What Is This $#@% You Want Me to Listen To?

 Jazz, in it’s most vague definition, is music that is syncopated and contains improvisation. Syncopation means that that notes that should be played evenly are not. If you’ve ever heard bands like the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies or the Brian Setzer Orchestra, you’ve heard syncopation. Improvisation, or soloing, means making up and playing a new melody on the spur of the moment. The person improvising is called the soloist. Improvisation is the core of jazz, and it has produced some of the most beautiful music ever heard. Almost e Read the rest of this entry »

Keith Jarrett (Allentown, 1945), is one of the great talents of jazz that emerged in the last thirty years. Also able to play the piano, guitar, sax, flute, harpsichord and organ, Jarrett said from his childhood by his precocity and his musical qualities.

Just completed his graduation from Berklee University in 1962, joined in 1965 in the “Jazz Messengers “with drummer, Art Blakey, with whom he remained from 1965 to 1966 and subsequently joined the group’s saxophonist, Charles Lloyd with whom he spent from 1966 to 1969. The great musical experience obtained with these two musicians, Read the rest of this entry »

The great composer and pianist Andrew Hill (Chicago 1937) is one of the most original jazz musicians of the last quarter of the twentieth century. His academic training was mixed with performances from local – had a brief meeting with the pianist Earl Hines – until he made his professional debut in New York in 1961 with singer Dinah Washington and the following year recorded by the extraordinary multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk .

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Jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge, is often considered the link between Louis Armstrong instrumentalist, best trumpeter of the swing era and jazz history, and the great Dizzy Gillespie, trumpeter most representative of all modern jazz . Although this account may seem a devaluation of own achievements as a musician Roy Eldridge, the fact is that this is one of the great jazz masters.

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The saxophonist, Steve Coleman, is one of the most iconic jazz figures of recent years. Endowed with great technique and trained in the desks of the orchestra of Thad Jones, Mel Lewis or the Slide Hampton, led a musical movement called “M-Base” (Macro-Basic Array of Structured Extemporization) built around their group “Five Elements”, a formation with deep roots in jazz and hip-hop.

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