CD Reviews (11563)
Find full CD and individual track reviews of your favorite jazz artists right here, and hopefully you also discover some new artists to add to your collection as well.
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Gary Husband is a musical renaissance man. A ferocious progressive-rock and jazz drummer, he also handles the keyboard duties here and for guitar titan, John McLaughlin’s 4th Dimension band. This outing provides a glimpse of prominent artists he has performed with over the years. Subsequently, the program signifies the first…
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Even though she is a singer with lot of experience Hungry Girl is Margie Nelson debut album. A singer with a sultry voice, Margie can be funny, classy and romantic. Impossible to listen to the lyrics of the song "Hungry Girl" witout smiling. One line of the song says "Rachel…
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Things yet unknown is the debut album from Michigan native trombonist Shawn Bell. Shawn is a young musician who studied at Michigan University and Northern Illinois University. All the music on Things yet unknown are Shawn Bell originals except You stepped out of a dream and In the wee small…
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For an ensemble to create a lengthy recording of improvised music worthy of an attentive audience, it takes a unique combination of technique and empathy. Such is the case with Varpai from the German-based trio of vocalist André Pabarciuté, bassist Mark Tokar and percussionist Klaus Kugel. The three like-minded artists…
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Contemporary jazz saxophone icon Dave Koz has recently released his first CD for the Concord Music Group entitled Hello Tomorrow. Two decades of recording and touring extensively (on many occasions billed as “Dave Koz and Friends”) has helped lay the requisite groundwork for this superb masterpiece. Superlatively and exactingly produced…
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This is an unusual, even strange release. The basic idea is to take an eight-note theme by Bach (from his First Invention), and play it over and over again while changing keys and keyboard tone-quality. The variations are alternated with Afro-Cuban percussion. I probably shouldn't have told you that, because…
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With his second solo release for Norway’s SOFA record label, percussionist Ingar Zach spawns a strange, yet accessible panorama on this mind-bending studio session recorded in Spain. To augment drums, bells and cymbals, Zach employs a gran cassa, which is a horizontal bass drum, housing a resonating membrane that spawns…
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Nearly twenty years after the death of Stan Getz, we now have the complete recordings he made with Kenny Barron at the Cafe Montmatre in Copenhagen in 1991, shortly before the legendary tenor man succumbed to cancer.Up until now, the 2 disc version of People Time has stood as a…
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This album, by Issac Delgado, is the recreation of the sounds of Nat King Cole in Spanish. The majority of the songs are also on Latin albums of Nat King Cole. The rest are “Cole classics” mixed with Delgado’s own style and elements of Latin Jazz. For the first time…
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22 Feb
Heart And Soul by Kenny G.
Kenny G is one of the most phenomenal smooth jazz musicians known through out history. He has sold over millions of albums and that is just in the United States. He started his solo career in 1982 and in now known worldwide. This album Heart and Soul is produced by Walter Afanasieff and Kenny G. himself. This is a smooth jazz style with a twist of urban with the help of vocal artists Babyface, “No Place Like Home,” and Robin Thicke, “Fall Again."This album is very touching. Robin Thicke’s “Fall
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There is a very good reason why tenor and soprano, as well as sometime alto, saxophonist Joe Lovano is one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. It’s because he has devoted his life to finding new ways to express improvised melodic conceptualizations, because his harmonic language continues to…
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James Moody passed away today. It would take extraordinary words to adequately describe the genius of this remarkable artist. This album, his last, is a treasure and keepsake for all afficionados of jazz. Moody's phrasing and ideas say a lot about him. In his soliloquys, it's as if he is…
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Exploring odd-meters, swirling melodic themes and rhythmically-charged free-form improvisations, the New York-based collective Tarbaby delivers an intriguing set of swing-based jazz with The End of Fear. Along with core members Orrin Evans on piano, bassist Eric Revis and Nasheet Watts on drums, the twelve-track set features the trumpeter Nicholas Payton…
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Stories Yet To Tell is something very special indeed from British jazz singer Norma Winstone. Somehow, all the material on this album summarizes what the ECM label is all about: spacious, haunting music that leaves you with a sense of lingering reflection at what you have just listened to. It's…
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There is a little bit of Broadway in the way MJ Territo sings. And even in the jazzier moments on the album, Territo does not sound like any other female jazz singer. Her pharsing and style reminds me more of male singers, like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett than Holiday…
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Jazz and Country? Billie Holiday and Dolly Parton music in the same CD? Seems like an odd combination. Billie and Dolly is the tittle of Jacqui Sutton new album, but in reality just two songs are from Lady Day and the Queen of Country, God Bless the Child and Endless…
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One of the ways jazz has grown is by absorbing the sounds and rhythms of other cultures. African and Latin American music were strong early influences. Today, India is making waves. Since classical Indian music has always included extensive improvisation, it seems it might have happened sooner. However, while spirituals,…
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Europeans always liked and supported jazz since the beginning, when they first heard James Reese's Europe HellFigthers. At the beginning of the 20th century when jazz was regarded as inferior black music, some European classical composers were among the first to recognize the richness and the quality of this new…
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Jazz standards in an intimate format of just guitar, bass and clear, rich vocals, that is the new album of Jenny Davis, Inside you. Jenny Davis vocals are equally soulful and honest in ballads like My romance or swingin pieces like On green dolphin strett. Like any good jazz musician…
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Elisabeth Lohninger’s album, Songs of Love and Destruction, is full of extremely emotional songs. This album could take the listener on some kind of an emotional rollercoaster ride, but some tend to need something similar to realize that life is what it is. For example; her song, “Save Me” –“Save…
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