Posted last night, this piece is an overview of Ann Peebles’s Hi records that tries to track how she operated and changed as a singer, writer, and dramatist. It’s also a bit of a love story about her and her songwriting and life partner, Don Bryant. There’s also a detour about early seventies electro-acoustic R&B hybrids in which rhythm …
Here’s a piece I wrote about the great R&B records Ann Peebles made for Willie Mitchell’s Hi between 1969 and ‘79.
Here’s a piece on the trumpeter and composer Jason Palmer, who’s played with Mark Turner and others and who has recently put out a sprawling live double recorded at Brooklyn’s Ornithology.
Dylan Hicks knocks it out of the park once again, this time on Abbey Lincoln. Quite possibly the best writing on the vocal jazz queen since Gary Giddins.
That’s Him (1957) and A Turtle’s Dream (1995) are my favourites of hers, and this is a very rare case of an artist who late-period mature works are just as good as her early output.
My longish piece on Abbey Lincoln includes a sorta convoluted aside on the mini-history of self-overdubbed vocals on seventies jazz albums, in case that’s your specialty. But the emotional spur of the piece, I realized while writing it, came from one of her songs: “The world is falling down, hold my hand, hold my hand, hold my hand.”
Eventually, Abbey Lincoln inspired a lot of outstanding criticism, some of which I point to in this piece, a fan’s discursive overview with an eventual focus on her self-penned songs.
Others will have much to say about her work and untimely death, but here’s a very short thing I wrote the Susan Alcorn a few years back: about her album Pedernal:
The shooter marble in jazz’s tiny bag of pedal steel players, Susan Alcorn has made an eloquent case for the instrument’s versatility on her solo and duo performances. She reached a somewhat wider audience through her contributions to the Mary Halvorson Octet’s Away with You. Returning the favor, Halvorson brings her unmistakable pick…