Word: jazzing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SWING OUT SISTER: KALEIDOSCOPE WORLD (Polygram). Sophisticated jazz-pop with a British twist. Corinne Drewery's silky vocals and Andrew Connell's buoyant keyboards create expansive, richly atmospheric arrangements...
...decades later, Roberts, 25, finds himself with an album that has climbed to the top of the Billboard jazz chart. The Truth Is Spoken Here is a dexterous and loving homage, "a tribute," Roberts says, "to the artists who were the masters of the form." There are two Ellington compositions, In a Mellow Tone and a supernal rendition of Single Petal of a Rose, and a version of Thelonious Monk's classic Blue Monk that Roberts brings off with such light witchery that the song sounds reborn. Truth (which also boasts five Roberts originals) has all the well-studied funk...
...Tatum. Bump! " 'Does he have three hands?' It was the first time I heard something I couldn't see myself doing." He kept on learning and playing. He met Marsalis during his days at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Bump again! Marsalis talked to Roberts about the roots of jazz, challenged him intellectually, encouraged him to develop a philosophy: "Feeling is not fact." By senior year Marsalis invited Roberts to play a few gigs. Florida State promptly lost a promising music major...
Reticent about his personal life (he still lives in Tallahassee), Roberts is evangelical about jazz. "Children don't get a chance to hear much jazz," he says. "If you eat at McDonald's all your life, then you won't like broccoli the first time you taste it." When Roberts is cooking at the keys, though, he serves up jazz that is not only knowledgeable but accessible. Contemporary jazz can be too hip to draw in the listener: the more intrepid the music, the more insistent it seems about sealing itself off. Roberts' gift is to keep connected to past...
...home. When he was honored last month by the Black Filmmaker Foundation, Lee pledged allegiance to his home borough and teasingly swore never to join Hollywood's "black pack," whose members include Eddie Murphy and director Robert Townsend. Lee's next picture, the story of a jazz musician who must balance his career and love life, will also be shot in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Hollywood holds little allure for the man who rides around on a twelve-speed Peugeot bicycle (he doesn't have a driver's license) and considers a relaxing evening "going to a Knicks game, where...