One would
be hard-pressed to name a working jazz musician who has played with a longer
list of great artists than Ray Mantilla.
Beginning his career in the 1950s, the percussionist has played with such
widely diverse personalities as Xavier Cugat, Freddie Hubbard, Gato Barbieri,
Cedar Walton, Michael Urbaniak, Kenny Burrell, Shirley Scott and countless
others. Together with Max Roach, he was a founding member of the popular
percussion ensemble M’Boom. For his new CD, “The Connection,” Mantilla has taken
his decades of experience in music and synthesized it into a language which
encompasses the best of all genres while never quite leaving his Latin roots
and heritage. With a band made up of long-time colleagues, Ray rips through an
imaginative program of originals and standards where the Latin beats are tinged
with echoes of Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Spain and Ray’s own Nuyorican roots.
After nine
CDs over 20 years with her longstanding Tierney
Sutton Band, the five-time Grammy-nominated vocalist decided to leave her
comfort zone and leap off the cliff by tackling an homage to the revered pop
singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Having come up as a jazz singer with an
intimate knowledge of the Great American Songbook, Sutton wasn’t all that
familiar with Mitchell’s work prior to hearing “Both Side Now” in 2000. That
tour de force recording sparked her interest and sent her on a journey of
investigating Mitchell’s earlier masterworks. With “After Blue,” her most
daring and revealing project to date, Tierney puts her own unique stamp on
familiar Mitchell tunes from the late ‘60s through2000.
Also this
week, pianist Fred Hersch, who
performed at this summer’s Iowa City Jazz Fest, teams up with guitarist Julian Lage for the duo release “Free
Flying”; Southern California saxophonist David
Sills gathers his quintet for “Blue’s the New Green,” featuring many of David’s tasteful swinging originals;
and guitarist Fred Fried and Core
focus in on a program of Burt Bacharach material on “Core Bacharach.”
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