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Thursday
I like this album – it is mellow and soothing. It is what it is. It is great background music when you are working at the computer or around the house. I especially like the title track that features vocals by Andrea Bocelli.
One of the criticisms of Chris Botti is that he is not “jazzy” enough. I can use an illustration from my wife and I to show why this may be the case, My wife loves smooth jazz but when I have on a more traditional jazz album she can not get into it.
Unfortunately, the market will dictate the kind of music popular artist release. They are in the business of making money. I once heard George Benson talk about how he was broke when he was just playing “straight” jazz. Many Jazz performers would lack a real audience without European Jazz devotees.
Editorial Review
Smooth jazz trumpeter Chris Botti pays homage to his Italian roots on an album of plush love themes and Neapolitan songs. In addition to a tune featuring Andrea Bocelli, Botti was able to record with the late Dean Martin -- the duet on "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."
Pleasant Sounding Music
Rob P, music lover, 05/23/2008
Have recently purchased this CD and find it to be pleasant, easy listening music. My normal music listening mood usually calls for something that hits a little harder than this. For me, the best way I can describe Chris Botti is that he's a Diana Krall of trumpeters. Pleasant, entertaining but certainly not amazing. Will make my CD rotation, just not as often as other jazz artists that I prefer to listen to more often.
Italia – Chris Botti featuring Andrea Bocelli
One of the criticisms of Chris Botti is that he is not “jazzy” enough. I can use an illustration from my wife and I to show why this may be the case, My wife loves smooth jazz but when I have on a more traditional jazz album she can not get into it.
Unfortunately, the market will dictate the kind of music popular artist release. They are in the business of making money. I once heard George Benson talk about how he was broke when he was just playing “straight” jazz. Many Jazz performers would lack a real audience without European Jazz devotees.
Editorial Review
Smooth jazz trumpeter Chris Botti pays homage to his Italian roots on an album of plush love themes and Neapolitan songs. In addition to a tune featuring Andrea Bocelli, Botti was able to record with the late Dean Martin -- the duet on "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."
Pleasant Sounding Music
Rob P, music lover, 05/23/2008
Have recently purchased this CD and find it to be pleasant, easy listening music. My normal music listening mood usually calls for something that hits a little harder than this. For me, the best way I can describe Chris Botti is that he's a Diana Krall of trumpeters. Pleasant, entertaining but certainly not amazing. Will make my CD rotation, just not as often as other jazz artists that I prefer to listen to more often.
Italia – Chris Botti featuring Andrea Bocelli
Charlie Parker with Strings is a must have for anyone serious about their jazz collection. Here you have Mr Bebop playing jazz standards and the result is stunning.
Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop along with Dizzy Gillespie. It is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker's innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries.
Several of Parker's songs have become standards, including "Billie's Bounce," "Anthropology," "Ornithology," and "Confirmation". He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions.
His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuoso technique and complex melodic lines — such as "Koko," "Kim," and "Leap Frog" — he was also one of the great blues players.
His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.
Charlie Parker also became an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat generation, personifying the conception of the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than just a popular entertainer.
As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while in hospital after an automobile accident, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. Heroin would haunt him throughout his life and ultimately contribute to his death at age 34.
Editorial Review
Charlie Parker welcomed the opportunity to record standards with a small string ensemble in 1949, and the results are stunning, his liquid alto soaring over the tuneful and only occasionally stiff arrangements. Along the way, he invests tunes like "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" and "Laura" with a unique blend of bluesy realism and mercurial improvisation. The CD adds live versions from a Carnegie Hall concert, and there are also two brilliant versions of Neal Hefti's "Repetition." The 1947 version has Bird flying spontaneously over the dense orchestration of horns, strings, and Latin percussion. --Stuart Broomer From Jazziz
Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop along with Dizzy Gillespie. It is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker's innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries.
Several of Parker's songs have become standards, including "Billie's Bounce," "Anthropology," "Ornithology," and "Confirmation". He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions.
His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuoso technique and complex melodic lines — such as "Koko," "Kim," and "Leap Frog" — he was also one of the great blues players.
His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.
Charlie Parker also became an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat generation, personifying the conception of the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than just a popular entertainer.
As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while in hospital after an automobile accident, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. Heroin would haunt him throughout his life and ultimately contribute to his death at age 34.
Editorial Review
Charlie Parker welcomed the opportunity to record standards with a small string ensemble in 1949, and the results are stunning, his liquid alto soaring over the tuneful and only occasionally stiff arrangements. Along the way, he invests tunes like "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" and "Laura" with a unique blend of bluesy realism and mercurial improvisation. The CD adds live versions from a Carnegie Hall concert, and there are also two brilliant versions of Neal Hefti's "Repetition." The 1947 version has Bird flying spontaneously over the dense orchestration of horns, strings, and Latin percussion. --Stuart Broomer From Jazziz
In the 1940s, Norman Granz was a jazz visionary in several ways; one of these was his incorporation of strings into a variety of recordings. Granz ultimately attracted some of the best jazz artists of the era (and of all time). He managed a yet-to-be-duplicated balance of commercialism and risk-taking, of business and art, that led to the recording of some of jazz's landmark recordings. Charlie Parker With Strings (now on Verve, originally on Clef) is generally acknowledged as the first release to feature a jazz soloist backed by violins. It was just the beginning. Arguably the greatest improviser of all time, Charlie Parker was reputed to have been interested in doing a strings album for years. Granz gave him the opportunity to do it, with strings arranged and conducted by Jimmy Carroll (who was working for Granz at the time). Bird's album was monumental in more than the fact that he added strings - it was also an album of all standards, with Parker clearly stating each melody. "Just Friends" became Parker's biggest-selling single and the record of which he was said to have been most proud.
--- JAZZIZ Magazine Copyright © 2000, Milor Entertainment, Inc.
Charlie Parker (with Strings)
You Can’t Take That Away From Me – Autumn in New York
Monday
I am not too familiar with Bill Frisell and I say this to my own amazement. Where has he been hiding? This album is innovative and creative. I recommend you give it a try, my order is in the mail.
Editorial Reviews
Two CD set. Bill Frisell’s History, Mystery is a series of short pieces, alternately elegant and playful, written by Frisell for an octet comprised of the guitarist himself and a group of longtime collaborators-friends. One evocative snippet melds into another to form a virtually seamless work that unfolds over the course of this double-disc package. It has an engrossingly theatrical quality, as if it were the score to some unseen play. Some of these tracks were originally written for Mysterio Sympatico, a 70-minute multi-media dialogue between Frisell and fellow Seattle based artist/comic book author Jim Woodring that premiered in 2002 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, featuring Frisell’s compositions and Woodring’s surreal projections, and that has subsequently been reprised around the country.
Still Growing on Me
By Ron Hartman
This holds together much better then one might think, 30 tracks from different sources. There is a very nice flow to it. I like this more then East/West, less guitar histrionics (but there is a bit). It most reminds me of his "The Intercontinental", probably my favorite Frisell recording.
His version of "A Change is Gonna Come" on here is gorgeous!
Music for Grownups
By Eliot Gardenstreet
Miles Davis once said that the secret to playing jazz was capturing the feel of children's rhymes like "Patty Cake." Bill Frisell captures it perfectly, and his music is simple, playful, and fun. It's also serious and complex. No contemporary jazz artist (other Keith Jarrett) puts me in touch with the poignancy of life the way Bill does, with the sweetness of being alive, with delight in what's transient and beautiful in the face of great loss and inevitable death. Bill (like Keith) understands how important it is to keep jazz connected to its roots in blues and American popular song. ("All Blues" would be a good title for Bill's entire oeuvre.) I think this is why I resonate more to his music than to trickier cutting edge jazz, which sometimes sounds like an unfun puzzle. History, Mystery has the kind of artistic scope of Blues Dream, but it's even larger, more natural, and more satisfying. It contains echoes of The Intercontinentals, but sounds deeper, less concepty, and more settled. The pairing of guitar and violin has an illustrious history: Rheinhardt and Grapelli, McLaughlin and Goodman, McLaughlin and Shankar, Abercrombie and Feldman. Add Frisell and Scheinman to that list.
Bill Frisell solo - Wildwood Flower / Poem for Eva
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