Cool and jazz are not two words that I associate automatically. To be blunt, I find most modern jazz to me academic and vacuous.

However, I have an album by Pascal Schumacher that has been getting heavy rotation. "Change of the Moon" is a quartet piece with the Luxemburger Schumacher on vibes and the excellent Jef Neve on piano.

The tone is definitely acoustic cool school, although there is nothing studied about their playing which shows a solid grounding in the blues.

The best place to hear it is on the "listen & buy" page of his site at http://www.pascalschumacher.com/.

The quartet will be at Midem on Jan 22. I haven't seen them, but have read good live reviews.

M

Thanks for that.

I enjoyed the songs, very well done.

On a tagentI think was the Q book of music that described Miles Davis as changing Jazz from "Mmmmm nice" to "Mmmmm nasty"

Anyway cheers again that was was indeed cool.

When I listen to the early Be-Bop, I hear musicians that are VERY ANGRY. My beef with jazz these days is that this has been sublimated into being obtuse and complicated, which is not the same thing at all.

As for Miles Davis being nasty, that was certainly true in his fusion period but less in his "Kind of Blue" and "Lift for the Scaffold" period (brilliant albums both).

What a musician!