Drummer Chad Taylor, Mazurek’s Chicago Underground partner, is also keeping himself busy. The collective trio Sticks and Stones, featuring Taylor, bassist Josh Abrams and alto saxophonist Matana Roberts, makes its recorded debut with a self-titled CD for 482 Music. This band came together as the house band for Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge, and there is a strong Chicago pedigree here. Taylor aside, Abrams has been involved with Town and Country, and Roberts claims membership in the AACM. Sticks and Stones’ poor recording quality doesn’t do Roberts any favors. She plays with a light, papery tone and a touch of Steve Lacy’s acidic bite. With a self-effacing style, she often prefers long, lyrical lines capped with a terminal vibrato to anything grandstanding or brash. In this murky recording environment, her quiet contributions sound more reluctant and tentative then they would in a clearer, more balanced setting. Beyond that, it’s a solid date for the trio: a few swingers, some free-er things and a quirky, throwaway cover of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s “Son of Slaves.” The group sound best when Roberts floats her slow melodic lines over Taylor and Abrams’ tightly focused, forward-motion rhythms.
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

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