Donaldson - Clifford Brown Quintet: Clifford Brown (trumpet), Lou Donaldson (alto saxophone), Elmo Hope (piano), Percy Heath (bass), Philly Joe ...
(trombone); Benny Carter (trumpet, alto saxophone); Porter Kilbert (alto saxophone); Willard Brown (alto saxophone, baritone saxophone); Eugene ...
Tammany Talk: Karaoke winner gets everybody moving to 'Everybody'
SUNSET AT THE LANDING CONCERT
And now for something different, the Sunset at the Landing Concert series Friday will feature the Jeff Albert Quintet. The free concert opens with The Mutineerz at 6 p.m. at the foot of Columbia Street in Covington.
Trombonist Jeff Albert, who lives in Mandeville, is a composer and performer of free jazz improvisation. He released “Similar in the Opposite Way” in 2009, a collection of 10 original experimental explorations performed with Ray Moore on alto saxophone, Tom Sciple on bass and Dave Cappello on drums.
He recently performed with the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana, a group that incorporated technologies such as Ipads and joysticks into their performance at the Manship Theatre in Baton Rouge.
Albert is on the Music Technology faculty at Loyola University New Orleans and has a bachelor of music degree from Loyola, a master’s in music from the University of New Orleans, and is currently working on a doctorate in Experimental Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University. To listen, visit www.jeffalbert.com .
Music Review: Lafayette Gilchrist Soul Progressin'
I've always been very particular when it comes to piano playing, or at least listening to piano players as I couldn't play the thing to save my life. It doesn't matter whether it's a classical, jazz, or pop performance, but it has always taken a very specific type of player for me to able to warm up to the instrument. For some reason there is something about the tone, or the quality of the music, produced by the way its played that will often leave me feeling emotionally cold. It doesn't matter how technically gifted an individual is, it seems to require some sort of extraordinary gift to generate emotional warmth when playing the piano.
Of course it may have to do with how fiendishly difficult an instrument it is to play with any degree of proficiency, and the amount of rigourous training in technique that so many players have to undergo in order to amass the skill set required to do what is needed to even play the damn thing. There is such a focus on learning how that to bring any soul to the proceedings requires more than what some people can accomplish. I think back to the late Glenn Gould, classical piano player, who for the last fifteen years of his life refused to play in public because of his desire to only produce mistake free music. I once saw a documentary on him which showed him in the recording studio adjusting the pitch of individual notes with technology so that they would ring exactly true....
Lafayette Gilchrist CityPaper Feature
At Highlandtown’s Creative Alliance at the Patterson, he wore his gray Kangol hat with the gold piping at a jaunty tilt and stomped on the keyboard pedals with his basketball shoes. He would not have looked out of place in a Run-D.M.C. video, and the rhythms of his compositions hinted at the hours he spent watching hip-hop videos as a teenager in Prince George’s County.
But as Gilchrist’s big hands massaged the keys of his Kurzweil PC88, the Bolton Hill resident did things to those funk and hip-hop beats that had never been heard on MTV. The central groove never faltered, but the big beats were shoved forward and backward; they might drop out momentarily or be surrounded by a cloud of secondary beats supplied by the drummer and electric bassist beside him. The beats linked up to catchy melodic phrases, which in turn opened up into shape-shifting harmonies played by the five horn players behind him. As the beats swirled around, hip-hop turned into jazz.
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