We here at Heavy Blog like to ponder the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What makes one album “better” than another? You know, the big stuff. In order to better address such pressing matters, we bring you Heavy Issues: a semi-regular column by which we plan…
There are certain privileges and challenges that come when you get to interview a band multiple times. On the one hand, building a relationship and rapport with bands and artists breeds a certain familiarity and comfort that allows for more natural conversation that can dig deeper than your run-of-the-mill press…
There’s a lot happening in the music world, and we here at Heavy Blog try our very best to keep up with it! Like the vast majority of heavy music fans, our tastes are incredibly vast, with our 3X3s in each Playlist Update typically covering numerous genres and sometimes a…
Welcome back to Jazz Club Quarterly! We hope you’ve built up a craving for jazz over the past few months, because we have a diverse array of recommendations for your listening enjoyment. Other than the obvious inclusion of Kamasi Washington’s latest compositional epic and the “lost” album from sax legend John…
Midpoint. Half in, half out. Shadow. A divide. Balance. The semantic milieu surrounding stuff that’s divided 50/50 is incredibly rich; it opens some of the greatest cultural creations of all time (“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark” – Dante’s The Inferno) and…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
We’ve charted out quite the trajectory for Jazz Club over the past few years. Initially, we launched the column as a means of dissecting key albums from throughout the year, starting with what I still fervently believe to be the greatest jazz album of the decade thus far. Then the…
Our staff has shifted quite a bit since we posted our first aggregate AOTY list back in 2014. From refocusing our content to implementing The Brooklyn Plan™ to publishing our 2017 AOTY list, our roster of contributors has fluctuated substantially in terms of numbers and genre preferences. This ebb and flow…
The search for the greatest jazz album of the decade ended in 2015 when LA-based saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington released his aptly titled debut, The Epic. A nearly three-hour love letter to the genre’s greatest attributes, The Epic is the kind of album that could sustain an artist’s legacy on its own merits alone; follow-ups are welcome, of course, but admittedly unnecessary for the endeavor of establishing Kamasi’s longevity of influence. Though these claims may seem bold, there’s a reason the album inspired the launch of our Jazz Club column and became perhaps the first pure jazz album to ever land among on our collective Albums of the Year. The ensemble’s performances of Kamasi’s compositions are nothing short of enthralling, whether they’re soaring through swirls of gospel choruses and inspired playing or masterfully moving through contemplative moods. Every track is an epic statement in its own right, and by the time the album concludes, listeners should be awed by the manner in which Kamasi maintains intrigue and quality across such an overwhelming run time.
At this point, it must seem like we’re long past beating a dead horse when it comes to using this space atop our Editors’ Picks column to reiterate the mantra of “there’s just too much music!” But as we’re sure many of you have noticed, the amount of new music we face on a weekly basis far outpaces the time needed to digest it all, something we were reminded of yet again when it came to facing the onslaught that was September. Not only did the month have five Friday release days instead of the usual four, each of those official marker points for new music seemed to attract an enormous quantity and quality of releases from all corners of the music landscape. When we (The Editors) finally pared down our playlists and picked our personal recommendations for the month, we found ourselves with perhaps the longest list of album suggestions we’ve ever presented to our fine readers. Among these are albums from artists both old and new that hail from nearly every genre we all listen to on regular basis. This being the case, let’s not waste any more time and instead get to digging through the gold pile that was September.
