CoverDon’t think of Omar Sosa as a Cuban pianist/composer. Think of him, instead, as a shaman for whom music is a spiritual
instrument for opening a window onto the other world, enlarging our capacity for
compassion and joy, celebrating the life force.

On Senses, which finds him solo at the piano, he uses it to heal himself in an emotionally difficult period and to apply balm to any chafed spirit who listens.

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Another Poet in Nueva York

Alexis Cuadrado, A Lorca Soundscape (Sunnyside)
A Review

Lorca_CoverBassist, composer, and Barcelona native
Alexis Cuadrado may be the most lyrical cat on the New York scene these days. One thing’s certain: his latest release, A Lorca Soundscape, is the evocative musical analogue to the poetical phantasms of Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, a dark and
magical record of the poet’s experience in
Depression Era New York City.

For Cuadrado, the parallels between that time, the early 1930s, and our own are clear and disturbing, as this collection of
compositions makes absolutely clear. He calls the pieces a protest against the “inequality, racism, and injustice” that endure as part of our “daily narrative” 80 years after Lorca’s work was published. We could also call them an eloquently lyrical portrait of a world out of balance, and a stunning artistic achievement. Given the personnel on the album—Cuadrado (bass, percussion, background vocals), Claudia Acuña (voice), Miguel Zenón (alto sax), Dan Tepfer (piano), Mark Ferber (drums), and Gilmar Gomes (percussion)—the high level of artistry on the album should come as no surprise at all.

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