Category: Recordings
Yeah, it’s that time again! Last year, Mars William’s Ayler Xmas rolled through Berlin and in a packed cellar club the quartet blazed through a set-list full of holiday madness, with Christmas and Chanukka favorites being lovingly deconstructed and glued back together with abandon. The show was even better than the album – Volume II – that had…
We continue our celebration of the 50thAnniversary of ECM with three favorite ECM recordings from each of our writers. Please note, there is no order to sequence of writers…
Lee Rice Epstein
Lester Bowie
The Great Pretender (1981)
All the Magic! (1983)
I Only Have Eyes For You (1985)
Channeling, honoring, and spoofing Louis Armstrong…
By David Menestres
I first met Nick Millevoi a couple of years ago when we played on the same
night at Neptune’s Parlour in Raleigh, NC, me with one of Eugene
Chadbourne’s projects and Nick with the Desertion Trio, an ear splittingly
loud project, refracting the history of electric guitar over the throbbing
bass of Johnny De…
I think the best place to start this review is with today’s Q&A with Argentinian percussionist Pablo Diaz and pianist Paula Shocron, in which Shocron writes “I think that it’s easy for a guest to join us, I feel it almost always works. I feel we have great facility to adapt ourselves and our language to different instrumentation.”
I c…
Paula Shocron, William Parker, and Pablo Diaz.Photo byPeter Gannushkin
The Free Jazz Blog has given the musical adventures of drummer Pablo Diaz and pianist Paula Shocron some attention over the past few years, first with a review of the SLD Trio’s first album Anfitrion, then on their follow up, Tensegridad, and again on a few recordings o…
It can be a pretty special event when Berlin based guitarist Olaf Rupp and clarinetist Rudi Mahall get together with the Danish percussionist Kaspar Tom. It does not happen too often but when it does, musical sparks fly. For those unable to catch these rare appearances, we luckily have the eponymous titled recording, expertly captured by Rupp …
Since the blog will be heading to Jazz em Agostothis week and reporting back on the happenings, we thought we could seize the opportunity and over the next few days to document some of the music coming out of the fertile musical scene in Portugal. Today is a mixed bag of albums that have captured my attention, and tomorrow, coinciding with the f…
This is a fantastic album, and for nearly the past year it has been stuck in rotation on my playlist. Like the Nau Quartet’s 2017 recording, Fragments of Always, Lencastre’sEudimonia continues in sharing refined and exploratory musical vision with the help of the RED Trio’s pianistRodrigo Pinheiro and bassistHernâni Faustino, as well as …
What’s more a work of nature than Yosemite Valley? The iconic, and somewhat trampled, masterpiece is in a sense the heart and soul of the American National Park System. The pictures appears here on the cover of the group Nature Work’s self titled album and while it is a beyond my knowledge wether they just liked the picture or they feel a…
German woodwind player and composer Gebhard Ullmann began his Basement Research project in the early 1990s. He released the group’s self-titled album in 1993 on the Italian Soul Note label with a group featuring saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Phil Haynes. The music was a successful mix of more formal compositions d…
The Baritone saxophones is big and formidable. I’ve always enjoyed the power and sonorities of the large woodwind, and it seems it is the last sax that one can play without having to sit, or have some sort of contraption scaffolding the instrument. Folks like Dave Rempis, Ken Vandermark, and Mats Gustafsson eat up the instrument, often luxu…
Flamingo is a trio from Berlin, made up of bass player Adam Pultz Melbye, percussionist Christian Windfeld, and contra-bass clarinetist Chris Heenan, with a little help from the sound engineer Roy Carroll adding a touch of electronics. They eschew any song format for a one hour and 12-minute long improvisation that rises from the silence an…
