Lazy types might well have filed Henry Cow under progressive rock long before now, but in this instance as in so many others that's too convenient, for as Piekut's borderline forensic account...
Keyboard master, composer, founding member of the Pat Metheny Group and self-taught architect, Lyle Mays died in Los Angeles on the morning of 10th February 2020 aged...
Your review of Herbie Mann: At The Village Gate asks of Hagood Hardy "whatever happened to him?"
Hagood died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1997 (the year after I was...
If memory serves, this group was sold as the 'new' Steps Ahead when it visited Britain last year. The newness subsists mainly in the personnel, which has changed almost entirely since the mid-eighties. In fact, the only constant is Mike Mainieri, who founded the band in the early 1980s. Its peak was probably around 1984, when Erskine, Brecker and Gomez were in the group. After that it went through a grimly electronic and sequenced phase, but now seems to be moving once again towards real-time playing.
There's little of substantial novelty in the music, however. An enduring characteristic is Mainieri's marimba-like quasi-African ostinati, which are at best monotonous. A brilliant vibe soloist, he gets his turn here but never stands out as he did on the 1982 Steps Ahead (Elektra Musician 96 01681).
The most striking soloist is the young Scandinavian who simply calls himself Bendik. Not surprisingly he often uses the penetrating folky timbres popularised by Jan Garbarek, but, perhaps aware of the band's history, also does a good line...
The widely recorded London (1926-2000) was accorded an appreciative paragraph in the first edition of Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia Of Jazz, where she...
Actor Edward Norton secured the rights to Jonathan Lethern’s best-selling novel Motherless Brooklyn on publication in 1999. Exactly 20 years later he...
