William Hooker | LIGHT | The Early Years 1975-1989 | No Business Records

Light Box: Conception of William Hooker Don’t tell him he plays loud. He learned about music and his instrument playing within a tradition that straddles R&B and jazz. That tradition congeals in the smoothly accessible, yet sonically forceful music of the organ trios of the mid-sixties and it demanded amplitude. “An organ is powerful— a Hammond B3 with a Leslie tone cabinet. That’s a six foot cabinet. It’s got that swirly thing inside and you have to play with a certain amount of power,” — Thomas Stanley Continue reading

Albrecht Maurer | Lucian Ban | Mat Maneri | Fantasm | Nemu Records

Fantasm, the title-piece has been created by an amazing deep listener, eminent New York musician, drummer Paul Motian (1931-2011). He was a master of encrypting his deep listening dynamically into imperishable gestalt. Fantasm, a paradigmatic piece here, is fed by heterogeneous sources but unified by composer and composition carrying and keeping its secrets. Mat Maneri used to play in Motian’s bands a lot, nourished and nourishing. On this album nothing sounds like ordinary strings. It has dark moods not fading into ordinary melancholia, contains limping dances into lightness, wondrous fusing dissolving in finale of quiet grandeur, uncatchable creep up shadows, splintering bop and bright solitariness per exemplum. Concentrated. Enjoyably disturbing. — Henning Bolte, Amsterdam, October 2014 Continue reading