Spanish pianist Chano Dominguez has made a jazz career in exploring its connections with the flamenco of his native Cadiz. On previous offerings, Dominguez has carved out a place where the various dance rhythms and sung cadences of flamenco find equal voice with jazz lyricism, exploration, and harmonic adventure. Flamenco Sketches began as a commission…
This CD could have been titled Finally! Dianne Reeves has long had the potential to be the top female jazz singer, but so many of her previous recordings were erratic as she skipped back and forth between idioms without committing herself. However, after years of flirting with jazz and…
Dianne Reeves, who has always had a beautiful voice and the potential for greatness in jazz, has conducted a rather directionless career, performing many concerts filled with spontaneity while at the same time recording erratic albums that usually feature both veteran jazz ballads and newer material that is closer…
Drifting back closer to the avant-garde territory that they cut their teeth on, Medeski, Martin & Wood explore percolating sonic textures on The Dropper. Released by Blue Note in late 2000, the jazz trio’s seventh album is a complex blend of Latin jazz, haunting soundscapes, hip-hop grooves, and…
As the only jazz band to be accepted by the neo-hippies of the HORDE ’90s, Medeski, Martin & Wood pulled off the strange coup of being embraced by rock and jazz audiences, who both loved their endless improvisations. They managed to walk the fine line dividing between the two…
Vocalist Cassandra Wilson has used her 15 years at Blue Note to explore the interpretive range of her voice, whether singing tunes by Van Morrison, Robert Johnson, Lewis Allan, Miles Davis, or Hoagy Carmichael. In many ways, Wilson has offered a new view of the standard by using classic…
Cassandra Wilson’s swinging for her own creative fences this time. The sultry, gentle, acoustic guitars on her last five recordings have been largely jettisoned for a more keyboard-and percussion -friendly approach — which includes lots of programming and loops. To that end, she’s enlisted flavor-of-the-year producer T-Bone Burnett and…
Cassandra Wilson has garnered a deserving reputation for her soulful, visionary reads of songs by legendary composers old and new, from Robert Johnson to Van Morrison. On Glamoured, Wilson composed half the album, and her songs are as provocative and deserve the same weight of grace critically afforded her…
Cassandra Wilson continues to move down a highly eclectic path on Belly of the Sun, the somewhat belated follow-up to Traveling Miles. While displaying a jazz singer’s mastery of melodic nuance and improvisatory phrasing, Wilson draws on a variety of non-jazz idioms — roots music, rock, Delta blues, country,…
