Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Richie Cole is an internationally recognized jazz legend who began his career as the lead altoist in the Buddy Rich Big Band. He later started his own quintet and toured worldwide popularizing bebop and his Alto Madness style. He has recorded over 50 albums as a leader. These days he spends much of his time working with the Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra comprising four horns and rhythm. For his new release, “Cannonball,” Cole has put together a sextet, featuring trombonist Reggie Watkins, to feature the music of his musical hero, Cannonball Adderly.
With his accessible and entertaining new CD, “Ornettiquette,” trumpeter Chris Pasin and his adventurous band mates take a joyous look at the music of saxophonist/composer/innovator Ornette Coleman and his long-time sonic partner, trumpeter Don Cherry. It’s the fourth release as a leader for the New York native, a longtime practitioner of jazz from straight-ahead to avant-garde. “I became acquainted with the music of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Albert Ayler as a teenager and played along with their records,” Pasin recalls. “It was not until a couple of years ago that the idea of a band playing the music inspired by these heroes occurred to me, thus engendering Ornettiquette.”
Also this week, guitarist Bobby Broom embraces the rhythm-and-blues core of jazz with his new group, the Organi-Sation, playing interpretation of pop melodies from the Beatles to Motown on “Soul Fingers”.
Saxophonist Jeff Rupert and pianist Richard Drexler offer up another batch of tunes taken from a 2015 concert in Orlando on “R & D”.
Drummer Matt Kane releases his fourth album, “The Other Side of the Story,” the first to feature entirely his original compositions.