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Linda Oh, Initial Here

2012 | Label: KOCH Records / Entertainment One Distribution

05.22.12 On her terrific second album, bassist and composer Linda Oh digs deep within her personal history and surrounds herself with top-flight musicians to bring her ideas to life in full-blown color. Oh was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents and when she was only three, her family migrated to Australia; by the time she moved to New York to study jazz bass at the Manhattan School of Music in 2006 she had already studied piano and bassoon, and followed classical training with a love for pop and jazz. There's a malleable rigor to music on Initial Here, suggesting a band that trusts ones another. On tune after tune her excellent quartet — drummer Rudy Royston, tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens and… more »

Tomas Fujiwara & the Hook Up, The Air is Different

Label: 482 Music / IODA

05.14.12 Over the last decade or so, drummer Tomas Fujiwara has routinely grounded musical chaos in something familiar and grooving, whether it's manning the trap kit in the wild Indian brass band Red Baraat or maintaining order while fracturing time in his work with cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. He's part of deep musical family in Brooklyn, and his own excellent quintet the Hook Up features a crew of players that collaborate with one another in many contexts: Guitarist Mary Halvorson has played with him in Bynum's bands and in Thirteenth Assembly, and she's played with bassist Trevor Dunn in his Trio-Convulsant; trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson also works in Halvorson's quintet. Needless to say, the band, which also includes tenor saxophonist Brian Settles,… more »

Eric Reed, The Baddest Monk

2012 | Label: Savant

05.09.12 Since the passing of Steve Lacy in 2004, no one's been able to blend an intimate knowledge of the music of Thelonious Monk with dedication and confident creativity like Eric Reed. The Baddest Monk takes up almost literally where last year's The Dancing Monk left off, with Reed retaining the more carefree, florid approach he deployed on Dancing's final track, transforming the opener on Baddest, the "Rhythm-A-Ning," into an immediate highlight. The track demonstrates how Reed chooses to revel in the music rather than be cowed by the legacy of Monk, to season Monk's classic melody and rhythm with a dollop of funk that nods to his Horace Silver influence while remaining thoroughly Reed — and Monk. The flair continues… more »

Mary Halvorson Quintet, Bending Bridges

Label: Firehouse 12 / IODA

05.08.12 Mary Halvorson has kept busy since stepping out as a bandleader toward the end of 2000s. Quite aside from her active career as a guitar-slinging sidewoman (see Tomas Fujiawara's recent albums), she has at least three working bands under her own name. And that doesn't count her as-yet unrecorded supergroup with avant-jazz guitarist Marc Ribot, either.

There's her power trio, which recorded Dragon's Head — and vaulted her into the modern jazz front-guard — in 2008. Soon after, Halvorson expanded the group into a quintet, adding alto sax and trumpet, and used it to turn out the brilliant album Saturn Sings. More recently, the guitarist/composer has pumped her working band into a septet: though that's not what we hear on this,… more »