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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
