Blogcritics Author: Nick Deriso

Music Review: Sonny Rollins - Road Shows Vol. 1 (CD)/In Vienne (DVD)

Nick Deriso — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:42:29 EDT

"A different sunset every night," Rollins once said, "that's what jazz is about."
Funny what an early end does to a legacy.Doomed geniuses are always better off, accolade-wise. They make their mark, even if it is ever so fleeting, and that moment is examined by fans-turned-archaeologists for generations.Pity the poor soul, then, who keeps at it. Who remains vital, unparalleled and upright.Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins is that...

Music Review: Bill Moring & Way Out East - Spaces In Time

Nick Deriso — Tue, 7 Oct 2008 07:28:31 EDT

Assorted jazz that moves your soul. That's the Way Out East way.
Bill Moring is someone readers of this space have come to know as the guy jazz pianist extraordinaire Steve Allee relies upon for holding down the bottom in his band. Moring is hardly "just" Allee's bass player, though. Throughout a three-decade career, Moring has played in ensembles of all sizes for big names like Dizzy Gillespie,...

Music Review: Milt Jackson and Wes Montgomery - Bags Meets Wes

Nick Deriso — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:21:16 EDT

A chance meeting of two jazz legends turned into a memorable record.
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...

Music Review: Maceo Parker - Roots and Grooves

Nick Deriso — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 19:26:58 EST

The most fully realized compliment ever paid to Ray Charles makes up for the hip-shakers that are often too polite.
The almost mythical groove of saxophonist Maceo Parker, best known for stints with James Brown and P-Funk, has always been a canny blending of styles from a long-past era.There’s the muscular bebop of Charlie Parker, the angular soul of Ray Charles, the playful R&B of Julian “Cannonball” Adderly. Sometimes all in one cut.So,...

Oscar Peterson, 1925-2007

Nick Deriso — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 11:57:06 EST

Jazz piano giant Peterson, whom Duke Ellington once referred to as the "Maharajah of the keyboard," died Sunday.
Oscar Peterson, one of jazz music's most recognizable modern-day pianists, was felled on Sunday not from the lingering effects of a 1993 stroke -- he kept playing after that -- but from kidney failure. He died, aged 82, in his native Canada outside Toronto.Peterson's stroke compromised his left hand some, but never his spirit. That unstoppable will...

Forgotten Series: Ike Turner - 1958-1959

Nick Deriso — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:03:05 EST

Ike Turner spun a very intense mixture of what would become full-bore rock 'n' roll.
Ike Turner's death on Wednesday brings to mind some fond memories of some great music.It's been more than 50 years since Stan Lewis opened Stan's Record Shop in downtown Shreveport. From his vantage point at the top of Texas Avenue (I used to sneak down there after class), he would go on to create a once-lucrative business, then see the...

The Best Beatles Songs You're Not Already Sick Of

Nick Deriso — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 08:11:02 EDT

Some of our favorite Beatles songs that didn't become hits.
by Nick Deriso and PicoWe are a couple of music reviewers who are proud of our divergent tastes. Nick's got you covered from David Allen Coe to Marcus Roberts, while Pico swerves wildly between The Subdudes and John Scofield.But there's a place we come together (heh): The Beatles. A conversation we had the other day in the wake of the...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Music Review: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Caravan

Nick Deriso — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:07:18 EDT

Art Blakey demanded bravado from his bands, and this one was perhaps his most intense and adventurous.Debuting here on Riverside, Caravan opens with Blakey's audacious drum solo - then moves quickly into an assertive and simply awe-inspiring take on a track once defined by Duke Ellington. A muscular trio of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bone player Curtis Fuller and saxophonist Wayne Shorter -- swelling the Jazz Messengers to sextet status for the first time ever -- clear the way for a impish signature by pianist Cedar Walton, then encircle the tune in ways both inventive and familiar.If this album ended at the 9:44 mark, when Caravan concludes, it would still be one for the ages. But they were just getting started, quite literally.Shorter, by then the veteran of the group, completely inhabits that role, offering new compositions in "Sweet n' Sour" and the harmonically challenging "This is for Albert" that anchor both sides of this record. A surprise among two other cover tunes is "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," which softens the familiar, driving Blakey sound with a touch of welcome romanticism - courtesy of Fuller's warm and inviting work on the trombone. Leave it to Hubbard to finish things on an appropriate note - burning down the house on the set closing, and appropriately named, "Thermo."Blakey, who was all about thermo, helped shape the 1950s reaction to the languid and occasionally featureless West Coast jazz - something Miles Davis launched with Birth of the Cool, then almost immediately distanced himself from as it began to become both pervasive and then moribund.Hard bop, with Blakey as its champion, helped steer the music back into its African root system - as did the subsequent, far more commercial soul jazz movement. Both had, at their center, a basis in the blues, best heard on the records of soul jazz stars like Jimmy Smith and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley. Hard bop took the blues, though, and built a entirely different structure on top of it.Blakey walked the walk, spending time during this period on West Africa, and taking the indiginous name of "Abdullah Ibn Buhaina" - later more commonly shortened, simply, to "Bu."But his fierce, uncompromising records only heralded a flying-leap period of experimentation by jazz musicians that went even further away from European musical traditions in the latter half of the 1960s - a no-chords/no-compass approach personified by the sheets-of-sound recordings by John Coltrane, and mirroring the flights of fancy by signature pop artists of the day like the Beatles.But before that came this period of sharp-witted, still vibrant recordings by guys like Blakey - a loving, if aggressive, look back into the roots of black music. The exit of Lee Morgan, followed by the quick introduction and steady maturation of Hubbard and Fuller, confirmed Blakey's place -- even then -- as one of the top finishing schools for young jazz minds. It's a role he would play into the 1980s, with final lineups that featured Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and then Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison.Bassist Reggie Workman appears for the first time with the Jazz Messengers here, but it's Walton also takes this album to places -- notably on the extended title piece -- that the departed Bobby Timmons couldn't have dreamed. Blakey found a way, even on transitional albums, to improve.They're still discovering their true voices, but yet also finding ways to dazzle. Mosaic, which preceded this one in 1961, and the subsequent 1964 album Free For All, both on Blue Note, are similar, nearly perfect polyrhythmic gems. A high-water period for a band that had many.Original producer Orrin Keepnews, who has supervised a new reissue of Caravan, also included alternate takes on both "Thermo" and "Sweet 'n' Sour."

Musical musings by Something Else! "We're not saying this is the best music ever; we're just saying...

One Track Mind: Journey - "Don't Stop Believin"

Nick Deriso — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 01:15:35 EDT

Tony Soprano tucked himself into a booth at a New Jersey diner -- one of those old-time places with a selection of jukebox tunes right at the table. He considered, briefly, something by Tony Bennett, but then went with Journey's "Don't Stop Believin." And with that, the final, controversial moments of HBO's The Sopranos -- one of television's most challenging series -- began to unfold.As the camera cut to Soprano's wife Carmela, Journey frontman Steve Perry sang: "Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world. She took the midnight train going anywhere." Back to Tony: "Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit, he took the midnight train going anywhere."From there, nothing much else happened, short of some shady characters giving Tony the stink eye. Then, just as Perry sang "Don't stop...," Boss Soprano looked toward the restaurant's entrance and the screen abruptly went blank -- sparking furious debate about what happened next at watercoolers across America the next day.In fact, it did so even among the members of Journey. "The point of the song playing," Perry said in published reports this week, "is that you just don't give up; life goes on even if you're the Sopranos. In the midst of his turbulent life and everything, there's always this sense of family and this sense of dreams and hopes for some kind of normalcy -- some kind of don't-give-up, don't-stop-believing feeling. I actually shouted 'All right!' at the end."An era-defining radio hit -- Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", along with the band's other hits "Open Arms" and "Who's Crying Now," once blared from every passing car it seemed. "Don't Stop Believin'" helped move nine million copies of the album Escape in 1981.It was, and I'm not making this up, also part of a video game. "Don't Stop Believin'" played in the background while you controlled various band members, helping them avoid groupies and evil promoters on the way to the Journey spaceship. Still later, it became a locker room anthem during the Chicago White Sox improbable run to a World Series title a couple of seasons ago.Not bad for a tune that mentions a neighborhood, South Detroit, that doesn't exist. Perry later covered for this by inserting the name of every single stop the band made on its endless 1980s touring schedule -- even "Shreveport." Again, I'm not making this up. When Journey played a cowbarn in my hometown called Hirsch Memorial Coliseum, we were name-checked like clockwork.Now the song belongs to television history."It puts our feet in the cement," Journey keyboard player Jonathan Cain said this week. "We're a staple in the American music culture. Like us or not, we're here to stay."But, what did this final scene, you know ... mean?Many appear to be counting on an as-yet unannounced Sopranos movie to subsequently explain things, and the soundtrack seemed to bolster that theory: "Some will win, some will lose," Perry offered. "Some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on..."There is some truth there, even if a sequel isn't in the offing."The Sopranos" finale, to me, challenged us to once again accept the mundane, open-ended nature of our own lives -- and that goes for mobsters, too. Some, in fact, will win -- and some will lose. But we know little about how that all will turn out.In the meantime, there are smaller joys, like a jukebox and its perhaps disposable heroes. Not to mention video games that demonize groupies and evil promoters.

Musical musings by Something Else! "We're not saying this is the best music ever; we're just saying...

One Track Mind: Paul McCartney "See Your Sunshine"

Nick Deriso — Sun, 3 Jun 2007 14:47:12 EDT

Embroiled in a very public and nasty divorce, McCartney embraces everything that made him matter in the first place on his ardent and thrilling new album -- and never more so than on this terrific throwback.Memory Almost Full -- to be issued on June 5 and available now for advance order on amazon.com -- works as retrospective more than the expected bitter introspection. That's fully realized on "See Your Sunshine," a canny Wings redo that ends up as the record's most anachronistic but somehow most appealing tune.Background vocals, bright and cyclic, so strongly recall Denny Laine and late wife Linda as to transport you completely back into 1976. ("Silly Love Songs," after all, went to No. 1 during the final week of May that year.) This is the kind of pure pop that McCartney parlayed into a soundtrack for the decade immediately following the Beatles' own ugly split.And just as welcome.That the CD title, "Memory Almost Full" is an anagram for "my soulmate LLM," Linda Louise McCartney's initials, wasn't lost on reporters. Asked the question, Paul reportedly said, "Some things are best left a mystery."He's not one of them.McCartney is supposed to sound like this song. That he meets that standard, so fully inhabits the cliché, during a period of crushing adversity is part of his charm. It always has been."See Your Sunshine" is not necessarily representative of McCartney's new release, which insists (under a grinding, industrial riff, on "Vintage Clothes") that we shouldn't "live in the past; don't hold on to something that's changing fast."Comfy nostalgia also doesn't fit with his recent departure from Capitol Records (where McCartney had recorded since the early 1960s with some band or another), his subsequent signing with Starbucks' new label Hear Music for his 21st solo CD -- or agreeing to release "Memory Almost Full" for the first time digitally on the Web.Still, it's good to know that even as McCartney tries to embrace this brash new world, he hasn't forgotten what came before.In a letter released in advance of the album, McCartney said the title came to him after the message "Memory Almost Full" popped up on his cell phone. "In modern life," he wrote, "our brains can get a bit overloaded.""See Your Sunshine," in particular, is a CTRL-ALT-DELETE on all that."One Track Mind" is a more-or-less weekly drool over a single song selected on a whim and a short thesis on why you should be drooling over it, too.

Musical musings by Something Else! "We're not saying this is the best music ever; we're just saying...