Something that is striking, though subtle, about Devin Gray’s latest recording, a solo drum with electronics outing, is the attention to visual detail. With few exceptions, from the digital music perspective, artwork has gotten the short end of the stick, but here, each track has a different piece of imagery associated with it. Some are abstract, s…
Magnet Festival Poster
By
Paul AcquaroAt the end of the first night of the Magnet Festival in
Wiesbaden, the young Estonian pianist Kirke Karja was playing a grand piano in
the middle of a graffiti adorned Skatehalle. The room, a large cinderblock and
concrete wareh…
Listening to The Selva makes me feel like I am in on a secret, their music is
a clandestine whisper in my ears, and I like to listen with headphones. The
message moves slowly, it oozes, it delivers in little hits, like dopamine, its
takes over, and I acquiesce obligingly.
Camarão-Girafa, the Portuguese trio’s fourth album, delivers …
The story of the Peitz jazz festival, a festival that was founded in 1973 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) town of Peitz, is for good reason, easy to mythologize. Festival founders, Ulli Blobel and Peter “Jimi” Metag, both from the region, got their career start with the festival, and while they took different paths after the festival was sh…
have you ever wondered is an ear-catching set of music that makes use of the sonic environment of the bell tower of the lovely Notre-Dame de la Drèche in France, a Catholic church in the French countryside dating from the 14th century. As composer and bassist Pascal Niggenkemper explains, the album is “chamber music for carillon, trumpet, voice, e…
Any recording by FUSK is great combination of snappy melodies and free-jazz excursions, humor and wisdom. The quartet, which sprang forth from the
compositional mind of drummer Kasper Tom Christiansen over a decade ago, features Tomasz Dąbrowski’s tasteful trumpet, Andreas Lang’s ebullient bass,
and Rudi Mahall’s brash and buoyant bass an…
I first heard saxophonist patrick brennan play at a solo show at Downtown Music
Gallery, long long ago in a galaxy far far away. I recall being quite impressed with his fiery and rhythmic playing and on his
tremendous Tilting Curvaceous, a quintet recording featuring a stellar
cast of musicians, brennan merges his effusi…
While part 1 of this feature focused on German saxophonist and bass clarinetist Gebhard Ullmann’s acoustic work, part 2 considers his recent electronic leaning work. We begin by going a bit further back, to 2021 and then shoot ahead into the near future… GULPH of Berlin – self titled (ESP Disc’, 2021)
Ok, so this one was released mid-pandemic in…
Last year, German woodwind player and composer Gebhard Ullmann turned 65, but judging by his recent output, it seems safe to say that retirement is not on the agenda. In fact, between the latter half of 2022 and into early 2023, he has released an impressive batch of recordings that not only bristle
with creative energy but also show off quite …
By
Paul Acquaro,
Tom Burris,
and
Gary Chapin
The Sam Rivers ArchiveSeries looks to be a beautiful
physical manifestations of the love and respect that NoBusiness Record’s
DanasMikailionis has for NYC loft era free jazz (we’re working with PDFs
and digital files but I, for one, have my copy on
pre-order!). Over the …
James Brandon Lewis. Photo (c) Cristina Marx / PhotoMusixInterview by Paul Acquaro (with help from Nick Metzger)
Last month, Nick Metzger reviewed several of saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’
latest releases. In fact, one of them, Eye of I, had not yet been
released. Nick wrote:
On the forthcoming 2023 release Eye of I, Lewis’ first for th…
Abdul Moiméme. Photo (c) Nuno MartinsIntroduction
This past summer, late July to be more precise, I had a partial chance
encounter with guitarist/sound sculpture Abdul Moimême outside of the Jazz Messengers record shop in Lisbon. I say ‘partial’
because we had been in touch about his latest recordings and had made loose
plans to …
