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Rayford Griffin
Jean-Luc Ponty: Individual Choice
by Peter Rubie
By 1982, jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty had established an enviable reputation as a pioneer in jazz-rock and jazz fusion. He began as a young bebop player in the late 1950s with little interest in becoming another swing or gypsy style violinist. It was the sheets of sound" music of John Coltrane that spoke loudest to him. By the early 1970s Ponty was recording and touring with rock composer Frank Zappa, and playing with John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as ...
read moreJean-Luc Ponty: Open Mind
by Peter Rubie
If Individual Choice was the sketchbook of Jean-Luc Ponty's (JLP) decision to take his music in a new direction, Open Mind (1984), released the following year, was a deeper exploration of the emerging world of synthesizers and sequencers and their impact on live (studio) performance. Here, complex rhythmic patterns shift in the background while new sounds appear and disappear on the surface in colorful bursts, and outstanding jazz improvisors create familiar music in new settings. It's almost an audio version ...
read moreRayford Griffin: Reflections of Brownie
by Dan McClenaghan
Trumpeter Clifford Brown left a big legacy, in spite of living a lamentably short life--he died in a car accident in 1956, when he was just twenty-five years old. His recordings with drummer Max Roach endure as near-perfect works of art. Sets like Study in Brown (1956), Clifford Brown and Max Roach (1954), Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street ( 1956), and Brown and Roach Incorporated (1954), all on EmArcy Records, are bright, hard-blowing masterpieces of bop's early ...
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