The New Yorker - Arts and Culture (Free subscription) | 17/11/2008
Atlantic Vocal Groups 1951-1963” (Atlantic)--American popular music in the fifties was a stew of jazz, jump blues, and close-harmony groups; by the middle of the decade, rock and roll had taken hold. This four-disk set lovingly illustrates the transition through the era’s vocal groups--the Clovers, the . . .
New York Times (Free subscription) | 16/11/2008
Mr. Levinson, a music publicist, parlayed his close familiarity with jazz personalities into rich and sometimes intimate biographies of them.
On An Overgrown Path (Free subscription) | 13/11/2008
A reader wrote to say the Modern Jazz Quartet, who featured here this week , do not fall within their concept of classical music. I cannot resist a challenge like that, so here is another recommendation for raga a good bargain. Ravi Shankar made his recordings of Raga Nata Bhairav and Raga Mishra Piloo in the year which was both an Anuus mirabilis and Annus horribilis , 1968. For the sessions the legendary...
On An Overgrown Path (Free subscription) | 11/11/2008
Either you are for or against The Modern Jazz Quartet , there is no middle ground. I am very much in the 'for' camp, and have always been a big fan of their chamber style jazz with its classical resonances. Yes, they can sometimes lapse into easy-listening mode; but that's a small price to pay for standards such as Django - see video below, the sound improves after one minute. Talking of small prices...
This Is This (Free subscription) | 05/11/2008
When you do anything personal or close to your heart, you put your soul into it and there isn’t any doing that by half. It’s the same with writing. One of my favourite stories about creativity one that Winton Marsalis tells about Milt Jackson, the legendary vibraphone player with the Modern Jazz Quartet. Marsalis, part of a [...]
Chicago Tribune (Free subscription) | 03/11/2008
Mavis Staples said she couldn’t cut it when she initially wanted to take singing classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. “I’m finally here,” she said with a laugh Saturday at a benefit for the 51-year-old Chicago institution at the Harris Theatre. And she rose to the occasion before a near-capacity crowd of 1,175. It was a night raw with emotion against a backdrop of civil-rights-era anthems:...
The big take over (Free subscription) | 02/11/2008
I don’t often wish I were in Los Angeles, but if I could be there November 7-8 at the Hollywood Bowl, I would, because forty years after its November 1968 release, Van Morrison will be performing his album Astral Weeks with two of the musicians he recorded it with.
Scotsman.com Living - Books (Free subscription) | 26/10/2008
THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET Concorde **** Prestige 0888072306530, £9.99
Straight No Chaser - A Jazz Show (Free subscription) | 13/10/2008
Some of my favorite moments listening to jazz come from the intimacy a small group creates, particularly a small group minus percussion. While the chamber jazz of artists like the Modern Jazz Quartet or the piano trios of Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau certainly are beautiful and intimate in their sound and joyful in their internal harmonies, I'm thinking of the collaborations made by two great instrumentalists...
Detroit Free Press (Free subscription) | 21/09/2008
Composers have been marrying elements of jazz and classical music for a century with drastically uneven results. The aesthetic bliss promised by the union is too seductive for many composers to ignore, but the challenge is daunting. So if you're Wynton Marsalis, you seek advice from a master.
All About Jazz (Free subscription) | 17/09/2008
Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard watched a DVD of the Modern Jazz Quartet's 1994 35th Anniversary Tour and sent this review. The 57 minutes were recorded at the Freiburg, Germany, music festival in 1987 and the evening shows the guysin average (that is to say brilliant) form...
Rifftides (Free subscription) | 17/09/2008
Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard watched a DVD of the Modern Jazz Quartet's 1994 35th Anniversary Tour and sent this review. The 57 minutes were recorded at the Freiburg, Germany, music festival in 1987 and the evening shows...
All About Jazz (Free subscription) | 08/09/2008
Tanglewood Jazz Festival Lenox, Massachusetts August 29-31, 2008 Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts, is the summer home of the Boston Symphony, and it's also home to events like an annual James Taylor concert, an annual recording of A Prairie Home Companion, and the annual Tanglewood Jazz Festival, which ran this year from August 29-31...
Ernie (Not Bert) (Free subscription) | 31/07/2008
Day 29, here we go! Another day of seemingly random tracks with nothing really to link them together. It's getting close to the end, so I'm sort of just blowing some things out. Let's start with the only two tracks that have any sort of link. Both of these tracks are by The Modern Jazz Quartet from their LP Plastic Dreams (Atlantic SD 1589, 1971). The two tracks are titled England's Carol and Variations...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 25/07/2008
Obituary: Musician and producer whose tastes covered folk, jazz and rock
