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Oscar Peterson: The Oscar Peterson Trio at Baker's Keyboard Lounge
by Mike Jurkovic
If any one player fills a soul to the brim with unbridled joy, Oscar Peterson--his whole 'tude, his smile, his swing--is that grand soul and our grand fortune. Put on any of Peterson's archival releases-- Around the World, Con Alma: The Oscar Petersen Trio--Live In Lugano, 1964, or City Lights: Live in Munich 1994 (Two Lions Records/Mack Avenue, 2025, 2022, 2023)--and it becomes spontaneously apparent that the man brought the JOY every day to every stage. It was his life ...
Continue ReadingOscar Peterson Trio: The Oscar Peterson Trio at Baker's Keyboard Lounge
by Pierre Giroux
There are live recordings that capture an engagement, and others that seem to revive an entirely vanished room. This newly unearthed Verve Records release from Detroit's Baker's Keyboard Lounge, recorded over five sets in August 1960, clearly falls into the latter category. More than just a historical curiosity, it reveals atmosphere, temperament, and mastery. The Oscar Peterson trio at full strength in a venue that knew how to listen, playing as if elegance and fire were not mutually exclusive virtues ...
Continue ReadingRay Brown: His Life and Music
by Andrew Hunter
Ray Brown: His Life and Music Jay Sweet 310 Pages ISBN: # 9781800505353 Equinox Publishing2025 It is such a common occurrence in life that bad things happen to good people, and conversely that good things happen to bad people, that there is a branch of theology given to the question of how and why God allows such injustice to occur. It is called theodicy. Given the frequency with which people ...
Continue ReadingTeddy Edwards / Howard McGhee: Together Again!!!!
by Richard J Salvucci
Howard McGhee was one of the cats present at the creation, when bop became a thing. His life embodied a classic redemption story, complete with death (metaphorically) by drugs, years in exile and finally, by dint of his own struggles and a timely gig with Woody Herman, resurrection. While he had been widely admired and respected in the late 1940s as a pioneering trumpeter, the unspoken judgment was that it was his misfortune to come to prominence when Dizzy Gillespie ...
Continue ReadingOscar Peterson: Con Alma
by Chris May
To borrow Duke Ellington's description of Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson was born poor, died rich and never hurt anyone along the way. He also brought joy to untold numbers of people. But, truth to tell, his style was the twentieth-century equivalent of modern day AI-produced generative music. Sit Peterson down at a piano, progamme him (as in give him a tune to play), and press Go: a torrent of technique poured out. Trouble is, Peterson's pianism was ...
Continue ReadingThe Oscar Peterson Trio: Con Alma: The Oscar Peterson Trio Live in Lugano, 1964
by Mike Jurkovic
Was there ever a more generous player than Oscar Peterson? A man who, by simply doing the thing he most loved and thrilled to do, which was make people feel better way down deep in their bones, sat at his piano and made the world grateful? Rekindled that spark--of imagination, of potential, of better--just by running his hands along the eighty-eights and instigating his soul mates, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen to do the same. That ...
Continue ReadingSonny Rollins: Go West! The Contemporary Records Albums
by Richard J Salvucci
Apparently, the median age of a jazz listener is in his or her mid to late 40s. So, perhaps, the representative listener was born in the mid-1970s. Sonny Rollins first recorded in 1949. The recordings reviewed here were made in the late 1950s, well before many contemporary listeners were born. While there have been ample reissues of Rollins' work, most coincided with the still-active phase of his career. Much of his work has appeared since “Skylark" on The Next Album ...
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