Andrew Gilbert
Andrew’s Contributions
October 2007 Artist Profiles
Fred Katz: Freak Folk
Given the title, one could be forgiven for dismissing Folk Songs for Far Out Folk as an Eisenhower-era goof. But Fred Katz, the first jazz cellist to explore the instrument’s potential for bowed improvisation, was utterly serious about the 1958 project...
September 2007 Features
Clint Eastwood: Mise En Swing
If jazz had a few more champions like Clint Eastwood, the music’s status in America’s cultural firmament would be much less tenuous. Then again, as an iconic actor and Oscar-winning director and producer, Eastwood is sui generis. And so is his broad commitment...
June 2007 Artist Profiles
Andy Narell: Man of Steel
Andy Narell is a master of collaboration who has turned virtuosity on the steel drums into an international musical passport. But when it came to creating his most ambitious recording yet, Narell decided to go it alone. Tatoom, his new album on Heads Up...
June 2007 Features
Joshua Redman: Playing Through the Changes
From his first confident step onto the national stage with his triumph at the 1991 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition, he soloed with preternatural maturity, improvising with a beguiling blend of recklessness and poise. Off the bandstand...
January/February 2007 Artist Profiles
The Heath Brothers: Brotherly Jazz
Brotherly Jazz, the engaging and insightful 70-minute documentary DVD exploring the lives and careers of remarkable siblings Tootie, Jimmy and Percy Heath, almost collapsed before it ever got off the ground. Danny Scher, who made a mint as vice president...
December 2006 News
Larry Harlow: Salsa's Second Coming
Keyboardist and composer Larry Harlow was present at the birth of Fania Records, so it seems apt that the label’s revival has breathed new life into his career. At its peak in the mid-1970s, Fania was a global force that turned salsa into an international...
December 2006 Features
Harold Mabern and Eric Alexander: Getting Schooled
Seventy-year-old pianist Harold Mabern’s talents have long been sought by many popular bandleaders, but he’s remained committed to protégé Eric Alexander. Andrew Gilbert investigates one of the most fruitful partnerships in mainstream jazz.
November 2006 Artist Profiles
Slammin: Six Slamma Jammas
Keith Terry starts a groove with an elaborate series of resounding heel clicks, hollow-toned chest thumps, tom-tom foot stomps and sandpaper hand rubs. When he’s joined by Steve Hogan, the master beatboxer ornaments the rhythm with a stuttering figure and...
October 2006 Artist Profiles
Jake Shimabukuru: Ukelele Virtuoso Makes Waves
Jake Shimabukuro may be the first jazz musician to gain a pop following via the Internet sensation Youtube.com, which makes streaming video instantly available. Aptly situated on a rocky outcropping in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, the Hawaiian-born...
07/11/06 Concerts
Montreal International Jazz Festival 2006
Montreal vibrates in the summer. When the sun finally comes out and the mercury gets stuck in the sweaty 80-degree range, the pent-up energy of three million souls who have survived another long, arctic winter finds delirious release, and the city positively...
July/August 2006 Artist Profiles
Tammy Hall: Divine Piano
Pianist Tammy Hall has spent the past decade as one of the Northern California’s most sought-after accom-panists, providing soulful support for many of the region’s best jazz and blues singers. With Blue Divine, her new release on the Elfenworks label, Hall...
June 2006 Artist Profiles
Liquid Soul: Fighting Back
After two years out of the gym, Liquid Soul is back and fighting trim. The Chicago-based ensemble, which helped pioneer acid jazz in the early 1990s, returns with its fifth album, One-Two Punch (Telarc), a dense sonic uppercut to the solar plexus. Led by...
05/30/06 Concerts
Sonoma Jazz Festival 2006
California’s wine country has turned into an economic and enological powerhouse by pursuing two complimentary strategies. While some wineries concentrate on marketing good, relatively inexpensive wines for the masses, others focus on creating rich, heady...
May 2006 Features
Mimi Fox: Drop In
Long embraced in New York and the Bay Area, Mimi Fox is a rising star on the national scene as well.
January/February 2006 Artist Profiles
Jean-Michel Pilc: Rocket Man
No one knows better than Jean-Michel Pilc that playing jazz isn't rocket science. The pianist graduated from France's leading telecommunications research university, a degree that led to a four-year gig in the mid-1980s as a scientist with the French space...
January/February 2006 Artist Profiles
Mark Murphy: Always the Beat Generation
Dressed entirely in black, jazz's eternal hipster Mark Murphy slumps into a thick upholstered chair in the green room of the North Beach club Jazz at Pearl's, San Francisco's leading spot for the music. He looks exhausted, and his back is aching after his...
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ReportAbout Andrew Gilbert
As a teenage Deadhead in the mid-’80s, Andrew Gilbert experienced a series of jazz epiphanies at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center, starting with Sun Ra’s Arkestra parading through the audience chanting “We travel the spaceways/from planet to planet.” “I was already deep into Miles Davis, but I suddenly realized that jazz was as big as the universe,” Gilbert says. He covers jazz and world music for the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe and San Diego Union-Tribune. A JT contributor since 2004, Gilbert has written profiles of Miguel Zenón, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Mimi Fox and Eric Alexander.