Craig Green – acoustic and electric guitars, electronics | Dave King – drums, percusccion, piano and vibes
Produced by Craig Green, Dave King with Fabrizio Perissinotto. Recorded june 15th at The Terrarium and october 25th at Fur Seal Studios, Minneapolis Minnesota. Engineered by Dusting Miller and Joe Johnson. Mixed by Craig Green and Joel Keyes. Mastered by Maurizio Giannotti at Bips Studio Milano. Thanks: Mike Jones, Joel Keyes, Ellis Drums, Vic Firth, Zildjian, Black Diamond, Teuffel, Jason Orris and special thanks to Fabrizio Perissinotto for making it Shine on! All compositions by Craig Green, Craig J Green Music / BMI and Dave King, Franz Kline in the Dunktank Music / BMI. Artwork by Elena Raffa.
Tracklist: 1. Thin Blue Ice 2. Faux Hawk 3. Part 2 4. Walk Left 5. Rock, Paper, Scissors 6. Cinematic 7. Stand Right 8. Part 3 9. Praise The Shadows 10. Rainey Qunciera 11. Snow Plow 12. Border Town 1929
Eclectic experienced and creative guitar player Craig Green
plus celebrated and critically acclaimed drummer David King (from the Bad Plus and Happy Apple) will release in some months an excting and vibrant duo collaboration on Long Song Records. Totally improvised music in an odd setting (with piano from time to time, played by D.King), electric and also acoustic, working in many moods ranges. sketches of inventiveness and freshness all over. groovey and spacey, physical and ethereal, gentle and stinging. Music coming out of their hands and mind with an almost telepathic empathy, that gives life to true little “compositions”, as if written in advance.
Featuring Craig Green on acoustic & electric guitars, electronics & compositions
and Dave King on drums, percussion, vibes & piano. Although I had not heard of Craig Green before this disc, no doubt many know of the great drummer Dave King from the super-popular Bad Plus and Happy Apple. Starting with “Thin Blue Ice” which features stark piano and distant spooky drones. On “Faux Hawk,” Craig has a dark, sort-of Marc Ducret-like tone with some slow shredding guitar while David plays fine marching, jazz/rock drums. Craig plays some spacy, liquid-sounding guitar sounds on “Part 2″ while David plays some crafty metal percussion. Dave also plays some melodic, bluesy piano on a few of these pieces while Craig plays some superb, subtle jazz guitar. On each piece, both players change their sound or approach so that each piece sounds different. While David plays stark drums on “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” Craig switches between acoustic and electric guitars to create different layers or textures. Rubbing the strings, eerie swirls of feedback and harmonics suspended in the air all add a mysterious vibe to this haunting piece. What I dig about this disc is the way both players don’t depend on any obvious melodic cliches but rather create music with focused sounds. Much of this disc has a more cinematic vibe, painting pictures and setting up certain scenes. A long and varied journey to some unexpected places. — Downtown Music Gallery
Dave King is a brave-hearted musician
that can swing sweetly one moment, then quickly erase any notion of slang-a-Lang as he smashes his drum kit to a pulp. As he does in The Bad Plus, King makes defying expectation his mission on this collaboration with guitarist Craig Green. But Green and King don’t simply play guitars, drums and occasional piano; they bang on gongs, trample foot pedals and slide combs against strings. There are multiple paths into this music, which is entirely improvised. It works well in the semi-pastoral “Walk Left” with Green shaking his guitar neck to create glowing, skittering effects, will King plays piano like some son of Thelounious Monk set afire. They cross sentiments and met in lyrical moments. “Rock, Paper, Scissors” is equally fascinating, its martial snare drumming and erie treated piano recall Chinese warlords pillaging a village. King scalds the sense on the speedy “Part 3″ ripping his brushes as Green’s guitar produces menacing tones. Sometime this collaboration is more “beat it with your fist” that massage your temples, as in the noisy “Faux Hawk”; less would have been more here. However, King and Green never overstay their invitation. — Down Beat
CD version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)
Adding...
While the best solo jazz recordings reveal an artist’s inner thoughts, the most outstanding duos endure as memorable conversations. Guitarist Craig Green and drummer David King allow us to eavesdrop on a wide variety of semi-structured discourses with this stylistically varied, self-titled release. King holds forth on drums, percussion, vibes and piano and, as is apropos of this type of project, displays sides of himself that are not all that obvious in his main gig with The Bad Plus. Green likewise strays from electric and acoustic guitars by mixing in some electronics, adding to the already broad sonic patois.
“Thin Blue Ice” begins the set as a reflective piano soliloquy that is augmented by electronic coloration, while closer “Border Town 1929” reverses roles as Green’s guitar delivers a monologue supported by drums and electronics. What makes this an engaging listen though is the fluency that these two musicians articulate on the in-between cuts: “Faux Hawk” presents an escalating give and take between rock guitar and drums; “Part 2” is a minimalist interaction between guitar and vibes; “Rainey Qunciera” is a beautiful vibes and acoustic guitar Spanish language interchange and “Walk Left” portrays a tension-filled electric guitar/piano staccato chat. Three extended pieces allow for some linguistic boundary-stretching as the spacey argot of “Cinematic,” the old-timey meets-heavy-metal idiom of “Praise the Shadows” and a “Snow Plow,” that learns to speak a funky Latin slang.
This is improvised music that keeps the flashy solos to a minimum, eschews the head-solo-head form and in the process achieves a depth of expression. There are no hackneyed phrases here and the result is original and fresh with few cliches. Green and King are well spoken in their discordant dialects and disparate tongues.
Sometimes when listening to improvised music there’s the feelingof being Donny Kerabatsos from the movie The Big Lebowski, who Walter Sobchak scolds with the line, “…you have no frame of reference here, Donny. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know the story.”
But that’s not a problem with Craig Green and David King’s improvised duo recording. In fact, their self-described ‘new American roots music’ works quite nicely. While the pair perform spontaneous compositions here, nothing sounds alien or without reference for listeners to pick up upon or follow.
Percussionist Dave King is well known to jazz listeners as a member of The Bad Plus and Happy Apple bands. Craig Green should be introduced as a guitarist versed in jazz, rock and world music playing with the likes of Ray Charles, Brazilian drummer Emilano Benivides, North Indian tabla player Sadip Berman, Eyvind Kang, Jeff Kaiser and The Violent Femmes.
The disc opens with the drummer playing not drums but piano. “Thin Blue Ice” is a meditative and foggy track with Green furnishing electronic effects behind the early-morning chamber sounds of King’s piano. King’s piano playing is heard elsewhere, and it reveals itself to be as open to sound making as his drumming. He stabs notes behind the electric guitar of Green on “Walk Left,” a sort of halting ballad. King also reveals his vibes playing, tapping glass notes on “Part 2” and chimes on “Rainey Qunciera.”
Green conjures sounds from his guitars both electric and acoustic to great effect. He becomes a son of Bill Frisell, grandson of Derek Bailey but with a pension for rock. The longest track on the disc, “Snow Plow,” thumps along to King’s bass drum and Green’s stellar guitar effects. He alternates melodic passages with noise (as pleasant as can be), creating a menagerie of sound that morphs into a sort of tango. Elsewhere, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” hovers around the military beat until Green’s acoustic guitar signals a blues tune. King follows making the pulse a marching funkiness. The music is free, at times it’s wacky, but it’s altogether enjoyable. Dudes, this music abides.
Throwing away all preconceived notions, creating new musical environments, while still sounding familiar and even groove at times, is an unusual combination, yet guitarist Craig Green and drummer Dave King, who also plays keyboards, do exactly that. The guitarist I didn’t know, but of course Dave King is the highly energetic and rock-influenced drummer of The Bad Plus and Happy Apple, two bands who’ve rejuvenated jazz in the past decade and created interest in jazz among a younger audience. This record is not likely to achieve this, therefore it is a little bit too avant-garde for that, but then again … the twelve tracks each create their own musical universe, sometimes utterly bizarre, but at times combining known elements into surprising new approaches. For instance, on “Walk Left”, King plays piano in a totally irregular way, changing the rhythms all the time, and totally dissonant, while Green plays around this, only to fall into a repeated pattern at the end, becoming even a little sentimental and sweet. “Faux Hawk” brings a steady rock groove of some serious drumming and heavyly distorted guitar. “Cinematic” starts with eery electronic landscaping, evolving into wall-of-noise electric guitar sounds.
“Praise The Shadows” brings harsh guitar sounds over distant hypnotic polyrhythmics. “Rainey Qunceira” is a track of beautiful, melodic acoustic guitar with King on vibes, again nice and sweet. But once you’re accustomed to this pleasant tune, you’re pushed into darkness again with “Snow Plow”, on which a steady drone and brushed drumming create the backdrop for splinters and shards of guitar sounds, and surprisingly the record ends again with soft acoustic guitar over a steady almost industrial drum beat in the background.
Both musicians manage to create a wide variety of musical approaches to the art of the duo, integrating all styles and subgenres they master, while inventing many more possibilities. Interestingly enough, despite the wide variety of angles, it still sounds very coherent. Sounds promising.