The year 2017 is being widely celebrated as the centenary of jazz, marked by the hundredth anniversary of the music’s first recordings, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step.” Jazz began as a spontaneous, improvised music of syncopated rhythms and bent notes so creatively assembled that it defiedContinue reading “Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra”
Artist Archives
Pheeroan akLaff
Pheeroan akLaff believes in drums first, rather than last. He can drive an ensemble forward with the machine-gun attack of his snare and the rolling thunder of his bass and toms, compounding and enriching the music with dense polyrhythms, or using the metallic shimmer of his cymbals to surmount it all with a luminous, celebratoryContinue reading “Pheeroan akLaff”