Has there ever been a greater guitar soloist over one chord than Scott Henderson (with stiff competition John Scofield, Frank Gambale, Frank Zappa, John McLaughlin and a few more)? Give him 32 bars of G-minor and he’ll find any manner of exciting, propulsive, envelope-pushing angles, without ever resorting to jazz, blues or fusion clichés – […]
Of all the musical scenes that emerged during the 1980s, M-BASE – a Brooklyn-originated fusion of jazz and funk with many other influences thrown in – may be the least understood/remembered. The term was co-authored by saxophonists Greg Osby and Steve Coleman. The M stands for ‘Macro’, BASE is an acronym for ‘Basic Array of […]
In all my years as a jazz writer, web editor and record company executive, I’ve only had three Black colleagues. A lamentable state of affairs, but very common in the jazz world. The music’s innovators and performers have been African-American but the overwhelming majority of journalists, photographers and record executives continue to be white men. […]
Ron Carter is reportedly the most-recorded acoustic bassist in music history and has a rich 65-year career as both sideman and bandleader, probably most famous for his key role in Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. But he has also recorded over 60 albums as a solo artist, and this rare London Jazz Festival concert showcased […]
Surprisingly few musical memoirs take the reader right into the recording studios of the 1980s and 1990s, documenting what actually went down during the making of some classic albums. In his enjoyable new book, Jason Miles – synth player/programmer for Miles Davis, Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Roberta Flack, David Sanborn, Diana Ross, George Benson, Will […]
Matt’s new book ‘John McLaughlin: From Miles & Mahavishnu to The 4th Dimension’ is available now via the links below. Drawing on hundreds of sources and interviews with key collaborators, ‘From Miles and Mahavishnu to The 4th Dimension’ is the first major book about John McLaughlin since 2014 and the first ever to illuminate his […]
It’s a great era for jazz documentaries. The latest exhibit is Alain Gomis’s ‘Rewind & Play: Thelonious Monk’, based around some long-lost footage of the jazz piano giant filming a French TV special at the end of his 1969 European tour. Some of the edited footage was shown on French TV as ‘Jazz Portraits: Thelonious […]
Late July 1976: if you were a British jazz/rock fan, all roads led to the legendary Hammersmith Odeon in West London. The Billy Cobham/George Duke Band opened three nights of music, followed by John McLaughlin’s Shakti and then the headliners Weather Report. The encores often featured members of all three fusion supergroups. So how apt […]
There’s a history of controversial jazz autobiographies that would have to include Mezz Mezzrow’s ‘Really The Blues’, Charles Mingus’s ‘Beneath The Underdog’, Sidney Bechet’s ‘Treat It Gentle’, Billie Holiday’s ‘Lady Sings The Blues’, Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Dizzy’ and Art Pepper’s ‘Straight Life’. It may be somewhat of a surprise to report that the apparently mild-mannered, urbane […]
These days, jazz/rock generally dials up the ‘rock’ and dials down the ‘jazz’. But, on Ohio-based guitarist Dan Wilson’s fourth solo album Things Eternal, the balance is redressed. Harmony is king, promoted by the repertoire touching on Stevie Wonder (‘Smile Please’), Freddie Hubbard (‘Birdlike’), Herbie Hancock (‘Tell Me A Bedtime Story’), Michael Brecker (‘Pilgrimage’), McCoy […]
Even as streaming platforms gain an ever more forceful stranglehold on recorded music, savvy record companies can still deliver impactful physical products which could never be replicated in the digital space. Finnish label TUM are doing that in spades. A key artefact is the recent album by Andrew Cyrille, William Parker and Enrico Rava, 2 […]
The sad death of soprano/tenor sax titan Wayne Shorter has inspired many column inches but, reading most of the obituaries, you might be forgiven for thinking that he was completely dormant during the 1980s. Nothing could be further from the truth, even if he took more of a backseat in his ‘day job’ co-leading Weather […]
Soundsofsurprise.com wants YOU! My new book on master musician John McLaughlin will be published worldwide by Rowman & Littlefield in September. The design department have put together a few draft covers, and I’d like to know which one YOU most like the look of. It would be good to get your feedback, and you’ll get […]
The heart always beats a little faster when there’s news of a ‘previously unreleased’ Miles project. And if it’s from the 1980s, even better. The era is still one the least understood/lauded periods of Miles’s work, despite the stellar efforts of George Cole. It also has not been served well posthumously, particularly by his final […]
‘The baddest shit on the planet’ – that was Weather Report keyboard player/co-founder/chief composer Joe Zawinul’s assessment of his band’s music. He wasn’t alone – many credit them as the greatest jazz/rock unit in history, pretty impressive considering they developed out of a ‘scene’ that also included The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever and Herbie […]
The streaming revolution has seen the major labels dredging up the damndest ‘extra tracks’ for inclusions on catalogue albums. One of the weirdest is Bennie Maupin’s ‘Baker Street’, which has appeared at the end of his 1978 Moonscapes record. Of all the great 1960s and 1970s jazzmen you wouldn’t expect to go ‘disco’ – or, […]
Like most good ideas, it’s a very simple one; an A-Z guide to the Great American Songbook from a jazz perspective – who wrote the tunes, why they wrote them and a roundup of the best versions. Gioia, a highly respected jazz writer and author, comes up trumps with ‘The Jazz Standards’, a well-researched, witty, […]
These two giants of their instruments – Tyner on piano, Hubbard on trumpet/flugelhorn – crossed paths many times in the 1960s, particularly on three of the latter’s most famous Blue Note albums. (Tyner of course is probably best known for his work with the fabled John Coltrane Quartet.) So it was only natural that they […]
Even amidst this digital revolution, there are still classic jazz and fusion albums which just resolutely refuse to appear on streaming platforms, due to copyright problems, label problems or whatever. Eddie Gomez’s excellent late-1980s albums Mezgo (later rereleased as Discovery) and Power Play are cases in point, recorded for the Japanese arm of the Epic […]
Gil Scott-Heron’s work could hardly be more relevant as we move into 2022. The singer, songwriter, musician, novelist, poet and activist, who died in 2011, was arguably one of the most influential recording artists to emerge since the 1960s. Malik Al Nasir, the poet, musician and activist formerly known as Mark Watson, has quite a […]
It’s somewhat surprising that Solo Live is Venezualan pianist Edward Simon’s first unaccompanied recording, after a stellar 30-year career in the bands of Greg Osby, Kevin Eubanks, Bobby Watson and Terence Blanchard, and 15 albums as leader. It’s also a testament to the format’s challenges – not all pianists relish having to be the whole […]
Jazz books written by ‘jazz widows’ are pretty rare. Only a few come to mind: Laurie Pepper’s ‘Art: Why I Stuck With A Junkie Jazzman’, Jo Gelbart’s ‘Miles And Jo: Love Story In Blue’ and Sue Mingus’s ‘Tonight At Noon’. But, as Val Wilmer’s ‘As Serious As Your Life’ demonstrated some 50 years ago, behind […]
‘Level 42 – Every Album, Every Song (on track)’ is the first in-depth study of the jazz/funk/pop supergroup’s illustrious catalogue.
It features recording information, musical analysis, studio gossip, full credits, stories from the road and contributions from head honcho Mark King and key past members Gary Husband and Phil Gould.
Pop/jazz keyboardist/producer/impresario David Foster recently remarked in a podcast that the best jazz players seem to have the ‘big picture’ in mind when they start a solo, with a natural sense of storytelling/structure. It rang a bell when listening to a recently rediscovered 1994 solo concert from piano master Tommy Flanagan, now released by Enja […]
They say that if you want to understand why an instrumentalist plays the way he or she plays, listen to them speak. That makes total sense when hearing Wayne Shorter or Ornette Coleman being interviewed. And now, courtesy of Ben Sidran, there’s never been a better chance to hear other examples of this. Sidran is […]
Sounds Of Surprise 