Thursday, September 8, 2022

Paolo Alderighi, Stephanie Trick - Double Trio Live 2015

Styles: Piano Jazz
Year: 2015
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 65:26
Size: 150,3 MB
Art: Front

(7:10) 1. Shine
(5:22) 2. When You and I Were Young, Maggie
(8:28) 3. The Sheik of Araby
(5:36) 4. Old Folks At Home (Swanee River)
(5:19) 5. Charleston
(4:05) 6. Handful of Keys
(8:12) 7. St. Louis Blues
(4:40) 8. Home (When Shadows Fall)
(4:39) 9. Runnin' Wild
(4:25) 10. We'll Meet Again
(7:24) 11. Wednesday Night in Walnut Creek Blues and Boogie

Pioneers in the use of four-hands piano in jazz, Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi have earned widespread success with their arrangements of classics from the stride piano, ragtime, and boogie woogie traditions, as well as from the Swing Era and the Golden Age of Tin Pan Alley. In recent projects, they have focused on the repertoire created during a time when musicals were at the heart of popular culture: the Classical Hollywood Cinema period and the Golden Age of Broadway, since the songs written between the 1920s and 1960s represent a high point and creative ferment in American popular music. Blending impeccable technique with mature musicality, the piano duo has performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia, winning the acclaim of critics and fans alike.

Stephanie Trick (from St. Louis), a leading exponent of stride piano, and Paolo Alderighi (from Milan), one of Italy’s foremost jazz pianists, met at a piano festival in Switzerland in 2008. Three years later, they started to collaborate on a four-hands piano project dedicated to classic jazz, preparing arrangements of songs from the Swing Era, as well as drawing from the ragtime and blues repertoire. Stephanie and Paolo explored the formula of four-hands duets on one piano, rarely used in jazz, in their first two albums, Two for One (2012) and Sentimental Journey (2014). Their partnership continued with Double Trio Live 2015 and Double Trio Always (2016), recorded in the piano trio setting, but with two pianists instead of one. In 2018, they released their first album on two pianos, Broadway and More. Their latest project is a double album, I Love Erroll, I Love James P. (2020), and it features the compositions of two legendary figures of jazz piano, Erroll Garner and James P. Johnson.

The four-hands piano duo has performed in a variety of venues, including the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, Jazz at Filoli, the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, the Kobe Jazz Street Festival in Japan, the London Jazz Festival, the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, the Ascona Jazz Festival in Switzerland, the Silkeborg Riverboat Jazz Festival in Denmark, the Bohém Ragtime & Jazz Festival in Hungary, Teatro Dal Verme Milano, Jazzland in Vienna, Jazz Bistro in Toronto, and other jazz clubs.

Both Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi have a background in classical piano. Stephanie graduated cum laude from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. Paolo has a degree in Piano Performance from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, Italy, and also graduated cum laude from Bocconi University in Management of Arts, Culture and Communication. Since 2008, he has been teaching a course at Bocconi entitled “Music and Society.”

Stephanie and Paolo’s dedication to jazz and the repertoire of early American popular music is accompanied in equal measure by a desire to share its rich history, and they also perform in schools and universities, as they believe in the importance of educational outreach. Their programs range from lectures and concert lessons to master classes for students of all ages, with a focus on various topics, such as “History of Jazz,” “Early American Popular Music,” “Musical Improvisation,” “Blues and Boogie Woogie,” “Ragtime and Stride Piano,” “Music Appreciation,” “Intersections of Jazz and Classical Music,” “Music and Technology,” “Women in Jazz, Ragtime, and Popular Music,” and “History of Broadway and Hollywood.”

They have worked with a variety of institutions, including the following: the Eastman School of Music, the University of Mississippi, the Colburn School (Los Angeles), the University of Santa Barbara, Syracuse University, Tri-North Middle School and Templeton Elementary School (Bloomington, Indiana), Tokyo Nihon University, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Bocconi University (Milan), and others.
https://www.paoloandstephanie.com/biography

Double Trio Live 2015

Dave Brubeck - Dave Brubeck at Storyville: 1954

Styles: Piano Jazz
Year: 1954
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 48:19
Size: 110,9 MB
Art: Front

(10:51) 1. On the Alamo
( 7:02) 2. Don't Worry 'Bout Me
( 5:58) 3. Here Lies Love
( 8:15) 4. Gone with the Wind
( 9:29) 5. When You're Smiling
( 6:42) 6. Back Bay Blues

This Columbia LP contains a total of six tracks from three different appearances by the Dave Brubeck Quartet at George Wein's Storyville between December 1953 and July 1954, two of which originated from radio broadcasts. Sticking to a mix of standards and popular songs that have since fallen out of favor among jazz musicians, the pianist and his longtime alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond, weave their magic together with several extended imaginative improvisations, particularly "On the Alamo" and "Gone with the Wind." The campy pseudo-newspaper packaging adds to the appeal of this long unavailable record, which still pops up occasionally in used record stores nearly five decades after it was recorded.~ Ken Dryden https://www.allmusic.com/album/dave-brubeck-at-storyville-1954-mw0000895185

Personnel: Dave Brubeck (piano); Paul Desmond (alto sax); Ron Crotty (bass); Bob Bates (bass); Joe Dodge (drums)

Dave Brubeck at Storyville: 1954

Jimmy McGriff - I've Got A Woman

Styles: Jazz, Post Bop
Year: 1962
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 41:20
Size: 95,2 MB
Art: Front

(4:34)  1. I've Got A Woman
(3:56)  2. On The Street Where You Live
(2:21)  3. Satin Doll
(5:45)  4. 'Round Midnight
(2:53)  5. All About My Girl
(4:57)  6. M.G. Blues
(2:20)  7. That's The Way I Feel
(6:00)  8. After Hours
(3:24)  9. Flying Home
(5:06) 10. Sermon

McGriff's first album is great. The title cut was in the top 20 in 1962. Also on the same album is "M.G. Blues" and "All About My Girl." This session McGriff, Richard Easley on drums and Walter Miller on guitar. Hi-impact early McGriff is the still the best, and this is the album that started it all, on the Sue label. Three cuts available on the Collectable CD A Toast to Jimmy McGriff's Golden Classics. ~ Michael Erlewine https://www.allmusic.com/album/ive-got-a-women-mw0000090399

Personnel: Jimmy McGriff - organ; Morris Dow - guitar; Jackie Mills - drums

I've Got A Woman

Mary Halvorson - Amaryllis

Styles: Guitar Jazz
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 37:56
Size: 87,2 MB
Art: Front

(5:52) 1. Night Shift
(6:41) 2. Anesthesia
(5:55) 3. Amaryllis
(6:47) 4. Side Effect
(6:47) 5. Hoodwink
(5:50) 6. 892 Teeth

Guitarist Mary Halvorson has a formula she just doesn’t always follow it. The first track on this new sextet release begins with a jagged rhythm over which Halvorson solos. Her bandmates (Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet) pick up pieces of the rhythm as well as related themes. It is relatively easy to determine which parts are composed and which are improvised. These themes develop and flow around one another in a fashion that has been used by Halvorson in the past, as well as by various avant-rock (and creative jazz) groups. If you are a Halvorson fan, this is all good and not far from what you expected.

But Halvorson’s influences are wide and deep. Her innovations might hide her more conventional proclivities. She clearly appreciates the standards, whether jazz, blues, or otherwise, and this appreciation colors her own works. Subtle nods to more conventional stylings appear throughout this album, even as it leans toward the experimental end of modern jazz. The chimeric nature of Halvorson’s writing is both obvious and yet subtle as she deftly dances between genres.

Amaryllis is one of two companion albums released by Halvorson last month. It features the aforementioned players forming a sextet with Halvorson, with help from the Mivos String Quartet on the second half. The pieces are of uniformly medium length, around 6-7 minutes each.

The title track is a compelling romp with Dunston and Halvorson providing a running (as opposed to walking) pattern over which the horns provide the main melodic structures with Brennan offering up accentuations. The tune moves along at a nice clip, even as Halvorson switches to her signature note-bending. It is hard not to get caught up in the group’s joyful expressiveness.

Side Effect begins with Mivos, and eventually the core group joins in. While there is no shortage of compositional complexity and sophisticated chops (not to mention a killer solo from Dunston), the overall feel is cinematic and slightly retro despite moments of start-stop rhythms.

Hoodwink is something of an outlier, with Mivos again beginning the piece but this time with a less-structured modern classical approach until Halvorson comes in on acoustic, followed by the rest. Mivos’s playing becomes sweeter to match the emotion of Garchik and O’Farrill, while Fujiwara and Dunston gently push the boundaries, serving as a reminder that this is not your grandparent’s jazz.

Amaryllis ends wistfully, bringing its bouncy opening around 180 degrees. 892 Teeth is deliberately paced and more sparsely populated, with Mivos serving mostly in the background, beneath soloists (with kudos to Brennan). But in the last two minutes, the piece goes avant, with an effects-laden lead providing a discordant break before returning to introspection. https://avantmusicnews.com/2022/06/28/amn-reviews-mary-halvorson-amaryllis-2022-nonesuch-records/

Amaryllis