Fred Kaplan

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Ben Goldberg's Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues

Fred Kaplan | Feb 22, 2013 |

Ben Goldberg's Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues (on his self-owned BAG Production label), is an album as seriously playful as its title. There's a deceptive looseness in the music's rhythm, veering toward New Orleans bar stomp, but braced by modern harmonies (Steve Lacy, Monk, and Andrew Hill are heavy influences), and swung from an early Ornette-ish sense of blues (one of Goldberg's 9 originals on the album, "Study of the Blues," is a Cubist riff on the opening bars of "Lonely Woman"), though rooted more in Coleman's deep melody than his Free velocity.

Fred Kaplan

Best Jazz Albums of 2012

Fred Kaplan | Dec 13, 2012 |

My column on the best jazz albums of 2012 is up on Slate this morning. Here’s the list (readers will note that I’ve written about all the albums in this space over the past 12 months):

Fred Kaplan

Dave Brubeck, R.I.P.

Fred Kaplan | Dec 05, 2012 |

Dave Brubeck died today, just short of 92 years old. He was a plodding pianist and a less inventive composer than many obits are suggesting. (It was his alto saxophonist Paul Desmond who wrote the biggest hit "Take Five" in 5/4 time, and while Brubeck wrote many pieces in more exotic times still, they didn't swing or flow like Desmond's.) Still, Brubeck was a colossal figure of modern jazz in many ways.

Fred Kaplan

Ted Nash's The Creep, Frank Kimbrough's Live at Kitano

Fred Kaplan | Nov 30, 2012 |

Ted Nash and Frank Kimbrough—co-founders of the Jazz Composers Collective, which I recently wrote about in this space—have new albums, and they're both among the year's best.

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Thanksgiving in NY: Jason Moran and Maria Schneider

Fred Kaplan | Nov 21, 2012 |

Photo: http://jasonmoran.com/look.html

Those of you in the New York area for the holidays (or for all times) should know that two of the best jazz groups around are playing at the two best jazz clubs: Maria Schneider and her Jazz Orchestra make their traditional Thanksgiving-week appearance at the Jazz Standard, and Jason Moran and his Bandwagon trio are at the Village Vanguard.

Fred Kaplan

Jazz Composers Collective at 20

Fred Kaplan | Nov 07, 2012 |

Photo: Lourdes Delgado

All this week, the Jazz Standard in New York will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Jazz Composers Collective, the brainchild of five musicians who formed five distinct bands: the personnel would remain the same, but each player would lead his own band and compose all of its music. Both concepts were unusual at the time: the continuity of players and the insistence on original compositions. Back then, jazz musicians rotated in and out of bands, not the other way around; and the emphasis was on covering standards or blowing improvisations.

Fred Kaplan

Donald Fagen's Sunken Condos

Fred Kaplan | Nov 01, 2012 |

Donald Fagen isn't exactly a jazz musician, but he is a musician who plays jazz and whose music is suffused with a jazz sensibility, whether on his own or as co-leader of Steely Dan, so here we go. His 4th solo disc, Sunken Condos (on Reprise), is one of his best and maybe the best-sounding since the Dan heyday . . .

Fred Kaplan

Ron Miles, Quiver

Fred Kaplan | Oct 12, 2012 |

One drawback of the New York-centric jazz world (and I say this as a New Yorker) is that musicians who live elsewhere too often go ignored. Oral histories are full of tales about some tenor saxophonist in Mississippi, or a guitarist in Nevada, who influenced someone who influenced everyone else. And so you should definitely check out the Denver trumpeter Ron Miles’ riveting new CD, Quiver (on the Enja label).

Fred Kaplan

Dave Douglas, Be Still

Fred Kaplan | Oct 08, 2012 |

Dave Douglas' Be Still (on the trumpeter's own Greenleaf Music label) is his most sheer-gorgeous album since the 1998 Charms of the Night Sky and one of the best-sounding new recordings that I've heard by anybody in quite a while. And it's available on LP as well as CD (more about which, later).

Fred Kaplan

Coltrane at the Vanguard (Ravi Coltrane)

Fred Kaplan | Oct 06, 2012 |

Photo: ravicoltrane.com/

Ravi Coltrane's quartet is at the Village Vanguard this week, and that in itself is a marker of how confident—ballsy wouldn't be a stretch—this musician has become in recent years. It's bold enough for John Coltrane's son to take up the tenor saxophone as a trade. It takes the next level of audacity to lead a band at the club where Dad laid down maybe the greatest live jazz recording ever. But the ultimate display of self-assurance from Coltrane fils came during his improv on an original tune, "Thirteenth Floor," when he casually quoted a few lines from "A Love Supreme."

Fred Kaplan

Fred Hersch Trio, Alive at the Vanguard

Fred Kaplan | Aug 30, 2012 |

Fred Hersch's new double-disc album (on the Palmetto label) might be called Alive at the Vanguard, instead of the customary Live at . . . , for two reasons. First, it's a declaration that Hersch, who's had HIV-positive for many years and not long ago slipped into a coma for six months, is alive. Second, this music is alive: fire-breathing with adventure, dance, spirits of all sorts . . .

Fred Kaplan

John Abercrombie Quartet, Within a Song

Fred Kaplan | Aug 15, 2012 |

The guitarist John Abercrombie's latest, Within a Song (on ECM) is something of a high-wire act: delicate music of an uninsistent intensity, a quiet swing, that hangs together or collapses on the ensemble's sustenance of balance. The musicians here—Joe Lovano on tenor sax, Drew Gress on bass, Joey Baron on drums—are masters at this sort of thing (and many other things too), and so it's a riveting album. Even when they coast, swish, and twirl along the slightest thread, you're carried along (or I was anyway).

Fred Kaplan

The Thelonious Monk Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection

Fred Kaplan | Aug 08, 2012 |

In a sense, I understand why Thelonious Monk's albums on Columbia, recorded between 1962 and 1968, have been neglected. His earlier sessions, on Blue Note, Prestige, and Riverside, were the ones where he introduced his classic songs, developed his eccentric style, and played with star-studded rhythm sections. The six quartet albums for Columbia feature a total of just six new Monk songs. And they find him playing with a working band of accompanists—no John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, or Roy Haynes here.

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Bob Brookmeyer, Standards

Fred Kaplan | Jun 30, 2012 |

Sometimes you hear a CD, things come up, you store it away and forget about it, until something compels you to take it out of the closet, give it a spin, and you kick yourself for your negligence, you realize, suddenly, belatedly, that this is a really special album. That's my story with Bob Brookmeyer's Standards (on the ArtistShare label), a pretty magnificent send-off from one of the most elegantly inventive big-band composers in jazz, released in 2011, shortly before he died at the age of 81.

Fred Kaplan

Jason Moran & Herlin Riley at the Blue Note

Fred Kaplan | Jun 25, 2012 |

Wednesday night, June 20, I witnessed a marvel that, among many other things, confirmed my (hardly original) belief that the recording industry has to change its business model.

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