Search Results for "Miles Davis"

Jim Snidero – Live at the Deer Head Inn (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 18, 2023 · Comments off

Jim Snidero - Live at the Deer Head Inn (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz] Download

As with many professions, it was a difficult thing to be a jazz musician during the pandemic year of 2020, but alto saxophonist Jim Snidero found himself in a unique situation: he was able to assemble a quartet for a feasible, safe, limited-audience gig at Pennsylvania’s famed Deer Head Inn.
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Jeremy Pelt – Make Noise! (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 16, 2023 · Comments off

Jeremy Pelt - Make Noise! (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt occupies an enviably open-minded space in the modern jazz landscape. A capable traditionalist, Pelt has built his career around making acoustic post-bop, with increasing forays into electrified, electronic-tinged fusion. His mutable choices keep you in suspense as a listener — you’re never sure what to expect from one album to the next. While there are no such electronic flourishes on Pelt’s 2017 effort, the warmly sophisticated Make Noise!, it still pops with much of the same cross-genre creativity he’s explored in the past. The album follows his similarly inclined 2016 effort #Jiveculture, which also featured an inventive acoustic sound accented by legendary bassist Ron Carter. This time out, Pelt brings along a slightly less-high-profile, if no less talented, ensemble including pianist Victor Gould, bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Jonathan Barber, and percussionist Jacquelene Acevedo. Together, they take an intimate approach to expansive post-bop that straddles the line between Miles Davis’ ’60s albums and Terence Blanchard’s early-’80s work. Pelt has a broad, enveloping trumpet tone and a knack for laying down highly engaging solos that never hold a listener at arm’s length. It’s a skill he puts to good use throughout Make Noise! and one complemented by his bandmates, especially pianist Gould, who layers these tracks with a sparkling delicacy reminiscent of the late Mulgrew Miller. Similarly, with Acevedo’s kinetic percussion filtered throughout, Make Noise! also has a strong Afro-Latin influence, a vibe especially apparent on the roiling title track and frenetic, salsa-infused “Bodega Social.” Equally compelling, “Chateau d’Eau” has a languid, R&B-inflected melody set to a midtempo Afro-Latin groove. Elsewhere, Pelt pushes toward harmonically nuanced modalism, offering a fittingly elegiac and noir-ish tribute to the departed pop icon on “Prince,” and evincing the angular, classically influenced style of Black Codes-era Wynton Marsalis on “Cry Freedom.” While much of Pelt’s work fits nicely into the jazz canon, he clearly has an open ear for melody, a gift he exercises on “Your First Touch…”, which sounds like a Leonard Cohen song reworked as a sensuous jazz ballad. Ultimately, Make Noise! continues to reveal Pelt’s maturation into a confident artist, comfortable enough with his place in the jazz tradition to keep subtly pushing the edges of audience expectation. – Matt Collar
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Jeff Ballard Trio – Time’s Tales (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 13, 2023 · Comments off

Jeff Ballard Trio - Time's Tales (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

There could hardly be a better start for the new year – the 2014 jazz season will be opened by none other than Jeff Ballard, together with outstanding guitarist Lionel Loueke and the great Miguel Zenon on saxophone. Their first ever album collaboration Time’s Tales offers a varied repartoire from Thelonious Monk to Iranian folk melodies, with influences from Bartók, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Stevie Wonder and more. At the same time, it reflects the musicians’ different geographic backgrounds – the USA, Benin and Puerto Rico.
Opening with a funky african groove in 9/4 and moving over to imitated bird melodies, Time’s Tales also offers dark and slow textures, including a cover of contemporary rock band Queens of the Stone Age while closing with a completely improvised song which can be considered a glimpse into the future of the band. The album is characterized by complex rythms, exotic harmonies and soulful melodies.
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Jeanne Lee – The Newest Sound Around! (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 13, 2023 · Comments off

Jeanne Lee - The Newest Sound Around! (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download

“Third stream” may have been the bandied term, but this unjustly ignored 1962 duet set, the debut for pianist Blake and singer Lee, who worked up their act while studying at Bard College, plays blissfully free of the lumbering lugubriousness and Big Mac-thick philosophizing that mar so much of that music. The eeriness, the mystery, and the sweetness lie always in the deceptive simplicity, never more so than on the opener, “Laura,” sketched by Johnny Mercer as a hazy image of loveliness, always out of reach and perhaps not even real, and she flickers in and out of existence with the strike and fade of Blake’s figures, the attack and decay of Lee’s intonation, now husky, now fruity, but as exacting as Miles Davis’ muted trumpet. “Church on Russell Street” is Blake’s alone, a gospel show for solo piano late at night, or early in the morning, when everyone but the pianist and maybe the Lord has gone home. “Where Flamingos Fly,” from which Van Morrison peeled a few leaves years later, finds Lee a mournful anti-siren, losing her lover and a few members of the animal kingdom to an island that may be Aruba, Iceland, or even Alcatraz; Blake tests single notes like water drops, rumbles chords for incoming tide, stabs boldly at the not quite in tune top octave on his keyboard. “Season in the Sun” (nowhere near Terry Jacks) injects levity with bassist George Duvivier sitting in (as he does on “Evil Blues,” the second dash of comic relief) and Lee dryly, slyly insinuating the brevity of her bikini. “If there’s going to be an enduring ‘new wave’ in jazz styling…this voice, this piano may well be the beginning,” reads an uncredited blurb on the cover. The record started no revolution, probably because no other two performers had such chemistry or such a distinctive reaction. As jazz styling, though, it endures unsurprisingly. You hear the set in less than one hour (four CD-only bonus tracks included). You spend decades wandering inside the sound, as you might inside a sonic Stonehenge, savoring each new vantage point discovered, and the impossibility of discovering them all.
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