City Recital Hall, June 4 In layering jazz into traditional and contemporary Greek music Charles Lloyd and Maria Farantouri miraculously avoid creating another anaemic cultural fusion (to join the world-wide infestation). The triumph is how remarkably intact and separate the two elements remain while intertwining, like two lovers whose individual…
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York Theatre, May 31 Confession time. I know critics aren’t supposed to deal in the currency of expectations, but I’d half-envisioned being smoothed into a state of erasure by a Larry Carlton concert, or exhausted by the unrelenting good taste. More fool me. Yes, Carlton’s guitar playing was impeccably tasteful,…
As bed fellows go, traditional Greek music and jazz might have seemed as likely as Mahler and Abba. But then Charles Lloyd, one of jazz’s most revered saxophonists, heard one of Greece’s most cherished contraltos, Maria Farantouri, and she affected him the same way that Billie Holiday had done when…