Deadwax Noir

There is nothing predictable about Brandon Sanders, and Lasting Impression follows suit. Long before he found his calling behind a drum kit, Sanders was crashing the boards as a basketball player at the University of Kansas and ...

Some albums are just collections of songs. Others transport you somewhere. A Great Day In Newcastle does exactly that. Before hearing this record, I knew little about Newcastle other than  ...

Crate diggers, unite. Here’s how Deadwax Noir opens—no grand overture, no fireworks. Just a figure slipping back into frame. Sonny Rollins disappears for three years at the tail end of the ’50s—walks away at his peak—and ...

Last night, long after I should have gone to bed, I found myself sitting alone with a half-finished bottle of Cabernet and Chet Baker's Chet spinning quietly through the room. There are albums you listen to, and  ...

When The Inner Mounting Flame hit in 1971, it didn’t really sound like a jazz record anymore. Or a rock record, either. The Mahavishnu Orchestra took pieces of both, wired them together, and sent the whole thing hurtling  ...

Christian Dillingham's As It Relates To Now carries that quiet confidence you find in the finest contemporary jazz albums. Rather than flaunting technical skills just to impress, Dillingham builds the record around  ...

Billy Cobham’s Spectrum hit in 1973 like a blown fuse in the middle of polite jazz fusion. By then, Cobham already had serious credentials: a Panamanian-born drummer raised in Brooklyn, veteran of Horace  ...

There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness that only certain jazz records understand. Not sadness, exactly. More like urban dissociation. The feeling of sitting in a parked car at 1:17AM outside a diner that never closed, watching neon  ...

The room is already dim before I drop the needle, but Components somehow makes it darker in the best possible way. A single lamp glows amber across the wall, rain slips softly against the window, and a  ...

It turns up when he’s not even really looking—just thumbing through a worn jazz bin in the back corner, fingers dusted with cardboard and time. The sleeve catches him first: Piccolo. Ron Carter. That’s enough to pause. He slides the  ...