★Intakt Records
Another Day In Fucking Paradise
Frith returns to his deep roots in this improvising trio with the classic lineup of guitar, bass and drums. Playful, intimate, and bound together by a dark and delicate interplay, the group reminds us what listening is all about. After a lifetime of experience across almost every field of musical endeavor, Fred stretches out in the company of two stalwarts of the vibrant Bay Area music scene who have their own stories to tell. Fred Frith writes about his Trio: "When I proposed this trio I had no…
Blue Shroud
2016 release ** "After his great compositions for the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and the Barry Guy New Orchestra, Barry Guy has written a large scale work for a new international ensemble. Guy's work The Blue Shroud is an hommage to the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. It is for the people of the Spanish town, who were victims of the Nazi German air force bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. Guy also wants us to remember the occasion in 2003, when the Guernica-tapestry at the UN Sec…
Features
Schlippenbach Trio's magic chemistry is founded on years of working together, both on intuitive listening and interaction – the ability to respond in an instant – andon the match between their characters, each adding to the whole as well as challenging each other – a stroke of fortune. Alexander von Schlippenbach likes to talk about the 'impetus of music making'. Impetus means drive, initiative, force, momentum, temperament. Three 'travelling fellows' on a Winterreise. The motto is: never …
Texture Time
Texture Time” is the third album by Dense Band and quite possibly the best. It signals a further development of Moss' use of live sampling and electronics to magnify the impact of that already dramatic vocal delivery, showcasing Moss' astonishing leaps from register to register and his ability to shape time like an origami master folds paper. No other improvising vocalist that I know of has created such an intense, idiosyncratic vocabulary. Texture Time is indispensable.
Portraits
Portraits is a sprawling, ambitious work composed by bassist Barry Guy that brings together musicians from across the British jazz/improv spectrum, from free music luminaries Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, and Phil Wachsmann to somewhat more jazz-based players such as Paul Dunmall and Trevor Watts. The album contains seven main "portraits," each distinct from the next, which are tailored to spotlight the various soloists as well as the different smaller working units contained within the larger 1…
Plie
The problem that besets British jazz - from Ray Noble and Ronnie Scott to Barbara Thompson and Andy Sheppard - is light-music, 'Radio 2' gentility; in Germany it is what Michael Kator (describing the results of the Nazi ban on "hot Jewish music") called "the bane of German jazz, the dreaded 'um-papa' sound". Here, four free music veterans from East Berlin (Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, alto; Ulrich Gumpert, piano; Connie Bauer, trombone; Günter Sommer, percussion) have decided to ease up, let some 'da…
World of Strings
Stephan Wittwer Intakt solo album, World of Strings has him all over the guitar. Live recordings.
Five Voices
International consortium of freaky vocal talent culled together here represent some of the finest exponents of extemporaneous jibber jabber extant. From the U.S., we have the zany N.Y. avant chanteuse Shelley Hirsch and her equally flipped out N.Y. compatriot in extended vocal technique David Moss as well as the L.A.-based Anna Homler, whose approach emerges from her personal zone of invented language generation as heard on her gorgeous Do Ya Sa Di Do CD, which I posted a while back. To that, ad…
Uluru
Solo work by one great saxophone player, founder of the Butch Morris' X-Communication and of the Cecil Taylor's European Big Band.
Hardcore Chambermusic
1995 release ** The “Hardcore Chambermusic” album is a music publishing phenomena that has taken Switzerland by storm, in which Koch-Schütz-Studer sampled and compressed hundreds of pieces of music from sources as diverse as Bela Bartok and Luciano Berio to Public Enemy and Bob Marley to create something revolutionary and altogether new."