jon garelick

Jon Garelick is associate arts editor of the Boston Phoenix, where he has been on staff since becoming music editor in 1990. Jon writes the column “Giant Steps” -- which is mostly about jazz -- as well as pieces about TV, art, theater, and other subjects. He has also written for the New York Times and New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Jazziz, the Boston Globe, and other publications. He has won two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards -- in 1993 and 2003 -- for his writing about music.

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Latest Articles

Getting the story

Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux sing jazz's many strains
Full-length written histories of jazz can be a slog. Especially since "the story of jazz" (as critic Marshall Stearns titled his 1956 tome) only gets longer and more complicated. Personally, on these prose-narrative trips along the New Orleans–New York axis of musical development, I usually bog down somewhere outside Chicago.
By JON GARELICK | December 01, 2009

Erik Deutsch | Hush Money

Hammer and String
Having played in projects from jam bands to jazz and as a singer-songwriter accompanist, keyboardist Erik Deutsch led an acoustic jazz album for his debut.
By JON GARELICK | November 25, 2009

Mixed media

Ran Blake's Pawnbroker, Sofia Koutsovitis's pan-American roots
Film noir has been a running theme in composer/pianist Ran Blake's work since the beginning of his career — his very first album, The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962), with singer Jeanne Lee, began with David Raskin's theme to Otto Preminger's Laura .
By JON GARELICK | November 18, 2009

Live and on record

Darius Jones, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Ben Goldberg’s Go Home
To call Darius Jones’s music avant-garde seems almost beside the point. In its way, it’s older than old — it’s ancient.
By JON GARELICK | November 04, 2009

Henry Threadgill Zooid | This Brings Us To, Volume 1

Pi (2009)
Henry Threadgill has been reinventing his language — and by extension the jazz language — for at least 30 years, beginning with the trio Air in the 1970s.
By JON GARELICK | October 28, 2009

Slow hand

Jeremy Udden’s rocky jazz path
In his Village Voice review of Jeremy Udden’s Plainville (Fresh Sound New Talent), Jim Macnie recalled how a friend of his tried to file it as “jazz for Wilco fans.” As Macnie explained, that’s not the whole story with Udden or Plainville , but it’s not a bad starting point.
By JON GARELICK | October 21, 2009

Slow hand

Old school, new school

Amanda Carr and Gretchen Parlato do it their way
If fans plan shrewdly next Thursday (October 15), they can hear jazz singing at its best in two completely different styles.
By JON GARELICK | October 08, 2009

Coming home

Terri Lyne Carrington gives the BeanTown Jazz Fest the blues
Terri Lyne Carrington gives the BeanTown Jazz Fest the blues
By JON GARELICK | September 25, 2009

No new age

Earthsound is for real
Yes, this Boston jazz trio incorporates the sounds of seals, tree frogs, and crickets. Yes, one of them is a working ecologist. Here's why you shouldn't hold that against them.
By JON GARELICK | September 25, 2009

No new age

Teachers and students

NEC and Berklee set the jazz stage
Several of this fall's promising jazz performances are clustered around the week of October 18. That marks the 40th-anniversary celebration of the jazz-studies program at New England Conservatory, which, created by Gunther Schuller, established NEC as one of the international twin beacons of jazz education in Boston along with Berklee College of Music.
By JON GARELICK | September 14, 2009

More than guitar

Julian Lage's talent isn't just in his fingers
"I like using songs to change the environment — to get the listener's ear to be a little skewed."
By JON GARELICK | September 08, 2009

No translation necessary

Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, live at the M FA, September 26, 2009
Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys — named for their home town in southwest Louisiana — play music for dancing.
By JON GARELICK | August 31, 2009

Luis Bonilla | I Talking Now

NJCO/Planet Arts (2009)
Sometimes even the fanciest jazz virtuosity can sound routine, if for no other reason than that we've heard it all before.
By JON GARELICK | September 02, 2009

Street rhythm

Florencia Gonzalez gets ugly . Plus, Dave Holland is sitting pretty.
In the city where Florencia Gonzalez grew up — the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo — every neighborhood has its own candombe group. These are drum outfits that might meet on a Sunday afternoon, a Wednesday night, or particular holidays, depending on neighborhood tradition.
By JON GARELICK | August 25, 2009

Covering the bottom end - and the bottom line

Newport Jazz comes back with a bang
The biggest news made by the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals the past two weekends was that they happened at all.
By JON GARELICK | August 14, 2009

Jeremy Udden | Plainville

Fresh Sound New Talent (2009)
Saxophonist and composer Udden (formerly of NEC and the Either/Orchestra) here dives deeper into the jazz-pop connections he began to explore in his 2006 debut as a leader, Torchsongs .
By JON GARELICK | July 29, 2009

Interview: Steve Swallow on the Gary Burton Quartet

An interview with Steve Swallow
DO YOU REMEMBER EXACTLY HOW YOU GUYS FIRST GOT TOGETHER? I have a memory. I tend to distrust them, but my recollection is that I met Gary when he called me up and asked me if I would consider playing in Stan Getz's band, which he was already in.
By JON GARELICK | June 30, 2009

Meet the Beatles!

The Gary Burton Quartet remembers its roots
Swallow says that when he first picked up an electric bass, "My immediate impression was: 'Oh, shit! I'm in deep trouble here!' "
By JON GARELICK | June 17, 2009

Mixed messages

3play+ do what they wanna; Melody Gardot follows her instincts
Given the sound of its first track (which is also the title of the album), you'd have every reason to think that 3play+'s debut CD is about to plunge you into Bill Frisell–style Americana.
By JON GARELICK | June 02, 2009

Making it right

New Orleans drops the guns and dances
Whatever increments of recovery New Orleans has made since Hurricane Katrina, in many ways the city never changes. The only shocker was a lower-left-hand piece, "Crime is down sharply in N.O."
By JON GARELICK | May 05, 2009

[FILM] John Cassavetes and Peter Falk

Plus 4 more >>

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