Saxophonist/flutist Richard Reiter’s I Hear Africa (City Pigeon) is a fusion effort that includes a number of African elements and influences inspired by the award-winning composer’s trip to Senegal in West Africa. With an instrumentation of his own saxes and flute plus keyboard, electric bass, guitar, drums and percussion, Reiter’s fourth album integrates African percussion and rhythms with funk, pop and jazz fundamentals to create a kind of enhanced fusion sound, including several tracks specifically influenced by Senegalese Afro-pop. But the program is broad enough to encompass a gentle recital piece in which flute, guitar and keyboard engage in delicate improvised counterpoint and imitation, as well as an a capella rendition by 12 overdubbed saxophones of a piece inspired by an all-male African vocal group. Solos are spread throughout, but “Jobim Time,” especially, contains an excellent series of mainstream modern improvisations. Jaunty two-beat fusion, wistful ballad, Afro-Pop, whatever-the compositions and the band’s renditions of them reflect consummate professionalism.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

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
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