At age 82, pianist Lee Shaw is one of the unsung elders of jazz. Her highly interactive trio of bassist Rich Syracuse and drummer Jeff Siegel is captured live at the Cafe Stockwerk in Graz, Austria. Shaw is in fine form here, swinging with verve on Dr. Billy Taylor’s “Easy Walker,” settling into an easy, elegant mode on Victor Young’s “Street of Dreams,” getting feisty on her own “Foots” or turning in a soulful interpretation of Ahmad Jamal’s “Night Mist.” Her harmonic language is expansive, her time impeccable, her touch divine. Lee’s fascinating life story, from her Birdland days to the present, is revealed in the accompanying DVD.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time