Jazz

Five Spot | Petras Vysniauskas | Yuri Yaremchuk | Roberta Piket | Mark Tokar | Klaus Kugel | Poltva

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The band’s name reveals that this is a quintet, with Lithuanian Petras Vysniauskas on soprano, Ukranians Yury Yaremchuk soprano, alto and clarinets, and Mark Tokar on bass, German Klaus Kugel on drums and Roberta Piket from the US on piano. All five musicians have solid backgrounds, both in traditional contexts as in a more free environment, as is the case here, for this live performance at the Lviv Jazz Festival in Ukraine in 2007, and it is free jazz in the spirit of the seventies, with the whole band working together on a coherent musical flow, rhytmic and forward-moving, with the musicians very concerned to build a unique sound rather than using the improvisation for personal expression. In the hands of lesser musicians this becomes a perfect recipe for either chaos or boredom, but you get the opposite here: discipline and deep listening skills, creativity and variation make this quite a captivating program.– Stef Continue reading →

Jorge Nuno | Joao Paulo | Signs Of The Silhouette

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Signs of the Silhouette it’s a project in which the act of music is answered with reactions to a video imaged projected in the musician body. Therefore the one that plays becomes the visual support of an image interpreted by musical improvisation. The group uses simple, but complex sonorities based in electric guitar and drums. The act becomes a dialogue between a body transmuted lived image perception in loco by a musical, gestual, reactive and spontaneous response. — Jorge Nuno & Joao Paulo Continue reading →

Henry P. Warner | Earl Freeman | Philip Spigner | Freestyle Band | No Business Records

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Why should an album as good as this one is be so obscure? Well, there are many reasons. There are all the ugly assumptions in the music world that poor black people can’t make serious art, the assumptions that George Lewis lays bare to such devastating effect in his history of the AACM, A Power Stronger than itself. There’s the economic corollary to that assumption: that if it’s not art, then it must be subject to the marketplace pressures of pop music, which European, or “real,” art music doesn’t have to contend with. Since avant-garde improvised music isn’t popular music, the economics always work against it. And so this album, and countless others, fade away due to social and economic neglect to become the quarry of avid record hounds. The reasons albums like this one sink out of sight are not entirely due to impersonal social and economic forces, however. It’s not as if these conditions were mysterious or unknown to musicians. Indeed, they have always been a source of anger and frustration. By the early ’70s, this anger and frustration boiled up into the do-it-yourself, countercultural, and black separatist spirit of the loft movement. Rejecting the system that in effect rejected them, the musicians who lived and worked in the lofts established their own performance venues and sometimes their own record labels. — Ed Hazell Continue reading →

Andrew Lamb | Tom Abbs | Michael Wimberly | Guillermo E. Brown | Rhapsody in Black | No Business Records

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It gives me great pleasure to once again find myself in the midst of expressing my thoughts about another recording of my work. The Creator had blessed me with the opportunity to have the wonderfully creative bass, tuba, and didjeridoo performer Tom Abbs, who has been with me for slightly over a decade, together with two of the most unique, musically diverse and culturally aware percussionists today – Michael Wimberly and Guillermo E. Brown. These gentlemen are true pfrofessionals both on and off the bandstand, which is a great pleasure for me to state. The works on this recording are organic and unpretentious, laced with the type of communication that can only be obtained, and experienced by those who are truly kindred spirits. — Andrew Lamb Continue reading →

Narada Burton Greene | Live at Kerrytown House | No Business Records

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Though modern, “avant-garde” jazz is an ensemble music often based on collective improvisation, solo performance is its own extraordinarily fruitful sub-area of investigation for the creative improviser. Without a reactive, interpretive partner (or several), the solo recital blurs the lines between composition and improvisation as the performer enters a world of unfettered development. Greene has been performing and recording solo since the 1970s, and these settings have yielded some of the most powerful statements in his oeuvre. As diverse as Greene’s palette is, his music is entirely about being grounded – and at home. — Clifford Allen Continue reading →

THE THING with Barry Guy | METAL ! | No Business Records

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Recorded live at Saint Catherine’s Church, Vilnius, Lithuania on 3rd April, 2011 by Arūnas Zujus. All compositions by Mats Gustafsson (STIM), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (TONO), Paal Nilssen-Love (TONO) & Barry Guy (PRS), except “Ride the Sky” by Lightning Bolt, “Praseodymium” by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (TONO) & Barry Guy (PRS) and “Neodymium” by Mats Gustafsson (STIM) & Paal Nilssen-Love (TONO). Mixed and mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Design by Oskaras Anosovas. Produced by The Thing and Barry Guy. Executive producer – Danas Mikailionis. Co-producer – Valerij Anosov Continue reading →

Nate Wooley | Christian Weber | Paul Lytton | Six Feet Under | No Business Records

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Six Feet Under (2009 [2012], NoBusiness): Trumpet, bass, drums, respectively. Lytton is the best known, one of the major drummers of Europe’s avant-garde, but Wooley has been prolific since 2002, even more so since he started releasing records under his own name in 2009 (AMG lists eight, missing this one — an LP release limited to 300 copies, so I’m glad to have received my CDR). Scratchy, lots of low volume, high pressure maneuvers, making the few sections where the trumpet breaks loose all the more impressive. —Tom Hull Continue reading →

Will Guthrie | Solo – Sticks, Stones & Breaking Bones

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The hardest thing in the world is to have an original idea. As much as creative musicians hate to admit, free improv/experimental/underground (and all other useless adjectival identifiers) music now has as many stylistic tropes as your standard 19th century symphony: the endless variations on white noise, the orgiastic free ensemble climaxes, reassuring bass drones, “brutality”, all of which point to performance, not playing. Musicians cling to the next solution that the media spotlights, as if consensus actually ever helped anything in art. — Anthony Pateras Continue reading →

Faruq Z. Bey with Northwoods Improvisers | Primal Waters | Entropy Stereo Recordings

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Faruq Z. Bey – tenor, alto saxophone | Mike Carey – flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, kalimba | Skeeter C. R. Shelton – tenor, soprano, alto saxophone, flute | Mike Gilmore – vibes, kalimba | Mike Johnston – bass, shakers, bells | Nick Ashton – drums, log drum. Live Studio Recording, August 4, 2011. Recorded and Mixed by; Mike Johnston. Cover Design; Mark Rudolph / Mike Johnston. Cover Photo by; M. Andren Continue reading →

The Shoreditch Trio | Again | Amirani Records

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When I think about what I look for in a musician it is that they add something to music. That they have their own musicality. The musician also has to have a generosity of spirit. Freely bringing their complete range of skills to the playing situation and serving a musical imperative rather than following or hiding behind an agenda. They must also have what I call the edge. This is creating in real time. There are many musicians who can play Charlie Parker solos note for note but the edge is missing as they are not, nor ever could be, Charlie Parker. Non of us can be someone else. To have the edge is not to trot out a series of well rehearsed licks but to be there, in the moment, playing the music in the way only you can. I have had the good fortune to have played with three musicians on this CD and they pass all my criteria to the full. Generous with ideas, open minded and spirited, and with a genuine musical curiosity. As a group I heard them in October 2009 at Shoreditch Church in London and thought at the time ‘this group has legs’ meaning that it could continue growing and developing its music for a long time if the chance was there. I’m delighted it wasn’t a one off concert and that the group has indeed grown into the fine one you can here on this CD, where each musician is intimately aware of the space occupied by the others and the aim is quite simply to play good music. — John Russell Continue reading →