Braved a fairly torrential downpour to go see Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! at the Bloor Cinema downtown (& got a good sloooshing from a passing streetcar into the bargain). It was that or go see Marcus Belgrave — on second thought I wish I’d gone to see Belgrave. Not because the film wasn’t worthwhile (it’s [...]
Just a quick note for the Torontonians who read this site. The jazz festival this year has a pretty decent lineup: thought I’d list a few things I was thinking of going to. (How many depends on how deep my pockets are, which in turn depends on how a job interview goes this Wednesday…)
Joost Buis’s [...]
A belated post for Bloomsday, courtesy Count Screwlooseum: check out this feature article on the obstructiveness of the James Joyce estate.
Robert W Getz on Scott Walker’s latest and the new book on Impulse! Records. Check it out, folks.
I know I should be writing up some more worldshaking things rather than catching up on the obscurer corners of my to-review pile, but actually it’s an enormous relief to start making real headway on the backlog of [...]
Jeff Silverbush, Grandma Mickey (Dodo Music). Eric Dolphy used to play along with the birds in the trees, and I’ve always imagined Jimmy Giuffre learned a lot from birdsong too — he did, after all, title two of his albums Flight and Conversations with a Goose. Saxophonist Jeff Silverbush’s debut album takes the idea further [...]
A quick pointer to the (latest) blog by the UK’s own Chris Goode, poet, playwright, writer of infrequent but massive and memorably digressive posts (currently, Derek Jarman, J.H. Prynne, Sound323, biorhythms and the Tate Modern are floating around somewhere in his prose).
Current activities here have been too numerous to list. Spent the last week or so at the [...]
The Uptown Quintet, Live in New York (Cellar Live). A slightly unexpected south-of-the-border release from the Cellar Live label, the house label of Vancouver’s Cellar jazz club. Like the Zimmer CD I just reviewed, this is faithful hard bop, though not pushing as far into mid-1960s styles (i.e. no audible influence from Impulse-period Coltrane or the [...]
Pete Zimmer, Burnin’ Live at the Jazz Standard (Tippin’ Records). You can tell we’re into hard bop territory here by the dropped “g”s: yep, we’re burnin’, we’re tippin’, we’re even doin’ somethin’ (title of a Zimmer original). Trumpeter Michael Rodriguez seems to be attracted to the lyrical, fragile trumpeters of the 1950s and 1960s rather [...]
Finally got round to updating the portion of the site with the old music reviews. It’s still far from complete (nothing new from Coda or Signal to Noise) but I tossed in several dozen pieces from late 2005 up to early this year. Tell me if you spot any typos or broken links: when I [...]
Sathima Bea Benjamin, Musical Echoes (Ekapa).
Benjamin, a South African jazz singer, is still best known for two key personal/musical relationships – as the wife of Abdullah Ibrahim and as (with Ibrahim) the prot&eaigu;g&eigu; of Duke Ellington — rather than as a musician in her own right. This is the first recording of hers I’ve encountered, actually, though [...]