Tag: Free Jazz Blog
Photos by Vera Marmelo – Gulbenkian MúsicaHow do you know on what soundyou’re dropping the needle?I’ve never understood this, being a long time LP enthusiast, but by no means a DJ, I shakily aim the stylus for the blank area before the starting groove, placing it anywhere else is simply random. So when the Berlin based electronic musician Ignaz …
Last year, Jazz 2020, a scaled back and localized version replaced the venerable Jazz em Agosto for its traditional two weekends at the end of July and start of August. It was supposed to be the Covid-19 version of festival, but as we all know, 2021 hasn’t been the light at the end of the tunnel that we all hoped for, however at least Jazz em Agost…
Robert Dick ; Nicola L. Hein – Structures of Unreason (Shhpuma, 2021) **** Nicola L. Hein often plays a well worn electric guitar with many pedals at his command. Looking the part of a serious philosopher, one may not expect the array of sound that emerges from his instrument. Or then again, why not? He lists sound artist first on his website, then…
Today we continue our series of reviews celebrating Clean Feed’s 20th anniversary, with more to come in the near future. Be sure to check out the first installment here.Happy Anniversary Clean Feed!
Mario Pavone – Isabella (Clean Feed, 2021) ****
By Kenneth Blanchard
Mario Pavone had no intention of going quietly. …
“Let the Free Be Men” is Lisbon based tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado’s “This is Our Language” quartet’s third outing. It began in 2015 the self-titled album, which was a homage to free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, from the mix of the title of two Coleman recordings This Is Our Music from 1961 and In All Languages from 1987, to the similar stell…
Part two in the series of recent guitar duos, before we move onto trios.We begin today with a couple of actual guitar duos and continue from there …
Rubén Reinaldo ; Kely García Guitarra Jazz Dúo – Acuarel (Free
Code Jazz Records, 2020) ****
Guitar and Guitar. I’ve confessed before about my reverence for the
guitar …
Fingerstyle guitarist Duck Baker with Derek Bailey, Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Mark Dresser, John Edwards, Michael Moore, Steve Noble, Roswell Rudd, Alex Ward, and Joe Williamson.Yes, let that list sink in for a bit. This latest offering from Baker, a master musician across so many idioms, is so many things at once. The releases is a series of …
In my last installment of guitar focused reviews, I covered solo recordings (seepart 1, part 2), here I expand the focus to duos. If I were being stringent, I’d also stick to straight guitar duos, but I did not feel like limiting it so much, therefore to get into this batch the requirements was at least one guitar and one something else. Part 2 of…
Today we pick up where we left off yesterday with an overview of recent solo guitar recordings. Readers of the blog may know that I have indulged in “Guitar Weeks” in past years, dedicating 5 days or more to guitar recordings, this time, however, my list grew unwieldly. I would need a guitar month to cover everything. So, I’m breaking it down into …
The pile of recordings to be reviewed grew ever taller. Over the course of the pandemic, as the months wore on, lockdowns come and went, case numbers rose and fell, the recordings, thankfully, kept coming, music kept being made. Some labels turned to digital only release series to keep the output going amid the unknown, some musicians raided their …
Where to start with a review of Leap of Faith? The group, the orchestra, the one man band, the duo, begins with woodwindist David Peck aka PEK and spirals forth from his home base in Boston. PEK identifies with fractals, as far as I know, it is the motif of all his many archival and more recent recordings. I think that it serves as a strong metapho…
In the waning days of the pre-pandemic world, reeds player and composer Ken Vandermark performed at the 3 Tage Jazz 2020 in Austria (a series connected with the renowned Saalfelden Jazz Festival). There, he played with Hungarian woodwindist István Grencsó with whom he released DO NOT SLAM THE DOOR! onBMC Records in 2019 (the album is a must liste…
