Browse some recent Origin Reviews.
James Moody - 80 Years Young: Live at the Blue Note, March 26, 2005
by John Murph, DownBeat
To commemorate jazz legend James Moody's centennial birthday celebration, Origin Records releases the sanguine James Moody: 80 Years Young-Live At The Blue Note. The album captures both a March 2005 birthday party and a victory lap for Moody as he fronts a stellar and rotating cast of musicians that includes trombonist Slide Hampton, pianist Cedar Walton and alto saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera. The vibes are as relaxed... read more
Chris Walden Big Band - Full-On!
by Jack Goodstein, Blogcritics.org
It's been seven years since the last big band album from composer/arranger Chris Walden, the Kurt Marti Suite for big band and choir-much too long. But if it takes waiting that long for an album as fine as the newly released Full-On!, how can you complain? Los Angeles-based Walden has busied himself conducting and arranging for artists as diverse as Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Diana Krall and Rihanna, and a raft of others - so... read more
Michael Bisio & Timothy Hill - Inside Voice / Outside Voice
by Russell Perry, WTJU
Bassist Michael Bisio (Matthew Shipp, Kirk Knuffke, Whit Dickey) and guitarist / singer Timothy Hill have released a very idiosyncratic disc with equal parts ballads from the Great American Songbook (For All We Know, I Fall in Love To Easily), classics of the edges of modern jazz (Coltrane's Wise One, Ornette's Law Years, Henry Grimes's For Django) and duet improvisations (Hearsay, Transfigure). Each of these angles has merit. The ballads show... read more
David Friesen - Structures
by Chris Spector, Midwest Record
Unlike other cats that have been playing forever and like to push the envelop, Friesen doesn't do things just to do them and seems to only unleash his releases when they are ready. Here we find him at the center of a double disc set of duets, each disc having a different duet partner of high quality. Intimate stuff that could be a recital but has too much blood flowing through it to come off that way, let's call it a master class with a jazzbo... read more
Hal Galper / Jeff Johnson / John Bishop - Furious Rubato
by Bill Barton, Coda
The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines rubato as: "An elastic, flexible tempo involving slight accelerandos and ritardandos that alternate according to the requirements of musical expression." Pianist Hal Galper's liner notes elucidate quite eloquently his theories regarding rubato, parsing the basic pulse, "bending and shaping" the melody and harmony and - as he emphasizes - "you have to swing whatever tempo you're playing either basic,... read more
David Weiss Sextet - Auteur
by Edward Blanco, All About Jazz
4-STARS Trumpeter, composer and bandleader David Weiss delivers the fourth album from his exquisite sextet entitled Auteur, a French term originally used to define film directors as the "author' of the film and in musical respects here, to mean the director or "scene setters" of the music. A master of the bebop sound Weiss, as stated in the excellent liner notes from author Aidan Levy, "is dedicated to the proposition that there are... read more
Clay Giberson - Spaceton's Approach
by Adam Greenberg, All Music Guide
For his fourth release on Origin (not counting a handful of albums with his Upper Left Trio), pianist Clay Giberson reunited with a pair of New York accomplices to fill out a piano trio extraordinaire. The majority of the pieces are original compositions from Giberson, with the exception of the album-opening Rodgers & Hammerstein number and a stray (but excellent) Miles Davis piece near the end of the set. The compositions are well-crafted, with... read more
Sam Yahel - Truth And Beauty
by Larry Hollis, Cadence, Oct-Dec, 2007
If one were to go back and listen to Sam Yahel's debut disc "Searchin'" on the Naxos label, after giving a quick listen to "Truth and Beauty", it might seem like one was hearing two completely different oragnists. That effort sported the horns of Eric Alexander and Ryan Kisor on four of the nine numbers while his following recordings have all been within the trio context of organ, drums, and either guitar or saxophone. Brian Blade was on his... read more
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