Category: Recordings
I think it is easy to get a little intimidated by a new Nate Wooley recording. There is usually a concept that tries to answer a question about the process of creation and creativity that he presents eloquently and humbly, but as a listener you may be inclined to wonder, as I sometimes find myself doing, ‘will I get it?’ It’s easy to let this happ…
By Paul Acquaro Emerging during the depths of the Covid winter, the Dorf Alien Trio’s album, Industrial Memory, is the output from a trio of young players from Ahaus, Germany who seem to be, on the one hand, steeped in…
By Paul Acquaro New York based violinist Sana Nagano’s Smashing Humans begins with a no-nonsense musical statement. ‘Strings and Figures’ starts off with a few strokes of Nagano’s bow across the strings and then is joined by a lurching bass figure and…
Some days just call for a little more muscular sounds and others something more delicate. Fortunately free-jazz and experimental music is so wonderfully ill-defined that you can find something that fits both your mood and nice tolerance level without problem – often within the same album. Here are two bands from New York City that make a lot of sou…
Eli Wallace – Solos/Duo (Eschatology, 2020) ****Brooklyn based pianist Eli Wallace has been developing a dynamic approach to his instrument, running a spectrum from minimalist sounds to maximum energy. A while back I reviewed two recordings featuring Wallace from when he was transitioning from the west coast. Since then, he has released several exc…
Algo en un Espacio Vacio, or ‘something in an empty space’, is right on. There is something that pianist Paula Shocron and drummer Pablo Diaz, musicians and physical movement teachers from Buenos Aires know about how to fill a space and on Algo en un Espacio Vacio they use light brushstrokes when applying their magic. Their medium – piano and drums…
, Tom Burris, and Nick OstrumFollowing Lee Rice Epstein’s review of the new William Parker biography, we thought it would make a nice pairing with a review of Parker’s new 10 CD setMigration of Silence Into and Out Of the Tone World out on Centering and AUM Fidelity. Needless to say, it was a daunting task and even as we spread it out among three o…
In the blurb on Bandcamp about Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities the word ‘glitchy’ is used to describe the work of the trio of guitarists Han-earl Park and Nick Didkovsky with saxophonist Catherine Sikora. It is an apt word, as Park has an approach that is as much electronic impulses as it is human touch. Didkovsky too is a musician with a deep…
No Gravity is a collaboration between Lisbon based drummer João Lencastre, RED Trio pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro, and bassist João Hasselberg. The group spins shimmery web of electro-acoustic sound that at times seems impossibly delicate and other times deadly effective.The opening track, ‘First Encounter’, begins with Pinheiro’s gently dripping note…
Tumbling into the rabbit hole of Soft Machine began with Third. It took me a long time to understand how it all came together – from the group’s early psychedelic days to the various mutant offspring that began already in the late 70’s with Soft Head and Soft Heap, and then later with Soft Mountain, Soft Bounds, and then Soft Works, and finally Sof…
Ivo Perelman: A Musical Storyteller, tells the story of the Brazilian saxophonist from his formative years as a young musician moving to New York in the early 1990s, after a dissatisfying introduction to being a working musician in Los Angeles, to present day. It begins with the restless artist telling this story and how his own musical way began u…
Elsa Nilsson, a New York City based Swedish flutist, has released an album that celebrates the music surrounding the holiday of Lucia, a festival of lights, held on the Dec 13th, the Winter Solstice (according to the Gregorian calendar). So, it’s a holiday album, but not one of the typical ones that you may expect at this time of year. Nilsson and…
