Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
For 20 years
, Guillermo Klein has been creating some of the most singular and exciting music for his highly adept 11-piece ensemble, Los Guachos. His compositional style has been evolving over the years, though always utilizing elements of jazz, folkloric music of his native Argentina, rock and modern classical music. Klein’s musical voice has established a number of unique composing concepts. His new recording, “Los Guachos V,” heralds his use of a new method: symmetries. To highlight his work, Klein has created two suites that use familiar works of the jazz canon and his own material reworked using mirroring, inversions and retrogrades of harmonies and melodies to create new compositions.
For about twenty-five years, Frank Catalano has been billed as a “young, up-and-coming prodigy” saxophonist cut in the Chicago tenor tradition. But a musician can only retain the ‘young prodigy’ title for so long. Now 39-years-old and a fixture on the Chicago music scene, Catalano has assumed his rightful place as a torchbearer of the great Chicago tenor tradition. He continues what has become a musically simpatico and prolific relationship with Jimmy Chamberlin, who is best known as the drummer for the pioneering Chicago rock band Smashing Pumpkins, with a new disc that pays tribute to Von Freeman and Eddie Harris. “Bye Bye Blackbird: Blowing In From Chicago for Von and Eddie” also features New York-based guitarist Nir Felder, Chicago’s Demos Petropoulos on Hammond B-3 organ and special guest David Sanborn on alto.
Also this week, trumpeter Wayne Bergeron highlights work by special guests Arturo Sandoval, Peter Erskine, Dave Weckl, Eric Marienthal and others on his new big band project, “Full Circle”.
Saxophonist JD Allen delves into a personal investigation of the blues on “Americana: Musings on Jazz and Blues”; and pianist Louis Heriveaux, a mainstay on the Atlanta jazz scene for many years, enlists noteworthy sidemen Curtis Lundy on bass and Terreon Gully on drums for his debut as a leader, “Triadic Episode.”