Tag: good music

Battling Butler with the BQE Project

Back when I was but a wee lad growing up in Rochester New York I used to play piano in a society orchestra called The Len Hawley Band. It was made up of a mix of local jazz musicians, down-on-their luck lounge buskers and top talent from Eastman School of Music. The band’s mission was […]
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RIP OP

Jazz piano has lost one its Jedis with the passing of Oscar Peterson on Sunday. Peterson was one of the pianists who really excited and inspired me about the potential of jazz piano when I was most at risk of giving up practicing the piano for sensualist teenage pursuits. Critics who have dismissed OP as […]
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Spiders on the Keys

Listening to James Booker, half crazy and in the final years of his hard life make spine tingling music on this horrible saloon upright takes the term ‘it is a bad craftsman who blames his tools’ to a new level. These recordings were taken from hundreds of hours of tapes from Booker’s ‘77-82 solo piano […]
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Naturally – Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

I have had this CD lying around for a while and finally listened to it. What a refreshing blast. This Brooklyn band is really doing oldschool soul/funk right. The band is as relaxed-tight and Tower of Power. There is neither ensemble overplaying nor any gratuitous displays of individual instrumental virtuosity. Sharon Jones is a powerfully […]
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Catching the Wave

Well it is that time of year again. Winter blahs. Even with the pathetic warm winters that NYC has been serving up lately, February finds me lusting for sun and hammock. There are things about this album that works to cure these ills for an hour. First of all I love the cover. It was […]
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Colin Bates

A friend of mine recently forwarded me a few out of print records that his jazz pianist uncle, Colin Bates played on. Colin Bates was an Australian pianist who moved to the UK and played with pretty much everybody there during England’s postwar ‘swing renaissance’. Two of these records are George Melley recordings. Melley, who […]
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Remembering Michael Brecker

My Highschool had was a music ‘listening room’ with a bunch of tapedecks, record players, reel-to-reels and library of jazz records and tapes. It was a hidden and underutilized place. Only me and a few other megamusicnerds ever used it and I was usually in there completely alone. I used to hide out in there […]
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