Tag: Free Jazz Blog
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…
Earlier this week, legendary Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko passed away (learn more here). This weekend on the Free Jazz Blog we pay tribute to his work with a selective and wholly subjective dive into his discography.
Krzysztof Komeda Quintet – Astigmatic (Polskie Nagrania Muza, 1966)
By Colin Green
Recorded in Warsaw in December 1965 b…
It was hot and still in Berlin. Even sitting outside Radialsystem V, alongside the Spree river there was little relief. This was about a half hour before the doors opened to the big event hall where the festival was about to kick off with a solo set by Norwegian vocalist and sound artist Maja S.K. Ratkje and Bill Laswell’s ‘doom raggae’ out…
Early(ish) on an unseasonable warm and bright Saturday morning in Norway, the final day of the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, I was at a kiosk poking at the festival T-Shirts. I was looking at the colorful wheel logo of the main festival shirts, but was also intrigued by the more suggestive line drawing of a person with a cigarette on a different o…
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…
By Martin Schray and Paul Acquaro
The final evening of the Vision Festival arrived. It was a bittersweet moment – memories of the past week of shows still lingered sweetly in the mind, but expectations were high for the stellar line up which included the highly anticipated New World Pygmies with Jemeel Moondoc, William Parker, and Hamid Drake …
The general consensus, as far as I could tell, is that this is a Vision to remember. So far, on this penultimate evening, the sets have been above average to stellar and a glance at the line-up for this evening suggested no radical departures.
The change of venue, from the past few years at Judson Hall in Manhattan’s West Village has been mos…
and Martin Schray
The line up of Friday night, squarely in the middle of the festival, seemed to showcase musicians at the top of their game – from the young (Irreversible Entanglements) to the established (Daniel Carter).
Irreversible Entanglements
And so, it was the young whippersnappers who began the evening. Philadelphia’s Irreversib…
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…
