Tag: Free Jazz Blog
Captured at the 2015 Jazz em Agosto Festival in Lisbon,SummerSkyshift is the second collaboration betweensaxophonist John Butcher and the Portugal’s RED Trio, their first wasEmpire, from No Business in 2011. This new collection of improvisations runs from introspective toout of this world during the course of its four tracks.
Butcher hardly …
I’m not sure how Rahsaan Roland Kirks’s music is best considered- it’s not ‘free jazz’ – though it has elements ofit in sound and spirit, and its certainly not ‘traditional jazz’, though he played standards. It was tuneful, soulful, unusual, and often defined by his use of multiple horns.
It seems that it was his own music, and it came purely…
Loren Connors – The Red Painting (Family Vineyards, 2016) ***½Tom Carter & Loren Connors – untitled (Family Vineyards, 2016) ****Loren Connors & Clint Heidorn – Light (Family Vineyards, 2016) ****
The Red Painting
In the cover story from The Wire (#389, July 2016), Kurt Gottschalk describedguitarist, pianist, and painter,Loren Con…
When we last heard from pedal steel master Susan Alcorn, she had just released the stunning recasting of Astor Piazzolla’s tango compositions for solo pedal steel guitar. It was an ambitious and exquisite record. On Evening Tales, a new collection of solo pieces, we are drawn even deeper into her musical universe – it’s definitely more expansi…
Just about every week it seems that there is an alert from Bandcamp that a new release from French guitarist Noël Akchoté is available for download. The alert from the other week though was particularly intriguing: Akchoté (who has released albums with guitarists Derek Bailey, Fred Frith and Marc Ribot, among many others) had recently teame…
Oh, acoustic guitar duo, how my heart beats for thee! DeSalvo and Minasi are a great pair on Soldano Dieci Anni,both performing on either unamplified archtop guitar or acoustic (classical and steel string) guitar. They split the responsibilities, supporting each other, and creating space for stretching out, sometimes freely, and other times wi…
Multi-instrumentalist Rhys Chatham is known for his guitar orchestra work, where he had multitudes of guitarists playing together, and from his involvement with the New York Downtown and No-Wave scene in the late 1970s. However, at the end of the aughts, he began performing solo on trumpet and incorporating live looping — certainly a more str…
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…
Trondheim Jazz Orchestra & Kristoffer Lo
By Martin Schraywith a little help fromPaul Acquaro
In 2012 Louis Rastig and Karina Mertin launched the first A’Larme! Festival in Berlin, presenting a program of contemporary jazz and improvised music, both radical and polarizing. Free jazz legends met with a younger generation, which has more of …
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…
