Darren Salmieri

Having taken Benson along with him when he founded CTI, Creed Taylor merely leaves the guitarist alone with a small group on his first release. The payoff is a superb jazz [more]

This may be Freddie Hubbard's finest moment as a leader in that it embodies and utilizes all of his strengths as a composer, soloist, and frontman. On Red Clay, Hubbard [more]

This five-CD box set collects all five of the Dave Brubeck Quartet's {#Time} series recordings: Time Out, Time Further Out, Countdown: Time in Outer Space, Time Changes, and Time In, [more]

Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller only worked together twice, briefly in 1925 in Erskine Tate's band and four years later in the New York [more]

For all those who have a big axe to grind with Brubeck, for all those who claim the band was only successful because they were predominantly white, or played [more]

Hank Crawford's '60s sides for Atlantic rightfully established him among the preeminent soul-jazz saxophonists. For pure phrasing and feel, Crawford was in a class by himself. When Creed [more]

With an eye and ear on what was happening on the soul charts -- James Brown in particular -- Benson made a decided swerve toward R&B on this release. Indeed, the J.B.'s Pee [more]

Of less importance than the concurrent release of The Best of Louis Armstrong: The Hot Five and Seven Recordings is Satch Blows the Blues, since it only distills the great [more]

Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis 1963-1964 is an anomaly among the retrospective sets that have been issued from the [more]

Despite the presence of classic tracks like Joe Zawinul's "Great Expectations," Big Fun feels like the compendium of sources it is. These tracks are all outtakes from other sessions, most [more]