The East Village Scene
by Mark Schiebe
Like predecessors such as Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones, Foster doesn’t just “kick” the soloist, providing “fills” in the spaces between the horn players’ lines.
Rather, he sets up his own rhythmic patterns “underneath” the soloist. He is the Matisse of the drums, painting in bold shapes and colors, rather than the dense polyrhythms of Jones. Overall, the show was an example of beautiful, non-pretentious music with a focus on craft, openness, and freedom within tradition.
The Sign of Three: Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard
by Mark Schiebe
Fly: Sky & Country (ECM, March 2009) My personal and admittedly partial lineage of the jazz saxophone trio starts with Sonny Rollins’s pair of 1957 recordings Way out West and A Night at the Vanguard. Way out West was a studio album, with bass icon Ray Brown anchoring and Shelley Manne on drums. The cover pictures Rollins in […]
A Screaming Comes Across the Sky: John Adams’ Doctor Atomic
by Mark Schiebe
John Adams, Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera The idea to do an opera about the atomic bomb was the brainchild of Pamela Rosenberg, who in 2002 was the politically-minded director of the San Francisco Opera. The genesis of the bomb’s music, however, came much earlier, in a childhood experience of John Adams: “I do remember as […]
Redemption? The (D)evolution of Smalls
by Mark Schiebe
Aaron Parks’ Invisible Cinema (Blue Note, August 2008) The rise, fall, and resurrection of a little jazz room on West 10th Street and 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village is one of the more remarkable stories in our corner of the contemporary jazz world. In 1994, a nightshift nurse named Mitch Borden mortgaged his New Jersey house, rented […]
You Speak My Language
by Mark Schiebe
Pat Metheny Trio: Day Trip (Nonesuch, January 2008) Chick Corea/Gary Burton: The New Crystal Silence (Concord, February 2008) Contemporary jazz icons Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and Gary Burton have all released new albums in 2008. Metheny’s Day Trip marks the first recorded statement from the guitarist’s newest version of his trio, which includes Christian McBride on bass […]
Stuff You Can Sing: Radiohead Comes Home
by Mark Schiebe
Music Review Works discussed in this essay: In Rainbows by Radiohead (self-released) I was perplexed by the early response from some Radiohead fans that the group’s seventh album, In Rainbows, released on CD in the U.S. on January 1st, represented a return to an earlier style, a relief from the relentless experimentalism and introspection of the trio of […]
Jazz and Capitalism, or, “I Want to Get Jazzed!”
by Mark Schiebe
Music Review Fleurine at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola Andy Biskin at The Stone Kristin Norderval at The Stone “With the help of Coca-Cola, our club will embody [Dizzy Gillespie’s] sense of community and joie de vivre,” gushed Wynton Marsalis upon the opening Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in the Fall of 2003, Lincoln Center’s latest move in […]
Sublime, Not Beautiful
by Mark Schiebe
Gary Peacock. Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, and Paul Motian at Birdland. In an age where aesthetic experience continues to be packaged and repackaged into digitized bits by the dominant forms of media, the live performance of art stubbornly persists, and, for some of us, represents a kind of experience for which there can be no substitute. […]
