A few months ago, Avishai Cohen was releasing his symphonic album “Two Roses”, a “once in a lifetime project", he said. After a successful release and more than a hundred reviews around the world – the Israeli composer, singer, and bass player returns to jazz with a dazzling new trio: Elchin Shirinov, still on the piano and, on drums, the arrival of the young and incredibly talented Roni Kaspi, who joined the band during the 2021 summer tour. This new album “Shifting Sands”, recorded in August 2021, re-engages with this very special alchemy that Cohen’s music provides: fresh and expansive melodic lines, diverse and sophisticated rhythms and a musical elegance that only he can achieve.

REVIEW:

Consistency and excellence are two of the most fundamental requisites for achieving an optimal career in music. The Israeli bassist and composer Avishai Cohen has maintained those standards for many years, and his new trio emerges with a powerful offering that should reinforce his status as a jazz-based titan. This formation enlists familiar, longtime collaborator Elchin Shirinov on piano with a relative newcomer and recent Berklee graduate, 21-year old drummer Roni Kaspi. The results of their initial collaboration are stirring from start to finish.

Cohen's confidence in his team and his material is apparent from how often he remains in the background. On the opening "Intertwined," Shirinov sets the tone and gets the first solo while Kaspi snaps across the rims and cymbal heads in lead-type notation. Cohen does not come to the fore until two songs later, on the relaxed "Dvash," the first of three solo-type interludes, then demonstrates his proficiency on the bow during "Chacha Rom." "Hitragut" is a sweet summer song that lands like a Central Park serenade. Many pieces follow a basic structure that begins with one or two sharply repeated patterns, rolls into transitional overlaps, then returns along the opening framework in a formula that fits the album's title theme perfectly.

One of the most impressive things about this this exceptional record is how much masterful mileage each member gets from a relatively small number of notes or beats. Top rank creativity, aptitude, and technique are some other things that make for musical success. There is an abundance of all that and more to be found in this new trio.

-- AllAboutJazz.com (Phillip Woolever)

The celebrated New Orleans Jazz Orchestra examines and the profound relationship of its hometown to the nation of France with its release of Petite Fleur on Storyville Records. The second album under the artistic directorship of drummer Adonis Rose features ten songs, nine of them standards associated with French and New Orleans musicians. The tenth tune is an original by Cyrille Aimée, the acclaimed jazz vocalist born and raised in France but now living and working in The Big Easy itself.

Aimée is the NOJO’s collaborator and vocalist on the album. It was the singer who initiated the collaboration, telling Rose that she would like to work with the 18-piece big band and asking if he had any ideas for a project. “I said, ‘Well, okay, musically, how can I tell a story here?’” Rose recalls. “I thought about the long, shared history of those two places, and that became the concept. A narrative about the musical relationship between New Orleans and France.” The title tune, a standard by early jazz clarinet legend Sidney Bechet, epitomizes the concept: A composition by a New Orleans artist living in France, performed by a New Orleans band with a French vocalist. Composers from both sides of the Atlantic, from Michel Legrand to Jelly Roll Morton, get similar treatment. So do various New Orleanian styles, from a stomp (“Get the Bucket”) to a second line (“Down”) to Fats Domino-style rock ’n’ roll (“I Don’t Hurt Anymore”). In addition to being its spotlight vocalist, Aimée is also Petite Fleur’s featured soloist, applying her razor-sharp scat singing to “In the Land of Beginning Again,” “On a Clear Day,” and “Undecided.”

REVIEW:

Petite Fleur is essentially a meditation on the ties that bind Crescent City art to French culture. Teaming up for 10 songs that cross styles and oceans while exploring that particular connection, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and French vocalist Cyrille Aimée make a perfect match, united in the act of storytelling.

The album speaks to Artistic Director and drummer Adonis Rose’s sure-handed helming of the NOJO, the entire band roster’s contributions in part(s) and sum, Aimée’s well-documented gifts, and a shared vision that brings them all together.

-- JazzTimes (Dan Bilawsky)

With the support of the American State Department, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, including new members Joe Morello and Eugene Wright, began a major tour of Europe early in 1958. Their first concert in the Netherlands was held on 26 February in the legendary Concertgebouw Hall in Amsterdam. The concert inaugurated a triumphant career in Europe. It announced, loud and clear, the communicative enthusiasm that was the lasting hallmark of these four exceptional musicians.

Monk, also known as “Toot”, leads his sextet with an innovative and dynamic approach. Since 1992, the drummer has worked exclusively with his co-players, making the sound of the sextet incredibly tight. When they roll out their arsenal, they soar and swing, and are indeed exciting to hear. In that regard, it might be quite surprising to learn that this is Monk’s very first live album! “This is my first live recording, ever! It’s daunting and an uncertain kind of product. Most live albums aren’t that good. I’ve been lucky to always have great people working with me.”

The seven songs on the album are taken from two performances at two similar jazz rooms over a two-year period; three are from “Harlem’s Jazz Shrines Festival: Jazzmobile presents Minton’s Playhouse” at Ginny’s Supper Club on May 7, 2014, while others were recorded at Marians Jazzroom in Bern, Switzerland on April 24, 2016. Drummer, percussionist, composer, producer and bandleader, T. S. Monk has taken his place in the pantheon of jazz royalty, to which he was born. The swing is DNA inherited and absorbed in this master drummer’s persona. Monk spent the late 70’s and 80’s in various R&B groups, scoring his biggest hit Bon Bon Vie (Gimme the Good Life) in 1982, but by the 1990’s he decided to return to his jazz roots.

REVIEW:

Two Continents One Groove has superb sound reproduction for a live disc. But that would be for nought without great performances, and this band delivers. With its well chosen covers and strong member compositions, it’s a perfect blend of foundational and forward looking. Best of all, it’s great fun, with all kinds of swing and funk. Highly recommended.

-- A Green Man Review (Gary Whitehouse)

Avishai Cohen, one of the most innovative bassists and composers today, will release Gently Disturbed, his first release with his newly configured trio, from May on his own Razdaz Recordz label. While to outward appearances the trio would seem to be the standard piano-bass-drum formula, the music they've created on Gently Disturbed is far from the standard jazz trio repertoire. Featuring nine original compositions (written either by Cohen or by the trio collaboratively), including one traditional Israeli song, Gently Disturbed is an amalgamation of melody and groove, complexity and simplicity that nearly redefines the concept of jazz. With the departure of long-time pianist Sam Barsh, Cohen has slightly reconfigured his trio with the addition of Israeli pianist Shai Maestro. Since Cohen is an accomplished pianist in his own right and has performed on bass with such acclaimed jazz pianists as Danilo Perez, Brad Mehldau and of course Chick Corea, and because the previous keyboard players in his bands (Sam Barsh and Jason Lindner) have been exceptional, it is even more striking to note that Maestro is just 21 years old. Rounding out the trio is the brilliant Mark Guiliana on drums, who has been playing and touring with Cohen since 2003 and who Modern Drummer Readers Poll 2007 cited as "one of the best up-and-coming stars of today's drumming scene." Cohen's releases on Razdaz, which he founded with manager Ray Jefford in 2003, have consistently earned critical approbation, beginning with 2003's Lyla, followed by at Home in 2005, and through to 2006's critically acclaimed Continuo then followed by last year's Double Live CD/DVD release, As Is... Live at the Blue Note (Razdaz / Half Note).

Steve Swallow who is one of the pioneers of electric double bass in jazz noted that Millhouse "is using it to help define and refine what the electric bass can do to refresh jazz music." Eminent practitioner of this unique six-string instrument Millhouse as bassist and guitarist in one creates again on this second album with the saxophone trio format refreshing and formidable jazz. "With the rich saxophone and drum sounds the 6 strings incorporates chord playing techniques and moves around freely showing the way electric bass should be in modern jazz.' (K. Harada- Bass Magazine on SCCD 31942 Unwinding)

Dmitri Shostakovich was a versatile composer: popular and serious styles came to him with equal ease and are frequently found together in the same work. In his twenties, before the heavy hand of Soviet officialdom slapped him down in 1936, music of every kind poured out of him: symphonies, operas and full-length ballets but also a great amount of music for film and theatre. Here Andrew Litton leads the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in a program which explores this lighter side of a composer who is otherwise often regarded as unrelentingly serious.

The album opens with Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1, which Litton conducts from the piano. Consisting of three brief movements, it is the only truly original work on the disc, written in 1934 for a competition aimed at making ‘Soviet Jazz’ more respectable. The remaining suites are all reworkings of existing music, such as the ballets The Age of Gold – about the adventures of a Soviet football team visiting the decadent West – and The Limpid Stream, portraying a group of entertainers visiting an idyllic collective farm. The Suite for Variety Orchestra is a compilation that the composer made in the late 1950s from three film scores, a ballet movement and four piano pieces. Closing the album is Shostakovich’s 1927 orchestration of a Broadway classic, Vincent Youmans’ "Tea for Two," which had become a hit under the title "Tahiti Trot."

REVIEW:

Entitled Jazz & Variety, this album encompasses four of Shostakovich’s more popular-style suites, mainly drawn from his ballet and theatre scores. These range from the poker-faced, Kurt Weill-like stylization of 1920s dance music, complete with plunking banjo, in the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1 (1934), via the Prokofiev-like burlesques of The Age of Gold – a 1930 ballet about the vicissitudes of a Soviet football team in the wicked West – to the more straightforwardly traditional ballet numbers of The Limpid Stream(1935/45) set on an idyllic collective farm, and the Suite for Variety Orchestra put together from various pieces from the 1950s.

One item, the Waltz from the Jazz Suite, recurs twice: more fully orchestrated in The Limpid Stream, and in yet a third arrangement with a different, more banal middle section, in the Variety Suite. The collection culminates in Shostakovich’s twinkling orchestration of a version of ‘Tea for Two’, entitled Tahiti Trot (1927). Yet, in the middle of all these frolics, the searing intensity of the extended Adagio from The Age of Gold reminds us of the other, tragic side of Shostakovich.

Andrew Litton and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra lavish more care and subtlety on these pieces than the quality of invention in some of the music maybe deserves, additionally flattered by BIS’s spacious recording – though the Jazz Suite might have more bite in a drier acoustic. Still, this is a superior collection for those who relish this lighter, sometimes naughtier side of Shostakovich.

-- BBC Music Magazine

In 1974 SteepleChase released Perceptions SCCD 31022 by pianist Connie Crothers (1941- 2016) who was one of the prominent students of legendary Lennie Tristano. Now, 50 years later SteepleChase is proud to present Crothers' mentees jazz pianist/free improviser/singer Caroll Leibowitz and alto saxophonist Nick Lyons in tandem inviting us to their unique soundscape that encompasses the past, present and future of jazz. "... almost telepathic... hypnotically engaging..." (Roger Farbey - All About Jazz on Liebowitz-Lyons previous release)