Browse some recent Origin Reviews.
Tim Horner - The Head of the Circle
by Dave Sumner, emusic
emusic Pick of the Week - Hard to believe that this is just a sextet recording. Horner gets such a huge, yet finely detailed sound out of the group that you'd think they had a couple extra sets of arms helping with the heavy lifting. Lyrical as hell, and uplifting to boot. Joe Locke's vibes typically sound magical, but on this recording, he's casting spells left and right. I thought nothing could get better than Ted Nash's bass... read more
Sean Michael Giddings - Red Willow
by George W Harris, Jazz Weekly
Along with piano, leader Sean Michael Giddings plays harmonium, whammy clav as well as some orchestral programming with his team of Sam Pankey/b and Daniel Dufour/dr. The orchestrations are rich and graceful, as on the waltzing "Opening Scene" (featuring Pankey) and the pretty and poetic "Sonata". Some New Orleans pulses have Giddings hitting the chords hard on "White Claw" and he gives a rich romantic piano intro to "Agafia".... read more
Alon Farber Hagiga with Dave Douglas - The Magician: Live in Jerusalem
by Dan Ouellette, Jazz & Beyond Intel
Saxophonist Alon Farber founded his sextet Hagiga twenty years ago, so when his band performed live in June 2023 at the Israeli Museum for the Jerusalem Jazz Festival, you could expect a solid show of layered sonics. It took its improvisational power a step higher by inviting trumpeter Dave Douglas into the collaborative zeal. Together they capture the robust energy of the live setting. Dave transcends the sax clashes on his swinging composition... read more
Randy Halberstadt - Parallel Tracks
by George Fendel, Jazz Scene
Hey, if you want to talk about Seattle's three or four best piano practitioners, you'd better put Randy Halberstadt on the list. Right around the top. I heard him a few years back here in PDX accompanying singer Meredith d'Ambrosio, and remember being duly impressed. Well, here's Randy with a couple more giants, Jeff Johnson, bass and Gary Hobbs, drums. This exciting trio works seamlessly together on standards like Moonray, In The Wee Small... read more
Tito Carrillo - Urbanessence
by Paul Rauch, All About Jazz
Trumpeter Tito Carillo's second bite of the apple on Origin was more than a decade in the making, following up his outstanding first release, Opening Statement (Origin, 2011). With Urbanessence (Origin, 2022), the Chicago-based artist is truly up to the task, producing a work which is an homage to everyday life in the city. The narrative makes the point that cities are home to creators, visionaries and an army of people who are... read more
Les DeMerle - Cookin' At The Corner, Volume 1
by Tom Hull, Jazz Prospecting
The setup is piano-bass-drums plus singer, but the leader is the drummer, and he sings some too. In fact, DeMerle and Eisele pair up like Louis Prima and Keely Smith, even if they play it straight most of the time. (But not all the time: DeMerle sings one about a sailor who comes home after three years to find his wife has a new baby named Bennie. Where'd he come from, the sailor wonders? "Bennie's From Heaven.") Eisele doesn't enter until the... read more
Anthony Branker & Imagine - What Place Can Be for Us?
by Matt Collar, All Music Guide
Although he doesn't play any of the instruments on 2023's What Place Can Be for Us?, Anthony Branker's vibrant jazz sensibilities and identity as a first-generation Black American of Caribbean descent are at the core of the album's pulsing character. A longtime professor at Princeton and Rutgers, Branker started out playing trumpet, but health issues following two brain aneurysms in the late '90s forced him to refocus his attention on composing,... read more
Benjamin Boone | Philip Levine - The Poetry of Jazz
by Dr. Debra Jan Bibel, Amazon
Music and poetry have a close relationship, always, from rhyming pop tunes to metaphoric tone poems to soundtrack art songs, lieder, of which classical music abounds. Musical accompaniment has been scored for Goethe and Paul Verlaine and, more recently, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and even Bob Dylan. Thinking specifically about jazz and poetry takes us to the 1950s and San Francisco's North Beach and Manhattan's Greenwich Village.... read more
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