Medeski, Martin and Wood with Nels Cline at the Blue Note
By Dan Lehner Medeski, Martin and Wood have made a long-standing career out of making endlessly fascinating music with guitarists, and their set last week at the Blue Note
Michael Dessen Trio: “Resonating Abstractions”
by Dan Lehner Photo Credit: mdessen.com Explaining programmatic music is always a tricky balance. Tell your audience too much about the story behind your piece and it’ll
Christian McBride and Inside Straight at Columbia University
by Dan Lehner By now, bassist Christian McBride’s Inside Straight has pretty well established itself as the leading exponent of swinging music. What also needs to be said about the quintet,
Newport Jazz Festival 2012: Sunday Recap
As Sunday's lineup at Newport was even more stacked than Saturday, the temporal conflicts of the festival became all-too-clear. I was faced with a hard triple booking: Maria Schneider Orchestra,
Newport Jazz Festival 2012: Saturday Recap
by Dan Lehner Even if you’ve never set foot on the historic grounds of the Newport Jazz Festival (like me), the atmosphere quickly engulfs you. Fort Adams State Park, where
Undead Music Festival: John Hollenbeck’s “The Drum Major Instinct” at IBeam
By Dan Lehner You won't find photos of any current or previous performances of drummer/composer John Hollenbeck's "The Drum Major Instinct", mostly because each performance is deliberately played in complete
Preview: Undead Music Festival
The zombie revolution continues with the third annual Undead Music Festival, presented by BOOM Collective and Search & Restore. The first strike will occur right where the festival started, in
Kneebody at Littlefield
by Daniel Lehner In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, saxophonist Ben Wendel seemed perplexed that people were using Kneebody as a descriptor (e.g., “kind of a
Matt Siffert at DROM
by Daniel Lehner At his core, bassist/vocalist/composer Matt Siffert is a singer-songwriter type. However, what made his band’s first public outing out DROM most interesting was his eclectic instrumentation. There