Joshua Abrams Quartet | Unknown Known | RogueArt Jazz

RogueArt continues its Chicago jazz love affair with Unknown Known a quartet featuring Josh Abrams on bass, David Boykin on tenor sax, Jason Adasiewicz on vibes, and Frank Rosaly on drums. In many ways, Unknown Known sticks to those Chicago roots: even it its wilder flights, it always has a foot planted in composition and structure. It’s jazz that comes up under the tutelage of the AACM, which constantly pushed boundaries without ever entirely dispensing with them. Continue reading

Jeff Albert’s Instigation Quartet | The Tree On The Mound | RogueArt Jazz

The art of throwing spinning-tops It’s on. It’s overflowing with energy.The music tosses the spinning-top of reality, since playing is spinning around what is, where hides what is not, what once was, and what one day will be. To play is to drill. And to improvise is to recover and develop “the faculty and the ability to ceaselessly birth sensations.” (Novalis) To improvise is to make the world flow, or to let oneself go as it flows. Sounds visit us and their levels rise within us like the waters of a flooding river – closeness of the Nile and the Mississippi. (Edward “Kidd” Jordan is the instigator of River Niger, a composition sometimes played by this quartet, which is at Jeff Albert’s instigation). When he is playing, Jeff Albert, proud heir of the tailgaters, has all the dykes and seawalls at his disposition. When he is playing, “Kidd” Jordan accumulates cataracts and deltas. There are at least two types of accumulation: the methodical accumulation of the merchant economy, the one which compiles and compacts, which amasses objects, signs, bits and pieces, which amasses time-frames also, in order to confirm them in their conformity and isolation. There is the poetic accumulation: it is spasmodic, disparate, thought-provoking -while it gathers, it squanders; while is uses, it rejuvenates. Lucid silt. — Alexandre Pierrepont (Translation: Romain Tesler) Continue reading

Roscoe Mitchell | Nicole Mitchell | Black Earth Ensemble| Three Compositions | Live at Sant’Anna Arresi | RogueArt Jazz

Despite the compositions’ respective demands Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble fully and vividly represented Roscoe Mitchell’s varied means of creating chemistry between written and improvised materials. At every turn in the program, they played with a palpable sense of familiarity and ease with the composer’s vernacular and methods. They sounded like they’ve been playing this music every night for a long time. — Bill Shoemaker, excerpt from the liner notes Continue reading

Hamid Drake & Bindu | Blissful | RogueArt Jazz

…The music improvised by Drake, Abrams, Alexander, Morris, Parker and Parker is getting close. The music improvised by the second incarnation of Bindu is also a trance music: so is its rhythm of growth, the crossroad. The music can only grow, propagate waves, navigate through forms. Dance upon the laying body of cinder-covered structures. Everything is good to it, nothing dictates its behavior. The music improvises what it needs, summons the worlds it needs, within the flow of inter-play, Kâlî’s way of playing. Our rebirth; our voodoo. Everything darkens; everything brightens. The music gives out names, one by one. Love. Life. Love. Her. Even Heaven. Around the names and the bodies dismembered by Kâlî, the alphabet is not only divided up into vowels and consonants, but in masculine and feminine letters, lit up. Agni’s seventh tongue…– Alexandre Pierrepont, excerpt from the liner notes Continue reading

Alexandre Pierrepont | Mike Ladd | Maison Hantee | RogueArt Jazz

On one level, both music and poetry are very much the same, that being sound – at least the spoken word would be. Here in “Haunted House” is a sound design or shape being put forth with multiple meanings psychoacoustically, linguistically, musically that I can only say very little about in terms of meaning, since ultimately it’s meaning will be with each individual who experiences this work. This rhythmic engagement between these two art forms create a third reality of sound gestures and events that collide and integrate. Yet knowing these facts it still does not allow me to analyze or describe exactly what “Haunted House” is. Hopefully this experience will be a catalyst at some level for good. — Henri Threadgill, excerpts from the liner notes Continue reading

Hamid Drake & Bindu | Reggaeology | RogueArt Jazz

Following the stream of time and the dances of Kâli the successive incarnations of Bindu, more a crew, sailing, outward bound, an elective community of musicians, than a defined group of people, divulge the logbook of navigation by Hamid Drake. A logbook of boarding sounds, which is not written but delimits and unlimits the narrative space where the drummer and percussionist freely circulate… …The third Bindu, dedicated to a rapprochement between “jazz” and “reggae” – neither a recording of “jazz” nor a recording of “reggae”, but a recording from the “Great Tradition” – continues to create open environments… …Whatever he does, the creative musician states the collective value, the variable mutant of play. Euphoria. At the second hearing, if all goes well, if he got across Kâli’s heart, if he or she does not hide no more, the listener should have grown younger by two or three sources of happiness. — Excerpt from the liner notes, written by Alexandre Pierrepont

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