Republic of Jazz: Dave Zinno

Showing posts with label Dave Zinno. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Dave Zinno Unisphere - River of January (WHALING CITY SOUND 2017)

The songs on Dave Zinno Unisphere’s River of January are lavish jazz adventures, rich with texture, ripe with melodicism, and simply joyful audio journeys. The band is spectacular: Unisphere includes the talents of sax man Mike Tucker (Arturo Sandoval), drummer Rafael Barata (Milton Nascimento, Marc Johnson), Leo Genovese (Joe Lovano, Esperanza Spaulding), and Crescent City trumpeter Benny Bloom. Zinno leads them the way a hopeless romantic treats a first love: gently, understanding and worshipful. He glorifies his accompanists and allows them to go on at length, indulging their considerable talents and making River of January a wall of glorious of sound.

This isn’t to say that it’s stodgy. Zinno infuses the work with progress. The band takes the vibe of traditional jazz and reverses the paradigm, so the songs, while familiar, certainly don’t remain the same. There are many highlights here, and while it wouldn’t be a waste of space to speak about them individually, it would be easier to say that these tunes all include rushes of adrenaline, sweetness of melody and serious elements of style. River of January is a work of forward thinking tradition and one that has much substance within it to discover.

1 Babycakes

2 Remember When

3 Petra Hippie

4 Inverno Sem Rio

5 Little Lilli

6 Recife Blues

7 Wichita Lineman

8 South End Blues

9 Rapanui

10 Um a Zero

Dave Zinno - double bass

Mike Tucker - tenor saxophone

Leo Genovese - piano melodica

Rafael Barata - drums

Eric " Benny" Bloom - trumpet

Sunday, April 30, 2017

John Stein & Dave Zinno - Wood & Strings (WHALING CITY SOUND 2017)

You wouldn’t think so, but jazz guitar and bass duets are surprisingly rare in recorded jazz, especially considering how common they are on stage. John Stein and Dave Zinno’s Wood and Strings shines an intimate light on the simple joys of collaboration. The duo brings with it two lifetimes of musical experience and the awesome ability to explore, find, and cultivate personal and musical ground together. If there is an essential quality to this collection, it’s that Stein, through his compositions, arrangements, and performances, has created the environment in which he and Zinno can play in the moment while creating something of timeless beauty. As the Whaling City Sound label’s newest worthwhile collection, Wood and Strings could not be recommended more highly.

1. I Remember You

2. Modinha

3. Up and at 'Em

4. Out of Nowhere

5. Switch-a-roo

6. Sarlat

7. Labor of Love

8. Estate

9. Song for Now

10. But Beautiful

11. Beatrice

12. Birk's Works

13. Till There Was You

14. When Lights Are Low

John Stein- guitar

Dave Zinno - acoustic bass

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Jay Azzolina / Dino Govoni / Adam Nussbaum / Dave Zinno - Chance Meeting (2016) WHALING CITY SOUND

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Jay Azzolina / Dino Govoni / Adam Nussbaum / Dave Zinno - Chance Meeting (2016)

Four powerful jazz artists in mid-career, all with New England roots and impressive experience, come together in one explosion of brilliant light, to produce ten originals, full of purposeful playing and sublime solos. Chance meeting indeed! Perhaps though it’s not a coincidence that drummer Adam Nussbaum, bassist Dave Zinno, guitarist Jay Azzolina, and saxophonist Dino Govoni met at all. Together, the first-call quartet fuses beautifully on their debut play date together. Presiding over the session seems to be the musical spirit of Michael Brecker, Govoni and the band’s collective inspiration and the launching pad for much of the work on Chance Meeting. With Brecker in mind, the four musicians—educators, bandleaders, conductors and original artists—form a single dynamic enterprise, playing with the confidence of visionaries that have the same elevated goal: to reach a new level not as individuals, but as a team, as an exhilarating ensemble with multiple talents but a single mind.