Wynton Century

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and special guests take you through 100 hundred years of jazz piano on Handful of Keys. Star pianists Joey Alexander, Dick Hyman, Myra Melford, Helen Sung, Isaiah J. Thompson, and the JLCO's own Dan Nimmer grab hold of all 88 keys and reveal the full extent of the piano's evolution over the 20th century.

I love "Domino", Rahsaan Roland Kirk's great 1962 album. Recorded duriung his early period with Mercury Records, Rah extends his voice even further than his previous album "We Free Kings" and starts to exhibit more humor through his playing and interpretations of originals and standards. And the man cooks! His multi-reed playing is astonishing! Yet, what could be taken as showy or novel, is some of the most melodic, lyrical and swinging music around. And the company! Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Wynton Kelly, Roy Haynes, etcetera, is very fluid and challenging.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and special guests take you through 100 hundred years of jazz piano on Handful of Keys. Star pianists Joey Alexander, Dick Hyman, Myra Melford, Helen Sung, Isaiah J. Thompson, and the JLCO's own Dan Nimmer grab hold of all 88 keys and reveal the full extent of the piano's evolution over the 20th century.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and special guests take you through 100 hundred years of jazz piano on Handful of Keys. Star pianists Joey Alexander, Dick Hyman, Myra Melford, Helen Sung, Isaiah J. Thompson, and the JLCO's own Dan Nimmer grab hold of all 88 keys and reveal the full extent of the piano's evolution over the 20th century.

This expansive four-disc anthology essentially covers the recorded history of the guitar in the 20th century, beginning with the ragtime banjo that set the table for the role of the guitar in a jazz setting in the early 1900s, and then touching all the bases clear through to the post-postmodern possibilities of the instrument in the 21st century. Don't let the subtitle throw you, though, because Progressions: 100 Years of Jazz Guitar interprets jazz guitar in the broadest of strokes, as it includes not only pantheon jazz players like Eddie Lang, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Les Paul, Wes Montgomery, and John McLaughlin but also provides an uncommon sweep by featuring Hawaiian stylists Roy Smeck and Sol Hoopii; Western swing aces Leon McAuliffe and Eldon Shamblin; country jazzman Hank Garland; rock virtuosos Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Jeff Beck; fusion funksters Larry Carlton, Al DiMeola, and Mike Stein; and hard to classify avant-garde players like Derek Bailey, Sonny Sharrock, James Blood Ulmer, and Marc Ribot.

Reviewing Halliday’s previous recorded work with guitarist Corey Christianson, Billy Kerr remarked in “Saxophone Journal,” “His saxophone playing and his music are at the highest levels, great dark, fat sound, wonderful time and feel, as well as a clean, fast technique . . . I’m sure he could play any kind of music.”