Tag: Free Jazz Blog
https://stream.catalyticsound.com/During our conversation this summer, player, composer, organizer, and Catalytic Sound co-founder, Ken Vandermark, who at the time was in the thick of planning the Catalytic Sound Festival, dropped some hints of a in-development streaming service. At the time it was an intriguing aside, but now the service is live. …
Tumbling into the rabbit hole of Soft Machine began with Third. It took me a long time to understand how it all came together – from the group’s early psychedelic days to the various mutant offspring that began already in the late 70’s with Soft Head and Soft Heap, and then later with Soft Mountain, Soft Bounds, and then Soft Works, and finally Sof…
No Gravity is a collaboration between Lisbon based drummer João Lencastre, RED Trio pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro, and bassist João Hasselberg. The group spins shimmery web of electro-acoustic sound that at times seems impossibly delicate and other times deadly effective.The opening track, ‘First Encounter’, begins with Pinheiro’s gently dripping note…
Photo by Susanne BaltesWe asked the writers at the Free Jazz Blog to share their thoughts on this past year. Lee Rice Epstein posed the two questions “what will I remember when I look back at this year” and “what was listening like this year.” Considering the unusualness of the past year, we added a catch-all “anything else” to the list and then ga…
Ivo Perelman: A Musical Storyteller, tells the story of the Brazilian saxophonist from his formative years as a young musician moving to New York in the early 1990s, after a dissatisfying introduction to being a working musician in Los Angeles, to present day. It begins with the restless artist telling this story and how his own musical way began u…
Greetings,No doubt, there is a lot to be concerned about this year; however, 2020 has also been quite a year for recorded music.Let us focus on the positive and take a time out from the everyday to enjoy the nearly impossible task of ranking the “best of” 2020. If you have ever made one of these lists you know how difficult it is and how it is…
Elsa Nilsson, a New York City based Swedish flutist, has released an album that celebrates the music surrounding the holiday of Lucia, a festival of lights, held on the Dec 13th, the Winter Solstice (according to the Gregorian calendar). So, it’s a holiday album, but not one of the typical ones that you may expect at this time of year. Nilsson and…
Last year when I reviewed Mars Williams An Ayler Xmas Vol 3, I wrote that I was hoping that this would continue to be an annual event – a new collection of Ayler/Holiday mashups to counteract the deadly ear-poison of ‘All I Want for Christmas (is you)’. I also secretly wondered how Williams could keep finding new inspiration with the theme. Now, k…
Matthew Shipp @ Roulette, June 14, 2019. Photo by Peter Gannushkin
by Paul Acquaro
Today we celebrate the 60th birthday of pianist Matthew Shipp. An influential presence on the Downtown NYC music scene since the 1980s, Shipp is a creative and prolific musician who leads and appears on many projects. In the following Q&A, Shipp talk…
The Rewardis an aptly titled recording. For one, the recording, an LP from the French label RogueArt, which has been instrumental in releasing several recordings from the New York based pianist this year alone, is being released to coincide with Matthew Shipp’s 60th birthday. Then, it is also Shipp’s first LP only release since Sonic Exploration, a…
Saxophonist Rich Halley, hailing from Portland, has a background that begs metaphorical reading: he’s a trained biologist who conducted research on rattlesnakes, likes to spend time in the wilderness, and ended up in the music business. Somehow his 2019 outing with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist Michael Bisio, and drummer Newman Taylor Baker, Terra…
and Stef GijsselsAs Covid has continued to wreak havoc on the lives of musicians (yes, actually that could be expanded to the the world, but that’s for another day) some have sought other ways to express themselves, make some income, or work on something that that has been in the “if I just had time to…” category. Here are just a few that have c…
