Tag: Free Jazz Blog
ByPaul Acquaro
Aug 3, 2019, Lisbon
I am convinced that the best way to see a city is to orient yourself towards one of its remaining record stores and walk. Take your time, don’t worry, they open late and hardly at the hour Google Maps indicates, so get sidetracked. I started at my hotel and headed out, and along the way discovered a par…
August 2, 2019, Lisbon
Brilliant blue, in the mid-20s (80 F), with a light breeze, the weather could not have been more inviting for a long walk through the jumbled city, and so I begin the day with an exploration of the Gulbenkian grounds. Back when I began my undergraduate work in the early 90s, I thought I would become a landscape arc…
August 1, 2019, Lisbon.
There could not have been a more apropos artist opening this years “Resistance”-themed Jazz em Agosto festival than Marc Ribot. His latest album, Songs of Resistance, is a self proclaimed soundtrack for the troubles of our times. For the album, the guitarist arranged songs from the American Civil Rights movement…
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…
By
Martin Schray
Last year I covered NYC’s Vision Festival with Paul Acquaro, but since he has moved to Berlin, I’m on my own this year. New York welcomed me in its typical manic way: heavy clouds were hanging over the city, it was raining. On the bus from Newark Airport to the city it was on the news that a …
By
Colin Green
Such are the flood of releases from British reeds-man Paul Dunmall that it
sometimes feels like you can never quite catch-up. 2018 saw him feature on
eight albums, all on Trevor Taylor’s FMR label which has done so much to
support free jazz and improv over the years.
The Rain Sessions
…
‘Bast’ is a blast – a kinetic opener to say the least – a musical can opener that removes the lid from the Brooklyn based trio Bloor’s first recording Drolleries. Sam Weinberg’s saxophone playing is fierce and unforgiving, Jason Nazary’s percussion work, while at moments feels frenetic, is quite deftly applied, and Andrew Smiley (like Nazary, f…
