Category: Recordings
This trio of drummer Jeff Cosgrove’s, featuring saxophonist Scott Robinson (an true musical maverick who recently released an excellent homage to Sun Ra’s legendary Heliocentric Worlds recordings), and the fearless bassist Ken Filiano (the Brooklyn based musician seems to be everywhere the action is!), has released a wonderfully rich collabo…
Last year, Mar William’s released Volume 1 of An Ayler Xmas, this year, the saxophonist has followed up with Volume 2, which is another celebratory mash up of holiday music delivered in the style of Albert Ayler and with reference to his signature melodies.
Unlike the first volume that was recorded with his Ayler tribute group Witches and De…
Ken Vandermark’s restless musical imagination is well documented with theMomentum series, which began with his massive collection of improvised work from his residency at the Stone in NYC in January 2016, and continues this year with a double disc release of two composed works “Brüllt” and “Monster Roster.”
Momentum 2: Brüllt…
Uncompahgre is the sixth highest peak in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The word is from the Ute language and means “dirty water”, in reference to the red spring water from the area. I don’t know if this was flowing through the minds of cornetist Kirk Knuffke and clarinetist Ben Goldberg when they got together and came up with these set of im…
Polyorchard – Red October (Out and Gone Music, 2017) ****
I swear I heard somewhere in the middle of ‘I Would’, the first track off of Polyorchard’s Red October,a ring tone going off. As a live recording, it could be anyone’s phone ringing, but regardless, the sound fits. The track began scattered with Shawn Galvin’s percussion and fricti…
The Orion Congregation is a group out of Berlin, a mix of Malian, Nigerian, and German musicians, which caught my ear recently when I was poking around at a small record shop off of Berlin’s Boxhagener Platz. Ahmed Ag Kaedy, the Malian guitarist, is the group’s leader, and his group is Johannes Schleiermacher on synth and sax, Michael Wehme…
I had been looking forward to Friday’s program, and buoyed by last night’s concerts, I was ready. Maybe what had piqued my interests most was that the line-up featured a solid core of free jazz, topped off with a bit of video enhanced electronic post-rock. Again the heat was an issue, but unlike earlier in the week, when the night tempera…
All in All in All, on Relative Pitch is a rich and somewhat beguiling recording by the expansively thinking percussionist Mark Nauseef. The album, recorded in 2001 in Cologne, Germany, is a tremendous soundscape that focuses on the micro: dings of the glockenspiel, muted thud of prepared piano, hiss of electronics, and scrapes of percussion, pla…
Double Up Plays Double Up Plus (Pi Recordings, 2018) ****½
Composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill’s previous album, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs, with the first incarnation of the Double Up ensemble, was dedicated to Lawrence “Butch” Morris’ conduction method, and was given a thorough review by Lee Rice Epstein in 2016. Noting the re…
Sonar is a mathematically oriented, rhythmically-based quartet from Switzerland, and recently, they’ve became a temporary quintet with David Torn adding a third guitar and his unconventional looping and sound manipulations to their newest recording Vortex.
The core group is comprised ofStephan Thelen andBernhard Wagner on guitars,Christia…
A few weeks ago, the blog explored a new release from Anthony Braxton chronicling his work on Charlie Parker’s catalog. Another titan from the Be-bop era whose music is always up for reinterpretation is pianist Thelonious Monk. Today I look at two very different approaches to the forward thinking compositions of Monk: solo guitar and organ trio. …
Starebaby was born from NYC drummer Dan Weiss’ desire to play a bit harder than usual. Weiss’s recent recordings includeSixteen: Drummer’s Suite and Fourteen, both in the modern jazz vein. However, a fan of metal growing up, here Weiss explores a jazz aesthetic informed by heavy grooves, crunchy guitar, searing synthesizer, and a fine layer of…
