Consider Piazzolla Forever (Dreyfus) by Richard Galliano’s Septet as a late addition to my top releases of last year. With string quartet, piano and double bass, Galliano is featured live-with a masterful acoustic reproduction and mix-at the 2002 Jazz Festival Willisau in Lucerne, Switzerland. The entire weather-season-inspired “Porteno” pieces, encasing the recording, have an awesome grandeur. Aleksandr Petrovsky, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s character on HBO’s Sex and the City, can be readily pictured in a video for “Milonga del Angel” playing piano with the septet in his ample New York bachelor pad for Sarah Jessica Parker’s character. The “Concerto Pour Bandoneon et Orchestre Aconcagua: Final,” on the other hand, is intensely dramatic and oozes virtuosi pathos. “Laura et Astor” is Galliano’s only original and, in spite of its briefness and simplicity, it is quite powerful in tone, emotiveness and conception. “Escualo” has an Africanized backbeat, with one of several remarkable performances from violinist Jean Marc Phillips-Varjabedian.
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.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro