Moe! Staiano’s Moe!Kestra! | An Inescapable Siren Within Earshot Distance Therein And Other Whereabouts

Moe! Staiano’s Moelkestra!: Two Compositions for Large Orchestra. Produced and mastered by Dan Rathbun, November,2004 at Polymorph Studios, Oakland, California, USA Co-produced/policed by Gino Robair, Jonathan Segal, Moe! Staiano and Michael Zelner. Piece No.7 recorded live in performance by Michael Zelner, June 3,2003 at the Oakland Theater Box, Oakland,California. Piece No.5 recorded by Cuco Daglio and Guy Brenner, November 7,1998,attheYerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California for the OPUS415 Marathon *4. Note:The pieces are two large (and yet,separate) compositions as a whole.The indexes are provided for convenience only. All compositions, conductions and arrangements by Moe! Staiano. Design by Dan Kletter. Photos by Peter Conheim (Piece No.5 image) and Dave Grossman (everything else) © & © 2006 Moe! Staiano, © 2006 Rastascan Records, © 2006 Amanita Records. Continue reading

Moe! Staiano’s Moe!Kestra! | Two Rooms Of Uranium Inside 83 Markers: Conducted Improvisations Vol. II

Moe! Staiano founded the Moe!kestra! project back in the beginning of 1997. The idea came from a show he did in 1996 in Berkeley at a place called Beanbenders where he gathered some dozen or so musicians to do a simple instruction, playing a one sustained note from soft, quite, crescendoing into a loud frenzy before playing free and all totally out while Moe! destroys several television sets and lighting off Whistling Pete’s fireworks (a frantic and future Moe!kestra! player Bill Horvitz had to momentarily stop Moe! to save his guitar amp that was in harms way). At the end of the show o all the excitement and cheering, Brian Hall (from Ubzub) was shouting “Moechestra! Moechestra!” This gave Moe! the idea of working in a large orchestra format and started writing text instructional scores (Moe! has no music theory, so he needed to describe how the musicians play his scores though there are some notated parts, both traditional and graphically) and wrote Piece No.1: Death of A Piano, which was loosely based on the 1996 performance and literally requires the actual destruction of a piano, which has been performed in about six times total. Continue reading

The Long Way Home | The Best Of the Little Red Book Series | 1998 – 2008 | E-Book

This sturdy series of little ‘books’ has been compared to the Pocket Poets series begun in the early 60s by City Lights Publishing and continues to delight audiences with the powerful imagery of the writers selected. As Laurel Speer (Beatlick News) wrote: “You can carry a Little Red Book in your coat pocket along with a passport. The passport will take you out of the country. The book will transport you out into the galaxy.” Continue reading

Misha Feigin | Abraham’s Bagel

Abraham’s Bagel is Misha Feigin’s second collection of poetry. He has received the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry and was awarded the Al Smith Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction. His other books include Searching for Irina and The Last Word in Astronomy, both by Fleur Publishing. Continue reading

Connie Crothers Quartet | Deep Friendship | NA1058

The deepest friendship fosters freedom and from there, the joy of flight. The deepest friendship, like real freedom, is pluralistically unified, a place where the boundaries are malleable, at one moment wide open to the slow build and arc of myriad histories, then suddenly capturing a single moment in all its import, a look, a shared remembrance, a phrase spoken with neither artifice nor conceit, a simple act of communication whose ramifications define and transcend the shared experience, worlds and galaxies emerging from the gestural seed. Continue reading

Kidd Jordan | Peter Kowald | Alvin Fielder | Live in New Orleans | No Business Records

There are few left playing to whom the term “master” can be applied without reservation. Kidd Jordan and Alvin Fielder are two such musicians. Peter Kowald, who was taken from us far too soon, was another. Fielder and Jordan have been communing through deep listening and resultant improvisation since the 1970s, when the Improvisational Arts aggregate was conceived, and these three sessions afford the chance to compare their interactions at pivotal moments of a ten-year period. Though this trio performance with the internationally recognized German bassist is the only documentation of that group, he is clearly a kindred spirit, geographic concerns thrown to the winds as three veterans compose in, for and beyond each moment. The live trio set, ushered in by Kowald’s resonant pizzicato and an invocation from Fielder’s high hat, bristles with sublimated and titanic energy, roaring and surging with oceanic force only to be pulled back, the ebbs showing no diminution of spirit but thriving on subtlety. Listen, during his solo, to the supple but nearly silent descending polyrhythmic spirals and timbral thrusts Kowald floats over Fielder’s delicate brush work. Jordan’s reentrance, after Kowald builds his solo to an inter-register frenzy, is one of the concert’s highlights, saxophone and bass darting and weaving, overlapping, diving headlong into a spicy blend of neo -Schoenbergian pan tonality and “new thing” cries of freedom that will set the coldest heart ablaze, Fielder’s percussion adding layers of transcultural resonance. — Marc Medwin Continue reading

Bryan Rogers ­| Alban Bailly | Matt Engle | David Flaherty | YAPP | Symbolic Heads | No Business Records

Even for the standards of NoBusiness a label that sometimes features artists who haven’t been very well known so far, YAPP is a really young band, all of the band members seem to be around 30. It’s Bryan Rogers ­on tenor saxophone, Alban Bailly ­on guitar, Matt Engle ­on bass and David Flaherty ­on drums, and they cultivate the field between post rock, modern jazz, minimal and improvised music. — Martin Schray Continue reading

Kongrosian | Bootstrap Paradox | Aut Records

The music of Kongrosian is free jazz or is it improvisational jazz? I think both terms will bring to mind complete freedom, which for a few may mean “lack of organization or direction”, which in their case is untrue. Bootstrap Paradox (Aut) is a collaborative effort between the trio and Oreste Sabadin, and together they make music with a small bit of foundation, but then they each have the freedom to go anywhere and everywhere with what they do. In fact, the group say they are “a trio + 1″, and the role of that +1 is open to anyone who wants to join them. I love the concept of music that is “in the making”, or at least music that sounds like it’s being assembled as you hear it. You may hear trumpets, saxophones, and a bass clarinet play an off-key melody, while another clarinet plays around and within that melody, only for another instrument to follow, which in turns follows something else. It’s like an onion unveiling new layers, and you’re not sure whether to enjoy the onion or keep peeling. That’s the joy of such pieces as “I’m A Strange Loop”, “Fractal Structure Of Revolutions”, and “No, sir, away! A papaya war is on!”, the words have no reason for being there and perhaps the sounds are the same. They don’t belong, but do because that’s how it’s combined, to create these reckless sounds that may make you want to join in and play. Bootstrap Paradox is an album that is far from lacking any direction, the fun is trying to compile the sounds and figure out what they’ll do next. I look forward to their next destination. — John Book Continue reading

East-West Collective | Humeurs | RogueArt Jazz

The traveler listens, and says: I was called by a name that is not mine, and that is revealed by music. I barely had the time to assemble a bouquet of our hands and feet and to hang from the rope of our bodies. I heard this voice, the orgeat of this voice: what is happening to us? And with a more evasive tone: who are we, really? I stumbled on the chimney of dreams. I was with scarlet crows.Alexandre Pierrepont (translation: Remain Tessler) Continue reading

Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra | Matter Anti-Matter | RogueArt Jazz

Out of the 63 or 67 satellites around Jupiter, fifty or more of them were discovered since the year 2000 (since the “elections” of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, since the busting of the Internet bubble and the market launch of the first USB key: it’s all a question of scale, right?). We are told their orbits are far apart, eccentric, inclined and retrograde. That they do as they please, heads in the clouds, that they dance. It’s your turn to dance. You understand you are a moon in all its phases simultaneously. Let me say that again. Anybody can be the root, says Roscoe Mitchell. Everything is seed, says Novalis. Ascension Dream Phoenix, says Rob Mazurek. A feast. — Alexandre Pierrepont (translation Romain Tesler) Continue reading