Editorial Reviews
Music Review:
Music Review
Cage: The Perilous Night, Four Walls / Leng Tan, La Barbara
Early Russian Ecclesiastical Hymns
Music: Out of a Dream: Love Songs
Corruption [CD-single] [Import]
About the Artist
Ask Rich Herstek, frontman for Joceil’s Boy, about his creative influences and you get a strange answer: Martin Luther King, Jr. Wilkie Collins, Louis Farrakhan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lord Buckley, Somerset Maugham. Herstek is a writer first. A writer whose versified vitriol and barroom musings have found a haven in jazz. He has been a playwright, a newspaper columnist, a poet and a lyricist. Through it all, he has remained a fan and a student of people throughout history who have used language brilliantly. And passionately. In 1993, Herstek met Pierre Hurel, a Paris-born, Berklee-educated composer and pianist. Hurel has been a regular performer at Boston’s Regattabar, at New York’s Knickerbocker Club and at the Toulon Jazz Festival, where he has opened for jazz legend Chick Corea. With that meeting, Herstek’s words took on a new life. The two began their musical collaboration in the late nineties. For their first studio session, they brought in Boston bassist John Lockwood, and San Francisco drummer Royal Hartigan, veteran performers who give the CD its recurring afro-inspired rhythm track.
Album Description
A new spoken-jazz offering entitled, THIS IS JOCEIL’S BOY, is being released on indie label, OoBabaDoo Records. It features old style, late night FM vocals by jazz newcomer Rich Herstek, a.k.a. Joceil’s Boy. And lyrics—all written by Herstek—which are unlike anything being played today. Songs that range from savage social and political commentaries to tunes which are nakedly sentimental. All delivered in a style that gives props to some of the great storytellers in jazz—Oscar Brown, Jr.; Lord Buckley; Ken Nordine. Music was written by Paris-born, Berklee educated composer/pianist Pierre Hurel whose evocative playing gives each piece its distinctive sense of place, transporting you from one vivid scene to the next. A Paris nightclub, a suburban kitchen, a New Jersey prison, and beyond. This may be one of the most visual collections of music ever created.