60 stories by "Steve Provizer"
Kelly Green and her trio are essentially mainstream players, but they explore a lot of challenging territory within that framework.
Christopher Hollyday's Telepathy is a keeper, Chris Pasin's Ornettiquette is an excellent outing, Jake Ehrenreich's A Treasury of Jewish Christmas Songs is uneven, and for some long winter n…
In this album, saxophonist Ethan Helm has achieved a very personal balance between highly composed sections and solos rooted in harmony and free playing.
These albums, featuring Woody Shaw and Dexter Gordon, are illuminating to listen to side by side.
Time For Romance: But Beautiful may qualify -- if I can even use the term now -- as seduction music.
For most of its history, jazz has been a macho culture. Sexual ambiguity or gay-ness were subjects of derision.
The Window contains an inspired pairing -- between singer Cécile McLorin Salvant and pianist-organist Sullivan Fortner.
Arts Fuse Jazz critic Steve Provizer responds to Dale Chapman's book The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in a Neoliberal Culture.
Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval is a big personality and in this performance he was almost as much raconteur, comedian and ringmaster as musician.
Although his choice of material doesn't always work for me, for my money, Kurt Elling is the most important jazz vocalist of the last twenty years.
The author of this Sonny Rollins bio promises us "A Journey into his World of Spirituality" -- and that sets high expectations.
Vocalist Allegra Levy is at her strongest when purveying certain specific moods -- melancholy, playful, even lightly ironic.
Lionel Loueke is a unique voice, who has managed to bring a number of influences together without weakening or undermining any of them.
For the moment, it is refreshing to see how carefully the music is being recorded and packaged.
At this time in the Boston jazz scene, there are no ongoing spaces for big bands and, predictably, the number of such ensembles has shrunk.
While perhaps not more than the sum of its parts -- that would be hard to imagine -- the music on this tribute disc has its own vitality and stands well on its own.
Singer Allan Harris clearly loves Eddie Jefferson's music and performs it with sincerity and chops.
For my taste, some of the songs on Kurt Elling's The Questions simply aren't challenging or interesting enough.
A listener's response to this album would largely depend on whether or not the sound of Jeff Denson's voice and the instrumentation strike a chord.
"It seemed worthwhile to me to think about how the spiritual currents Billie Holiday navigated might have shaped her life and her sound and what she and others made of them."
The players are striking out into the unknown: you may find the journey inspiring and you may sometimes find yourself lost in the woods.
The Boston Symphony Chamber Players gave a very satisfying performance of eclectic musical material.
As part of its 150th anniversary celebration, NEC commissioned Anthony Coleman to compose a large-scale work he has named Streams.
The motto on the Morningside Music Studios web site is "keep the groove in your life."Â Words to live by.
Local music venues -- especially those with "off" music like jazz -- are caught in a vice, with real estate escalation on one side and corporate-dominated digital technology on the other.
