“The Magic Hour” by Louisiana-born trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was that sweetest of swinging homecomings – like time spent laughing with old friends on a front porch. We have Marsalis returning finally to small-band work – where he once sparked the kind of mainstream interest in a jazz trumpeter enjoyed long ago by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. [...]

by S. Victor Aaron Last year brought the welcome return of Enrico Rava’s 1975 masterwork The Pilgrim And The Stars to American shores for the first time in CD form. Only a few months later, we’re getting treated to a new set of recordings by Italy’s foremost jazz musician. New York Days, out just a few days ago, doesn’t look [...]

by S. Victor Aaron Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue is widely proclaimed to be the best jazz album of all time. To me, such a declaration seems to downplay so many other jazz records that are phenomenal and hugely influential in their own ways. If I were able to take only one Miles album–much less any jazz album—to that mythical [...]

by Nick DeRiso Weather Report founders Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, fresh off a stint in Miles Davis’ band, took a surprising turn on their next project. Again, they worked with equal skill outside the structure of jazz — tossing the straight-ahead nomenclature of soloist-and-accompaniment for a nervy cacophony of continuous improvisation by every member — even as they embraced [...]

There was, for a pairing of musicians so closely associated with other forms, an irrepressible blues feel to 1961’s “Bags Meets Wes,” reissued this year as part of the Keepnews Collection. That makes a chance meeting between Milt Jackson (longtime member of the complex, often formal Modern Jazz Quartet) and Wes Montgomery (who was just years away from turning his [...]

NICK DERISO: Jobim’s bossa nova orchestrations — marked by feather-like rhythms and a freer song structure — provide the platform for Frank Sinatra’s most interesting late-period release. “I haven’t sung so soft,” the belter once joked, “since I had the laryngitis.” Stories of the way conductor Claus Ogerman struggled to get the sensual tempo just right for both men are [...]

NICK DERISO: You have Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, playing a concert amidst some of the darkest moments of 1960s’ strife, making his own statement for racial pride. Then, as this former Miles Davis sideman repeats the song’s edgy admonition — Walk tall! Walk tall! – his band rumbles up with a friendly, familiar soul context. That’s anchored by Joe Zawinul, recalling [...]

NICK DERISO: There was a time, and not that long ago, when jazz was the music of this country’s youth — a way to rage against the machine, back when the machines were Desotos and Studebakers. So we have here a fairly novel idea: Using the staid conventions of classical compositions as a mid-century American improviser once would — that [...]

NICK DERISO: Volume 2 gives an idea of how considerable a wake the 1940s Miles Davis Nonet left. Taking its name from Davis’ legendary 1950 recording, this welcome, if belated, compilation scoops up all of the Capitol cuts from the early ’50s by two of the nonet’s most important disciples, Shorty Rogers and his Giants and the Gerry Mulligan Tentette. [...]

by Pico The first time I heard “Barbary Coast” was when I got halfway through the second side of a vinyl copy Weather Report’s Black Market I had just purchased, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with it then. In this rendering, it was a three minute one-chord bass riff decorated with Joe Zawinul’s chintzy synthesizers. It was also Jaco’s first [...]