Steve Greenlee
Steve’s Contributions
06/16/13 Albums
Grace
JD Allen
Tenor saxophonist JD Allen sounds different on Grace —less muscular, more introspective. But while he’s not as aggressive as he has been over his last several albums, he’s playing with just as much confidence. After four records in a sax-bass-drums trio...
05/25/13 Albums
Chicago Red
Brad Goode
Brad Goode, an accomplished trumpeter and jazz studies professor at the University of Colorado, has spent most of his career steeped in bop. But on Chicago Red he continues his more modern explorations, begun in 2008 with Polytonal Dance Party and the introduction...
05/13/13 Albums
Venture Inward
David Weiss & Point of Departure
Let’s call bunk on the claim that jazz should always find new things to say. Venture Inward , the new platter from trumpeter David Weiss and his quintet Point of Departure, is steeped in 1960s postbop—specifically that of Miles Davis—and it would be futile...
05/11/13 Albums
Long Story Short: Curated By Peter Brötzmann
Various Artists
The five-CD set Long Story Short is a distillation of the 2011 Music Unlimited festival in Wels, Austria, curated by angry-jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. The box set presents more than six hours of free jazz performed by 18 different configurations, some...
05/05/13 Albums
The Nows
Paul Lytton & Nate Wooley
Paul Lytton and Nate Wooley make a good match. The English drummer and the American trumpeter (respectively) are a pair of iconoclasts, and on The Nows they create strangely alluring modern improvised music that contains not one iota of anything musical...
04/28/13 Albums
Nilson Matta's Black Orpheus
Nilson Matta
Growing up in Brazil, bassist Nilson Matta was obsessed with the music from the 1956 play Orfeu da Conceição and, later, from the film based on it, 1959’s Black Orpheus . Both featured songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá, and that music would be...
04/22/13 Albums
We Want Groove
Rock Candy Funk Party
If you could put James Brown, Herbie Hancock, Joe Satriani, Galactic, Medeski Martin & Wood, Soulive and the Heavy in a blender, you might wind up with Rock Candy Funk Party, whose music sounds exactly like its name. It stands to reason. The five guys in...
10/02/12 Albums
Shimmy
Billy Martin/Wil Blades
Listening to Shimmy , you realize just how responsible Billy Martin is for the Medeski Martin & Wood sound. Thanks to the drummer’s shuffling rhythms, Shimmy sounds a lot like an MMW record, but in fact Martin has found a new keyboardist to jam with, Wil...
09/08/12 Albums
Sweet Chicago Suite
Ray Anderson Pocket brass Band
Sweet Chicago Suite has been a long time coming. Just the second album from trombonist Ray Anderson’s Pocket Brass Band, it’s the followup to 1999’s Where Home Is . Odder still, the six-part suite that constitutes this album’s core was composed back in 2001...
07/29/12 Albums
The Gowanus Sessions
Thollem/Parker/Cline
It starts with a fiercely struck guitar chord, a rumble of keys and a plucked bass note. For the next 41 minutes, pianist Thollem McDonas, bassist William Parker and electric guitarist Nels Cline play seemingly indiscriminately, creating unmusical layers...
06/29/12 Albums
Dirty & Beautiful : Volume 2
Gary Husband
We had a feeling this was coming, what with Gary Husband calling his previous album Dirty & Beautiful: Volume 1 and all. The multi-instrumentalist has attracted a wide range of guests to help him execute his vision, which lives unabashedly in the land of...
06/24/12 Albums
The James P. Johnson Songbook
Marty Grosz & The Hot Winds
How wonderful that music like this still gets made: honest-to-goodness old-time jazz, done without irony. Guitarist and banjoist Marty Grosz is not so much interested in putting his own stamp on James P. Johnson’s compositions as in delivering them to a...
06/23/12 Albums
The Baddest Monk
Eric Reed
Eric Reed is making a habit of covering Thelonious Monk. A year after releasing The Dancing Monk , the pianist has issued another album of Monk tunes. The Baddest Monk includes seven of the bebop father’s tunes and two Monk-ish originals. In doing so, Reed...
06/22/12 Albums
20th Century Folk Selections
Todd Clouser’s A Love Electric
Calling this record 20th Century Folk Selections may be a bit of a stretch—it includes more rock songs than anything else—but guitarist Todd Clouser’s point is clear: Anything, especially popular music, can become the basis for jazz-minded improvisation...
06/19/12 Albums
Spectrum Road
Spectrum Road
Spectrum Road is not the first group to pay homage to Tony Williams’ band Lifetime—Trio Beyond, with Jack DeJohnette, Larry Goldings and John Scofield, put out the excellent Saudades in 2006—but it may be the rowdiest. This all-star quartet (named for a...
05/31/12 Albums
Live at the Hillside Club
Joel Forrester/Phillip Johnston
Pianist Joel Forrester and soprano saxophonist Phillip Johnston have been playing together for 35 years, most famously as the leaders of the Microscopic Septet. The span of their partnership shows. This recent duo album, recorded in November 2010 at a gig...
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ReportAbout Steve Greenlee
Steve Greenlee is an editor and jazz writer with The Boston Globe. He grew up listening to Smiths, the Cure and Depeche Mode but eventually found religion in "Kind of Blue" and "Bitches Brew." He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and three children, annoying them with obscure recordings by Sun Ra and Last Exit. He plays keys in The Barn Goats groove-jazz quartet and also runs really fast.