Tommy Flanagan's lines live and breathe, they surge much like the most expressive horn player's, riding the breath current of his soulful ideas. Unfortunately, much of his work has been Van Gelderized. It's remarkable that he's still often immediately identifiable despite Van Gelder's distortion of the natural sound of a Steinway or Bosendorfer. There's not the least bit of hardness in Tommy's "hard bop."
Muhal Richard Abrams is likely best known as a driving force behind the hugely influential Chicago co-op the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), but he's also an underappreciated composer. Not unknown by any means — he won Denmark's first Jazzpar Prize in 1990, before the international jury got around to David Murray, Lee Konitz, Tommy Flanagan and Roy Haynes. But Abrams 'orchestra rarely got the attention it deserved in its '80s and… more »
