Mike Shanley
Mike’s Contributions
12/27/12 Albums
Biosphere
Florian Weber
Biosphere is likely the first jazz album to include compositions by Lee Konitz, Eric Clapton and the band Coldplay. More surprising, though, is the fact that all of the songs make sense in the context of the album. German-born pianist Florian Weber, also...
12/11/12 Albums
Casting for Gravity
Donny McCaslin
Donny McCaslin always comes across as a tenor saxophonist with a strong musical personality that he uses to push himself into creative situations. For his 10th album as a leader, he absorbed influence from two electronica acts, Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada...
11/28/12 Albums
Small Places
Michael Formanek Quartet
Michael Formanek’s The Rub and Spare Change became one of 2010’s critical sleeper hits, garnering massive praise. The real revelation was that the bassist’s ease and strength as a leader wasn’t already known on a wider level. Formanek actually released albums...
11/08/12 Albums
Blues For Albert Ayler
Frank Wright Quartet
ESP-Disk’ performed an honorable service by documenting many of the musicians associated with 1960s New Thing, but not everything in the underground label’s back catalog has the force of something like Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity . Two newly discovered...
10/31/12 Albums
Post-Chromodal Out!
Hafez Modirzadeh
Post-Chromodal Out! continues on the path that Hafez Modirzadeh (tenor, alto) started down two years ago with Amir ElSaffar (trumpet). Irani-American and Iraqi-American, respectively, both men incorporated the music of those countries with jazz on the innovative...
10/29/12 Features
Positive Catastrophe: Playing with Genre
Connects Salsa and the Avant-Garde, Music and Literature, Brains and Brawn
10/21/12 Albums
There Now
Josh Berman & His Gang
The name of cornetist Josh Berman’s newest group refers back to the “gangs” led by Bix Beiderbecke or to Chicago’s Austin High Gang, which existed close to a century ago. Although Berman formed this octet under the influence of that era, tackling standards...
07/27/12 Albums
Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry, SPP
Henry Threadgill Zooid
While the previous two Zooid albums, This Brings Us To, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 , provided a revealing portrait of Henry Threadgill as a composer and bandleader, one aspect of the AACM veteran seemed to be lacking: Threadgill the soloist. Especially on the second...
07/26/12 Albums
Mechanisms
Ballister
The members of Ballister are all prolific musicians who are well acquainted with each other, personally and musically. Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and saxophonist Dave Rempis both reside in the fertile Chicago improvisation scene and have shared the stage...
07/01/12 Albums
The Air is Different
Tomas Fujiwara & the Hook Up
It’s not surprising nowadays to hear a modern jazz composer combine several divergent movements into one piece, turning a corner with little or no transition. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara fits this composer profile. But what makes the Hook Up’s sophomore release...
06/21/12 Albums
Plugged In
Jerome Sabbagh
Single-disc jazz albums don’t often have 14 tracks, at least not in the case of new releases. But Plugged In , the latest from tenor saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh, a Frenchman based in Brooklyn, features seven of his compositions intermixed with seven by Belgian...
05/19/12 Albums
Bright Light in Winter
Jeff Parker Trio
On Nicole Mitchell’s excellent 2011 album Awakening , guitarist Jeff Parker’s performance sounded like a collision of Grant Green’s crisp tone and James Blood Ulmer’s vocabulary. But Parker, probably best known as a member of the post-rock band Tortoise...
05/11/12 Albums
Chance Episodes
Dead Cat Bounce
Matt Steckler, founder of and one of four saxophonists in Dead Cat Bounce, says the theme of Chance Episodes explores “memory’s haphazard way of bringing to the fore seemingly unrelated events, so that an episodic narrative is created, as if ‘by chance.’”...
05/09/12 Albums
2 by 2
Anthony Braxton & Buell Neidlinger
Anthony Braxton and Buell Neidlinger could have dug into any number of concepts in a duo performance, considering the saxophonist’s prolific output and the bassist’s far-ranging résumé (Cecil Taylor’s original quartet, Frank Zappa and orchestra gigs) and...
04/29/12 Albums
Live in L.A.
Bobby Bradford/Mark Dresser/Glenn Ferris
The album title is a bit misleading. Bobby Bradford (cornet), Mark Dresser (bass) and Glenn Ferris (trombone) did make this recording in the City of Angels in 2009. But they were performing in trombonist Bruce Fowler’s living room, not in front of an audience...
04/22/12 Albums
Três Cabeças Lourcuras
São Paulo Underground
Rob Mazurek can always be counted on to lead a number of groups, from the large-scale drone and swirl of the Exploding Star Orchestra to the hard-driving trio Starlicker, one of 2011’s most impressive acts. No matter what he plays, Mazurek executes on cornet...
E-mail
Share
RSS
ReportAbout Mike Shanley
Mike Shanley wishes there were more hours in the day to just sit and listen to music, probably with some coffee close at hand. A native of Pittsburgh, he served as arts & entertainment editor at two of that city's alternative newsweeklies, InPittsburgh and Pulp. In addition to JazzTimes, he freelances for Pittsburgh City Paper, Blurt and maintains a blog at www.shanleyonmusic.blogspot.com where he rambles on about whatever has landed on the turntable or disc player at that moment. His writing has appeared in Harp, Pittsburgh Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and on the website PopCity.com. He has also played bass guitar in a number of Pittsburgh indie rock bands over the past two decades.