Thomas Conrad
Thomas’s Contributions
01/05/13 Albums
Triveni II
Avishai Cohen
Most of trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s recorded output has subsumed his trumpet voice within the broader ensemble purposes of composition, multicultural interface and concept albums. Triveni II , his sixth release as a leader, lets him cut loose and blow. The...
01/03/13 Albums
It's All Good
Ed Cherry
The organ trio, whether led by the organist or the guitarist, is a down-and-dirty working-class format rooted in the blues. You don’t go to organ trios for radical stimulation. You go there for reassurance. But all valid jazz genres are endlessly renewable...
12/22/12 Albums
Transparent Heart
Animation
Animation is Bob Belden’s project. He is a composer-arranger-producer-saxophonist who thinks big. He has made ambitious concept albums, like Black Dahlia and New Sketches of Spain , with huge ensembles full of famous musicians. But Transparent Heart uses...
12/17/12 Albums
Made Possible
The Bad Plus
The boys are back. Made Possible is the 10th album by the Bad Plus. They are still loud and inappropriate. They are still impulsive and obnoxious and irresistible as street urchins. And they have found some fresh ways to be all these things. The tunes are...
12/12/12 Undertones
Fortune Songs
Jasmine Lovell-Smith’s Towering Poppies
Because of new recording technologies, it is possible to make a CD faster and cheaper than ever before. Jazz albums are flooding the market. Some claim that oversupply is devaluing the music, yet many of these albums need to be heard. Jasmine Lovell-Smith...
12/08/12 Albums
Unreleased Art Pepper Vol. Vii: Sankei Hall—Osaka, Japan
Art Pepper
Laurie Pepper, widow of Art Pepper, launched the Unreleased Art series in 2006. She is now up to seven volumes. All but one contains a single live concert from 1980-1982, the last two years of Pepper’s turbulent life. If you wanted to make a case against...
11/27/12 Albums
Indicum
Bobo Stenson Trio
Bobo Stenson’s trio with bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Fält belongs on the short list with the great piano trios of our time. But Stenson records less often than the Jarretts, Mehldaus, Bollanis and Morans. Indicum is only his fifth trio release...
10/24/12 Albums
Solo
Roberta Piket
Roberta Piket is an under-the-radar pianist who has made some excellent records. Among them are Love and Beauty (2007), an interactive trio session, and Sides, Colors (2011), with an expanded ensemble including woodwinds and strings. Her new album is a departure...
10/09/12 Albums
Mary Lou Williams - The Next 100 Years
Virginia Mayhew Quartet
Virginia Mayhew’s ambitious, labor-intensive research project into the art of Mary Lou Williams began in 2009. She needed a female jazz musician to memorialize for a “Women in Jazz” festival. She chose Williams when she discovered that 2010 would be the...
10/04/12 Albums
Branford Marsalis Quartet
Four MFs Playin' Tunes
Branford Marsalis is onto something here. In press notes, he explains, “We need to quit thinking of songs as vehicles and think of them as songs. ... What we are trying to do is figure out the emotional purpose of each song ... and then play according to...
10/01/12 Albums
Alive at the Vanguard
Fred Hersch Trio
In an interview for JazzTimes in 2003, Fred Hersch talked about why he loves the Village Vanguard: “When you play very, very quietly, it has a presence throughout the entire room. There’s a certain kind of stillness, a hush, that you don’t get anywhere else...
09/18/12 Albums
Believe
The Cookers
Few all-star groups are also working bands. The personnel of the Cookers has been stable for half a decade. They play 30 to 40 gigs a year and have now made three albums. They are Billy Harper (tenor saxophone), Craig Handy (alto saxophone), Eddie Henderson...
09/12/12 Albums
Total Eclipse
Ralph Bowen
Ralph Bowen plays a pure strain of postmodern tenor saxophone. He is hugely proficient technically and consistently spills his guts. Take “Into the City.” Its quick, jagged, asymmetrical head is like a call to arms. Bowen builds from a few repeated adjacent...
09/06/12 Albums
Cycladic Moods
Franco Ambrosetti
If piano is the instrument on which Europeans are most prominent in jazz, trumpet is next: Think Tomasz Stanko, Enrico Rava, Kenny Wheeler and, more recently, Mathias Eick. Franco Ambrosetti is in that mix. He often works in groups led by bassist Miroslav...
08/03/12 Albums
Live at Art D'Lugoff's Top of the Gate
Bill Evans
In the new millennium, archival albums of previously unreleased music have become a jazz record phenomenon. They are so prevalent that most jazz polls have now changed their “reissue” category to “historical/reissue,” so that new recordings do not have to...
08/01/12 Albums
Songs and Portraits
Third World Love
Omer Avital can instigate a band like few bass players. He has quietly become an important bassist-bandleader in the tradition of Charles Mingus and Dave Holland. Avishai Cohen, with his tantalizing tart tone and well-formed fresh ideas, may be the most...
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ReportAbout Thomas Conrad
His day gig notwithstanding (Senior Vice President/COO of Magnolia Hi-Fi, a subsidiary of Best Buy), Thomas Conrad was an active jazz journalist for 20 years, as liner note author, columnist for CD Review, and regular contributor to Downbeat. Beginning in 2005, after foreswearing day gigs forever, he became more prolific. His work currently appears in Stereophile (where he is a Contributing Music Editor), JazzTimes (where he writes the “Eight-Eights” column on piano recordings), and All About Jazz—New York. He travels frequently to international destinations and much of his writing in recent years has dealt with jazz originating outside the borders of the United States. Another recurrent preoccupation in his work has been the audiophile world as it pertains to jazz. Conrad divides his time between Seattle, Washington and Palm Springs, California.