DVDs
May 2008 By Bill Milkowski
Live
Cuban emigré Arturo Sandoval flexes his multi-instrumental muscle on this exhilarating concert DVD filmed in June 2007 at the Ann Arbor Summer Festival. Switching nimbly from his signature high-note, circular-breathing trumpet work to keyboards to timbales...
May 2008 By Will Smith
Live at Jazz a Vienne
This July 2007 public TV broadcast DVD offers loads of strong, often joyous music along with fairly unimaginative visuals from Vienne, France, capturing the SFJAZZ Collective in a lineup slightly different from its recent two-CD concert tour recording. In...
April 2008 By Bill Milkowski
Speak a Volcano
Back in 1974, Al Di Meola was the boy wonder, a shy 19-year-old fretboard shredder who rapidly ascended to international fame with Return to Forever. Three decades later, Di Meola is a savvy, seasoned bandleader and authoritative six-stringer with a vast...
April 2008 By George Kanzler
Norman Granz Presents Improvisation
When the footage of Charlie Parker on the “Gjon Mili Studio Sequence” from 1950 first appeared as a video in 1996 it was like discovering the Holy Grail of jazz. Now that infamous footage is finally being reissued in a more complete format, with a lot of...
April 2008 By Jeff Tamarkin
Non Stop Travels with Michel Petrucciani/Trio Live in Stuttgart
It would have been easy and obvious for a documentarian to make a film focusing on how Michel Petrucciani became an extraordinary jazz pianist despite a degenerative bone disease that kept him tiny his entire life. Thankfully, director Roger Willemsen chose...
January/February 2008 By Jeff Tamarkin
Mahmou D Ahmed & Eit Her/Orchestra
It was perhaps inevitable that Either/Orchestra would someday collaborate with the great veteran Ethiopian vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed. The 10- piece E/O, though rooted in jazz, has never been tied to one stream of thought—Afro-Cuban percussion, rock drive, bop...
January/February 2008 By Bill Milkowski
Live at Montreux, 1984/1974
From the vaults of Claude Nobs, the irrepressible harmonica- playing impresario of the Montreux Jazz Festival, comes this two-DVD set documenting two different phases of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. The expanded 1974 edition is closer in spirit...
November 2007 By Bill Meredith
A Retrospective
With director Daniel E. Meza’s liner notes touting Larry Coryell as “one of the greatest guitarists of all time, if not the greatest,” and an introductory quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes about the difficulty of recognizing genius, it’s easy to approach A...
November 2007 By Bill Milkowski
Gil Evans And His Orchestra
This live recording of a concert in Switzerland is a rare document of the late ’70s edition of the Gil Evans Orchestra featuring Randy and Michael Brecker, vibist Mike Mainieri, drummer Billy Cobham, bassist Tim Landers and guitarist Dean Brown. They join...
