If this album had been released in another era, say 40 or 45 years ago, it would have been a solid seller and a fixture on jazz radio for decades. But today, far fewer people will hear bassist Neal Miner’s wonderful collection of original cool-bop tunes, and that’s a shame. The writing is classic, the playing confident and the atmosphere genial and cozy as Miner’s sextet glides along with concise, effective solos and memorably swinging ensemble passages.
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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.”
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
