Brick Wahl

You write a few hundred picks columns and you know you've blown it a few times. You raved about some upcoming show that was so bad people demanded their money back, raved about another that turned out to be tame enough for Leisure World, or was maybe just ordinary and......

The Gerald Wilson Orchestra is perhaps this town's signature big band. Wilson has that direct connection with this town's glory days, when jazz ruled up and down Central Avenue and L.A. was second only to New York City in the quality and quantity of jazz. Of course, that was a......

Esperanza Spalding got the kind of publicity this past week that rarely comes to a jazz musician. A lot of it wasn't exactly positive, and not just from Bieber believers (The Atlantic's pop critic got all riled up and said she only won because she's a woman, and even pulled......

So Esperanza Spalding won the Best New Artist Grammy. And not the Jazz Grammy either, the real Grammy. The big one, at Staples Center, with all those Klieg lights and reporters and Barbra Streisand and after parties and cocaine. We knew she'd been nominated. Hell, there's always a couple genuine......

Zach Harmon is back on the drum kit at the Foundry on Melrose (between Vista and Gardner) every weekend. That's a way cool thing, since we dig the way he pl...

We don't know anything about art, really. It's like classical music or philosophy or poetry or anything really cerebral like that, universes we don't traipse around much. So we had no idea who George Herms was before we met him. We were occasional drinking buddies at Charlie O's, always right......

It's awards season and even the Jazz Critics Guild got in on the red-carpet action. You never see Joan Rivers in a jazz club, though. Or a lot of critics even. Just jazz fans. Friday in Little Tokyo might be interesting: Drummer Kevin Yokota pops back into town to lead......

Tenor Chuck Manning is back at Charlie O's on Saturday. We just saw him with Mat Marucci at Jax and what a couple sets that was, with Marucci's propulsive, rolling, explosive drumming and Manning's furious, rollicking blasts of smart post-bop or whatever it is we're calling all that post-Trane saxophonery......

Seattle's Reptet are back in town. We still listen to their Do This! and Chicken or Beef?, and when At the Cabin showed up not long ago, we were delighted. It's nothing like the other two, which were unlike each other (and unlike their 7-inch single, either) — it's maybe......