Apr 8, 2025 1:23 PM
Blue Note Jazz Festival New York Posts 2025 Lineup
Blue Note Entertainment Group has unveiled the lineup for the 14th annual Blue Note Jazz Festival New York, featuring…
Kurt Rosenwinkel released Angels Around on his own label, Heartcore Records.
(Photo: Renato Nunes)Kurt Rosenwinkel was three dates into an eight-city tour of Sweden in mid-March. Asked where, exactly, he could only laugh. “Damn! Stumped me on the first question,” he deadpanned into the phone, before valiantly trying to pronounce Härnösand, a port city 425 kilometers north of Stockholm.
It was a Wednesday, and Rosenwinkel was playing trio dates in advance of his new album, Angels Around. His road band included Dario Deidda, the prodigiously gifted Italian bassist who appears on the album and composed the title tune, and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr., in the chair occupied by Greg Hutchinson on the recording. Hutchinson was supposed to have been on tour in Europe with Joshua Redman at the time, but was instead stuck at home in Rome—on coronavirus lockdown, just like the rest of Italy.
Angels Around—released through Rosenwinkel’s own label, Heartcore Records—is his second collection of trio standards, following 2009’s Reflections (Word of Mouth Music). But whatever the two albums might share in concept and instrumentation is overshadowed by a pointed difference in sound and strategy. Reflections drew heavily from the Great American Songbook, and took a fairly conservative approach to the material, with Rosenwinkel backed by bassist Eric Revis and drummer Eric Harland. “I was going for a more traditional guitar sound,” Rosenwinkel said. “I’m in a place that’s quite different from where I was when I recorded Reflections.”
That much is obvious from the first track. Angels Around opens with the Thelonious Monk tune “Ugly Beauty,” which on the original recording, from the 1968 album Underground, is played in slow, deliberate 3/4 time. “I believe it’s his only composition in 3,” the guitarist noted. But Rosenwinkel’s version does its best to hide that. The guitarist launches the tune with a dreamy eighth-note figure in D-flat, with the top note moving from the major seventh to the sixth; the downbeat doesn’t become obvious until the bass and drums enter, and even then, the waltz feel that Monk used is undercut by Deidda’s tango-style bass line, which puts equal emphasis on beats 1 and 3.
Deidda’s performance on the tune was informed by his experiences with Argentine musicians in Europe who taught him about bolero, chaquarera and tango. “I tried that bass line and Kurt liked it immediately,” Deidda explained via email. “I believe it is a line influenced by the Argentine bolero and the Cuban cha-cha. And the interesting thing is that it sounds good on a groove that Greg played that is more of a marching rhythm.”
The Blue Note Jazz Festival New York kicks off May 27 with a James Moody 100th Birthday Celebration at Sony Hall.
Apr 8, 2025 1:23 PM
Blue Note Entertainment Group has unveiled the lineup for the 14th annual Blue Note Jazz Festival New York, featuring…
“I’m certainly influenced by Geri Allen,” said Iverson, during a live Blindfold Test at the 31st Umbria Jazz Winter festival.
Apr 15, 2025 11:44 AM
Between last Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Ethan Iverson performed as part of the 31st Umbria Jazz Winter festival in…
“At the end of the day, once you’ve run out of differences, we’re left with similarities,” Collier says. “Cultural differences are mitigated through 12 notes.”
Apr 15, 2025 11:55 AM
DownBeat has a long association with the Midwest Clinic International Band and Orchestra Conference, the premiere…
“It kind of slows down, but it’s still kind of productive in a way, because you have something that you can be inspired by,” Andy Bey said on a 2019 episode of NPR Jazz Night in America, when he was 80. “The music is always inspiring.”
Apr 29, 2025 11:53 AM
Singer Andy Bey, who illuminated the jazz scene for five decades with a four-octave range that encompassed a bellowing…
Davis was a two-time Grammy winner for liner notes.
Apr 22, 2025 11:50 AM
Francis Davis, an august jazz and cultural critic who won both awards and esteem in print, film and radio, died April…
