Ever since Dexter Gordon won an Oscar for his work in Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight, the story of American jazz musicians finding rejuvenation under European stage lights has been a mainstream one. A lot of what those musicians actually played over there, however, has been hard to find Stateside, instead trickling in across the decades through traded tapes, bootlegs and shoddy releases (with a few notable exceptions). So, it is with some interest that this grab-bag of live dates, o

Strange timing, this. Almost 25 years after it was originally recorded comes this medium-length conversation between two titans of American improvised music. Fans of jazz’ farther out shores will need little introduction to either of the participants here. But despite their joint (and lazy) labeling as “outcats,” the initial highpoints of their careers – Smith’s sparse and subtle phrasing with the Smith-Braxton-Jenkins trio vs. Blackwell’s upbeat tapdancing underneath the classic Ornette Coleman

Literary critic Harold Bloom’s contentious phrase - "the anxiety of influence" - sulks and stalks behind the majority of modern, young jazz musicians; simply meaning that m…

Sunny southern California hasn’t been known as much of a jazz spot for many years. In the postwar period, of course, it was not only a proving ground for so-called "West Co…

Parallelism is a tempting game for the lazy writer - thus the proliferation of name dropping and "sounds like" references in the average music piece. The problem is that it…