★Rogueart
Passages
Lawrence Butch Morris developed the concept of “conduction” to account for a mode of Instant Composition based on the creative freedom of the players stimulated by the gestures of a central conductor. AP/DP, with this cd, invent the practice of musical transduction. Just like the French language is not “translated” but transducted into Kamau Daáood’s unique prosody, DP’s cello does not “translate” the playing of a thumb piano, an oud or a kora: all of these instruments, all of their phrasings el…
Roots Run Deep
Nicolas Humbert and his co-author Marc Parisotto decided to make a further montage of the readings and songs for the album "Roots Run Deep". There are short stories and poems set to music, beautifully interwoven with the music Yusef Lateef had played during the shooting of the film "Brother Yusef". "I return as in a dream of a great American musician" says the old man in a great passage about Lester Young, as sounds and words melt into one song, drawing us closer to the aura of a great ja…
Spontaneous Suite For Two Pianos
A 4-CD box set of 9 "Spontaneous Sweets", elaborate, magnificent and melodic piano improvisations, recorded by Connie Crothers & David Arner performing in the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, NY. "It was magical from the beginning. The music seemed to create itself" "We trusted our spontaneity, our intuitive logic, our sense of form." "We had no set tempos, no preconception about soloing or accompanying." "We had no set themes or referents. What we did have was complete trust, i…
Velvet Songs (To Baba Fred Anderson)
"This 2 cd set recorded live at the Velvet Lounge a year before the legendary Fred Anderson passed away, is a fitting tribute by 3 Chicagoans to one of their own, the master tenor player, teacher, Velvet Lounge owner, advocate and AACM member, who has helped foster the musical scene in that city possibly more than anyone else. This artistic outing is a pilgrimage in sound taking us into the deepest recesses of this eclectic medium known as "jazz". These pieces conceived/composed by the 3 …
Numbers
A beautiful set of compositions from saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, presenting works recorded in the 2000s with performers including Thomas Buckner, Stephen Rush, Nils Bultman, William Winant, &c - "In the 45 years since he recorded Sound, Roscoe Mitchell's music has steadily evolved and diversified, making the idea of a comprehensive one-disc survey an impossibility. However, as much as any album, the both/and nature of Roscoe Mitchell's music is vividly represented on Numbers." -Bill Shoemaker, …
Unknown skies
...Every trio without a piano, or without a drums, or as in this case without a double bass, gains in incline what it loses in “balance”. It only takes a little sometimes. Everyone plays at ease across. Everyone can split themselves. There are no more solos as solos but phases, circles of influence and predominance which do not last. The duos bind and unbind more clearly, the contrasts stand out better. The theme is no longer material to develop but, as in Unknown Skies, a lyrical and volatile s…
Conversations
William Parker has long taken an active role in the presentation of his own art (self-produced records/CDs, concerts, festivals, publications) and that of others. That initiative continues with this major work, an anthology of musician-to-musician interviews in the lineage of Arthur Taylor’s seminal “Notes and Tones”. Approximately 12 years in the making, “Conversations” has hallmarks of being a very personal project, spotlighting many musicians who are largely unknown to even avid fans of the…
Reggaeology
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 …
Swimming In A Galaxy Of Goodwill And Sorrow
with Steve Swell: trombone Jemeel Moondoc: alto saxophoneWilliam Parker: double bass Hamid Drake: drum set - This is an album to be cherished, because it reaches back and incorporates styles from swing to post-modern free jazz; and because the playing of Steve Swell and the members of his quartet are as near-perfect as you are likely to find; and because the melodies capture the imagination with a complex beauty that hooks into the inner being of soulfulness. It encompasses a unity of elements…
Contact
CONTACT is made of a DVD filmed during the October 20th 2004 concert at IRCAM (Paris, France) and of a CD recorded in Berkeley (California, USA) on October 13th and 14th 2002. "David Wessel, despite whatever label on can attach to his music, is very familiar with the musical object commonly called jazz (never mind the name we give to this music which is both one and multiple, pushing the limits of its frontiers, the importance being that it exists, whatever the label). He has also played with G…
Transatlantic Visions
TRANSATLANTIC VISIONS is the live recording of the Vision Festival XIII concert (New-York, June 2008), which has been awarded "Best Performance of the Year" by the monthly magazine All About Jazz NY.
Red Morocco
Someday someone will write a history of modern music that will free us of the false dichotomies such as high vs. low, improviser vs. composer, classical vs. everything else… …The written materials Joe passed out to the musicians for Red Morocco was minimal, sometimes more visual than musical, but always modest. Everyone was seated in the same room, in a circle. The music heard on this recording occurred late in the day, when Joe felt a certain clarity was occurring……The results are an elegant,…
Live At Last
Notwithstanding a fruitful career, the great, late bass player Malachi Favors was quite a discreet musician even though no one has forgotten his role as the central mainstay of the Art Ensemble of Chicago until his death in January 2004. Apart from this, he only made one splendid solo album but no group recording as a leader was heard until this Maghostut Trio. Consequently, the present beautiful, original, intense and cohesive record is also a rare musical moment to enjoy. A few months before h…
Right Hemisphere
Sharp-edged work from Right Hemisphere -- nothing too cerebral, and instead some great improvisations from a quartet that includes Matthew Shipp on piano, Rob Brown on alto sax, Joe Morris on bass, and Whit Dickey on drums! Shipp's brooding piano really sets the tone for the record -- even when played sparingly, as it is on some tracks -- and the tunes are a mix of tentative sound explorations, and a few fiercer moments -- but even these latter ones still have a sensitive, almost poetic feel at …
No Side Effects
Roscoe Mitchell is of course one of the figureheads of free jazz, a long time member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and nowadays productive in smaller settings, duets and trios. On this double CD he is accompanied by Harrison Bankhead (bass, cello) and Vincent Davis (drums) , to bring 24 compositions varying between 2 and 14 minutes. The trio improvizes along structural patterns, and the interplay and technical skills of the three musicians, and then especially Mitchell himself, are excellent. …
Blissful
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.
Turn
The most exciting of the label's inaugural issues is a new title from Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Roscoe Mitchell. In itself that is always a notable event, but this new group (with Mitchell's longtime rhythm section Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabal on bass and drums along with new Art Ensemble trumpeter Corey Wilkes and the excellent young pianist Craig Taborn) stands among his greatest bands. They have all the role and bluster of Mitchell's Note Factory, but stripped down to an economic quinte…
Radiant Pools
Rob Brown has a sound of his own, one that you instantly identify, and it’s a wonder why his unique way of playing alto saxophone still hasn’t found the recognition it deserves. With “Radiant Pools”, not only does he confirm what a great musician he is, but he also shows how he can give life and soul to an orchestra… and what orchestra! Quite noteworthy is the way Rob Brown’s alto sax (hear his high notes) and flute, and Steve Swell’s trombone complement and enrich each other; respond to one ano…
We Were The Phliks
Guitarist Scott Fields points out in the liner notes to his latest record We Were The Philks: “It is my habit to set myself some rules for each project I compose. Otherwise the world is just too big for me. For my contributions to The Phliks book I made myself a rule that every tune would include traditional notation, graphical notation, and improvisation. In the Phliks pieces I would blur the distinction between notated and improvised material.” When one listens to the 70-minute work, a distinc…
Bindu
Drummer Hamid Drake has been a major voice in the generation of Chicagoans following the explosion of Mitchell and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He’s most known for a long association with saxophonist Fred Anderson and here makes his recording debut as a bandleader. He called together for the session a quartet of New York and Chicago saxophonists (Daniel Carter, Ernest Dawkins, Sabir Mateen and Greg Ward) and added the great young flutist Nicole Mitchell. The track…