Kevy Metal’s Gateway to Jazz
Are you a hardrocker or metalhead looking to dip your toes into jazz music, but you don’t know where to start? Or do the media you have tried to consult tend to treat jazz as this greater artform that should not be tainted with the vulgarity of rock music? That is exactly what happened to me when I was trying to get into jazz in my late teens and early twenties.
Kevy Metal’s Gateway to Jazz will hopefully help you find your way into jazz-rock, fusion and other styles of jazz that combine the power and the compositional leanings of rock music with the improvisational elements and harmonic elegance of jazz. That is exactly what the musicians interviewed for this ongoing series do.
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Interview Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen: “Doing What Others Didn’t Was Easier”
Few musicians are as good at combining the raw power of hard rock riffing with the improvisational character of jazz as Norwegian guitarist and composer Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen. Her Hedvig Mollestad Trio has been capturing the hearts of audiences from both sides of the spectrum for a decade and a half, while she is exploring
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Interview Mark Lettieri: Pop Music with Frills
One of the goals of releasing his eighth solo album ‘Can I Tell You Something?’ was for Mark Lettieri to show that there is more to his playing than people realize. And so, apart from the funk and jazz grooves he is known for, there is a lot of eighties-inspired instrumental guitar rock on the
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Interview Al Di Meola: “A Lot of Things I Do Don’t Make Sense”
What better way to start my Gateway to Jazz interview series than with a musician who made such gateways in different directions? First, a gateway between jazz and rock, on the albums with Return to Forever and his first few solo albums. Then, a gateway to instrumental acoustic guitar music. His brand new album ‘Twentyfour’
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Kevy Metal’s Gateway to Jazz – Part II: 21st Century
Some time ago, I published the first part of what I megalomaniacally called Kevy Metal’s Gateway to Jazz. My idea was to introduce jazz-curious hard rock and heavy metal listeners to jazz acts and releases that will ease them into listening to the genre, without the elitism that I sadly still often encounter in the
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Kevy Metal’s Gateway to Jazz – Part I: Origins
Frequent readers of this blog probably would not be able to tell, but I do listen to a decent amount of jazz-related music. It just doesn’t get reviewed here all that much, because my review format does not work very well with jazz releases. Jazz generally tends to be relatively bare bones on the compositional
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