Aug 26, 2025 1:53 PM
Blindfold Test: Buster Williams
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
Cellist Erik Friedlander will release an album insipred by American roots music, his own history as a young guitar player and the open road.
Block Ice & Propane (Skipstone Records) is a throwback to Friedlander’s childhood traveling across the United States with his family in the ‘60s and ‘70s. His father, the photographer Lee Friedlander, would plan journeys around his work and some of his photographs from that time figure in the CD’s packaging.
“Our camper was a thin shelled box sitting on top of a 1966 Chevrolet pickup truck,” Friedlander said in a news release. “Cities, campgrounds, parades, outhouses, wild animals and strange characters suffused in a haze of thousands of hours of highway travel. Writing these pieces put me back in that camper.”
Friedlander’s work on Block Ice, set for release Aug. 14, opened up when he noticed that his first sketches for the project were like finger-picking guitar pieces for the cello. A longtime veteren of New York’s downtown scene, Friedlander has backed John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Courtney Love and the Mountain Goats.
For more information, see www.blockiceandpropane.com.
“What I got from Percy was the dignity of playing the bass,” Buster Williams said of Percy Heath.
Aug 26, 2025 1:53 PM
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
Don and Maureen Sickler serve as the keepers of engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s flame at Van Gelder Studio, perhaps the most famous recording studio in jazz history.
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On the last Sunday of 2024, in the control room of Van Gelder Studio, Don and Maureen Sickler, co-owners since Rudy Van…
The Free Slave, Cosmos Nucleus and Sunset To Dawn: three classic Muse albums being reissued this fall by Timer Traveler Recordings.
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Butcher Brown, clockwise from top left: Marcus Tenney, DJ Harrison, Morgan Burrs, Corey Fonville and Andrew Randazzo. (Keyboardist Harrison couldn’t make the gig, so special guest Jacob Mann sat in with the band at the Reno Jazz Festival.)
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This year’s Jazz em Agosto set by the Darius Jones Trio captured the titular alto saxophonist at his most ferocious.
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The organizers of Lisbon, Portugal’s Jazz em Agosto Festival assume its audience is thoughtful and independent. Over…
