Category: Recordings
Abstract, heavy-hitting, andcertainlyedgy, NYC based guitarist Harvey Valdes leads a power trio via his 7-string guitar, with assured assistance from violinist Sana Nagano, and drummer Joe Hertenstein. The music is dense at times, and often sounding very precise, yet still feeling naturally flowing as the trio bends the musical logic into melo…
John Lundbom & Big Five Chord’s Plays all the Notesand Make the Changes are parts three and four of a series of EP releases that will culminate in a consolidated release this fall. For a quick refresh, you can check in with what Chris Haines wrote about the first two installments.
These two new EPsfeature the same line up as before: Jon …
Brooklyn-based, Dutch drummer/pianist, Flin van Hemmen has created a delicate and adventurous album with Drums of Days. His well-disciplined trio is bassist Eivind Opsvik, acoustic guitarist Todd Neufeld, and himself on drums and piano.
The album opens with ‘Drums of Days I’, van Hemmen on piano, striking open-ended tonal clusters, while Ops…
It was during my reading of Trevor Barre’s bookon the history of free jazz in London that I first heard of Born Free – a three LP release documenting the 12th German jazz festival in Frankfurt in 1970. The festival’s program was nearly all free jazz and was described by Barre as a milestone in his journey toward the free and avantgarde. O…
Watch out NYC – Patti Smith gave up on you years agoand Jeremiah’s already signed the DNR. Artists have always been pushed to the periphery, but when there isn’t a periphery any longer, they, and the cultural vitality, move on. And if I had a hunch to where it’s going, I’d keep my eyes peeled west, mid-west that is.
Tom Weber’s Over the Pavem…
Nickelsdorf in Austria is home to the great Konfrontation art festival and also to Phillip Schmickl, the driving force behind the ‘the oral’, an ongoing oral history project that has so far produced 12 volumes on artists and musicians, the latest beingConversations with Hamid Drake and William Parker. A conversation with Hamid Drake on the…
awa is the meeting of three Leipzigers and a lone New Yorker in a freely improvised setting. Comprised of Gustav Geißler (Alto Saxophone, Leipzig), Zach Seely (Guitar, New York), Noah Punkt (Bass, Leipzig) and Philipp Scholz (Drums, Leipzig), the quartet tends to rely on a light touch, with bursts of concentrated energy that finds each musicia…
Ron Stabinsky, a pianist from Pennsylvania, has been working in recent years with jazz upstarts Mostly Other People Do the Killing, debuting on 2013’s excellent Red Hot. Not only is he from the state that is band leader Moppa Elliot’s source of inspiration, but his approach to playing contains the sly and subtle irreverence that has so success…
Trumpeter Brian Groder’s trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen plays a sleek style of modern jazz that builds on the spirit of free-jazz and delivers with a laser-like focus. On their second release ‘R Train on the D Line’ (if you’re a New Yorker, you know), Groder and company pick up with where they left off with 2014’sReflex…
There is something familiar aboutAruánOrtiz’s approach on the piano. One bit Matthew Shipp, one bit Craig Taborn, and much of his own sound, there is precise angularity and elliptical energy that defines Ortiz’s approach to both composition and playing. Perhaps too, his choice of musicians says something – drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Er…
This is a recording that has been on high rotation in my playlist list for a bit of time now, and each time I come back to it, I find another interesting facet. I suppose an overarching description of the music is that it’s meticulously composed,and I mean that in a few ways. While there is an overall strong sense of composition that guiding…
We conclude this week of duos with four recordings featuring the saxophone and a stringed instrument – in this case cello, bass, bass guitar and guitar, and then close out with two classic sax and drum duos. The problem is, it’s hard to stop here. Just in the time of the creation of this week of reviews, a new recording from OutNow called Esoter…
