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Laurent Coq and Miguel Zenon, Rayuela

Smart, inventive and heartfelt musicArgentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1963 classic Rayuela – in English, Hopscotch – is a fragmented tale of a Bohemian adrift on two continents. To underscore his...

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Interview: Michael Formanek

Michael Formanek is one of jazz’s formidable bassists: fast and limber with a full expressive sound, instantly responsive to whatever his fellow improvisers invent on the spot, and able to sing for...

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The Unknown Dave Brubeck

Naturally enough, obituary writers focused on the milestones in Dave Brubeck’s career: his early, proto-cool octet, umptyzillion ’50s college dates with his long-running quartet, the Disney waltz “Some...

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Rudresh Mahanthappa, Gamak

Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa sometimes looks for ways to bridge jazz and South Indian music, as on his celebrated two-alto collaboration with Kadri Gopalnath, Kinsmen. On Gamak,...

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Six Degrees of Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Gamak

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations,...

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Interview: Ben Goldberg

The adventurous, lyrical, soulful San Francisco clarinet improviser Ben Goldberg made his reputation 20 years ago with the New Klezmer Trio. That band played what klezmer might have sounded like if it...

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Interview: Craig Taborn

Craig Taborn is a famously voracious listener, equally at home with 19th-century piano literature and glitchy techno. He’s covered so much ground in 20 years of recording it’s impossible to get a fix...

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100 Years of Woody Herman

In the later 1930s, when swing bands ruled American pop, Woody Herman — born May 16, 1913 — ran a distant third to his rival bandleading clarinetists, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. But in the 1940s,...

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ESP-Disk’: International Avant-Garde

ESP-Disk’ might be the most revered and reviled of historically important jazz labels: revered for the free/avant classics it issued; reviled for its business practices. The leader of one mid-1960s ESP...

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Gerald Cleaver and Michiel Braam: Reinventing ’70s Jazz-Rock

In most any genre, there are times when musicians develop similar ideas independently, extrapolating from how the music has developed so far. In the late 1940s, Dave Brubeck’s West Coast octet created...

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Cécile McLorin Salvant, WomanChild

An audacious and confident debut that radiates smart energyFew modern jazz debuts have been as audacious and confident as 23-year-old singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s WomanChild. The climactic “What a...

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Six Degrees of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s WomanChild

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations,...

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Reactionary Tango: Steve Swallow and Carla Bley

Around 1960, a bass-playing sophomore at Yale got a call to do a concert with a rising jazz pianist at Bard College. On the appointed day, Steve Swallow got in his car, drove the hundred miles to the...

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Ahmad Jamal, Now and Then

It’s strange, the ways the arc of jazz history can bend. Twenty years ago, for some conservatives, Anthony Braxton epitomized everything that was wrong with jazz. In 2013, he was named an NEA Jazz...

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Roswell Rudd, the Honker of Kerhonkson

Trombonist Roswell Rudd wasn’t always as ubiquitous as he is now. After making a big splash in the 1960s and ’70s, he dropped out of jazz for a decade. Family obligations kept him close to home in the...

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Kris Davis: The Pianist as Chameleon

Nowadays, many jazz musicians either lead or play in several bands over the course of a single year, but it wasn’t always so. Can you picture Coltrane in 1963 leading other groups on the side? His...

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Lafayette Gilchrist’s New-School Old-School Piano

Lafayette Gilchrist is by no means the only modern jazz pianist who folds funk into his playing, but nobody else’s mix sounds quite like his. He takes something a little old school — a distinctive...

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Chicago’s Mike Reed Gets a Second City

The drum set is a collection of instruments, assembled to let one percussionist do the work of several. In that way, every drummer is a multitasker. Though he may have bloomed late as a drummer,...

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Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch at 50: Still Out

Eric Dolphy’s quintet masterpiece Out to Lunch, was recorded 50 years ago, on February 25, 1964, but it sounds like it might’ve been recorded last week. It’s the Dorian Gray of jazz records, eternally...

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Anthony Braxton: Jazz Outcast

When multi-reedist and composer Anthony Braxton got the phone call last year telling him he’d been named an NEA Jazz Master, he thought there’d been some mistake. Over 20 years ago, jazz conservatives...

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