Fattigfolket is a Swedish-Norwegian band with Gunnar Halle on trumpet, Putte Frick Meijer - on bass, Hallvard M. Godal on saxophones and Ole Morten Sommer on Drums. I had not heard of the band until I came across this album on eMusic. It starts out nicely, with a very open tune, not much theme, but lots of emotional expressivity, but this high quality is not kept through all compositions, gliding away into more mainstream approaches. I had hoped to have identified again some adventurous Scandinavians, but they are often a little too middle-of-the-road to my taste. The playing is good, so are the ideas, but a little more audacity to find their own voice is needed. "Bulle I Bussen", "Bare Päls" and "Skjult Drage" demonstrate that they have something to tell. Promising.
Pianist Denman Maroney is a restless spirit, seeking new ways to express himself, joining careful structural compositional elements with free form, and the result is utterly perplexing and warm. I have listened more than a dozen times to this album in the past days and it is extremely difficult get familiar with it. Each time I listen to this record, it sounds different. It is hard to identify themes, or even structures in it, but the music is carefully crafted nevertheless : the rhythms and tempos are different for the various instruments in the quintet, and so is the harmonic development. It is at times puzzling for the listener: once you focus on one thing, the other parts seem to escape attention, and vice versa. A kind of musical "trompe l'oeil" with ever ongoing shifts and differing perspectives. Musical time becomes a relative thing. On top of that, Maroney uses his hyperpiano extensions: anything that is handy to give his strings a different sound color will do: slides and bows of metal, rubber, plastic, brass bowls, CD jewel cases, tape cassette boxes, you name it. But the brilliant thing about Maroney's approach is that his music sounds great. In contrast to many experimenters, the music still prevails here, and how. With a band consisting of Ned Rothenberg on clarinet and sax, Dave Ballou on trumpet, Reuben Radding on bass and Michael Sarin on drums, what more do you want? And I think you would need such technically gifted musicians to bring Maroney's musical concept to a good end, and adding some. It must have required great efforts of concentration for them, yet the quality of the improvisations is such that all five musicians dance their way through even the most difficult parts. And despite all the complexity, the album is great fun. It is serious at times, but Maroney does not take himself too seriously. And because of the different tempi, it funks too at times. Music for the mind, heart and body. And like any good music, its quality increases with each listen. More joy to come.
OK - I seem to have found a solution. Enjoy stef ------------------------------------------
Sorry guys, no review today. I am struggling to get mp3 flash player embedded so that I can share some samples of the albums I review. Unfortunately, I was thrown of the host server that I used because of copyright issues.
Strange world : promoting music is apparently not quite allowed, while so many other things are ...
If anyone has any insights into how this can be done without problems, please let me know. Thanks stef
Keeping track of the recordings with trumpetist Roy Campbell, one of my favorite musicians, appears to be a good idea. On this album by guitarist Garrison Fewell he plays an important role, but so does the whole band, including Italian Achille Succi on bass clarinet and alto, Eric Hofbauer on guitar, John Voigt on bass, and Miki Matsuki on drums. Alex Fewell joins on percussion on two tracks. Without tracking Campbell, this one might have gone unnoticed, and that would have been unfortunate, because it is excellent. The pieces are composed, and wonderfully organised around the double guitar backbone, that is lyrical and elegant. Both guitarists have this very functional, humble and melodic approach, making especially the longer suite-like pieces flow like rivers. Campbell is the way I like him, expressive, deeply emotional, but he is equalled on this album by Succi, whose heartrending solos are exceptionally good. The band is at its best on "Venus", a 17 minute-long track, with a steady slow-tempo rhythm, a great background for the various soloists to do their thing, nothing earth-shattering, but beautiful nevertheless. The album varies between expansive epic pieces, more intimistic moments, such as the sensitive "Avant Aria", or the more avant-garde intro piece "Spectronomous". A little more unity would have made this a great album, but most of it is truly excellent.
The three great musicians of the last century all three came to their peak in the 60s: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. In the totality of human musical history, you can forget about the rest of twentieth century composers, but not those three.
The disadvantage of that position, is that all kinds of third rank wannabees play tribute to them in the hope that the mere mention of the genius's name is sufficient to generate sales.
Same here: Hiram Bullock demonstrates that : - he knows how to play guitar, but the concept of music is alien to him - he has understood nothing of Jimi Hendrix' music - playing with a big band is not easy - he has bad taste.
I truly hope this album doesn't sell, although that's not a nice thing to say.
This is the third duo album by bassist Mark Dresser and pianist Denman Maroney, after "Duologues" and "Time Changes". In contrast to some of the other material by the two players, this one is fully improvised in three long pieces. The first 30 minute track was recorded live at Vision Festival on June 10, 2008, the two other pieces date from a performance in Chicago in 2001. It's hard to call this jazz, since none of the two plays anything which ressembles anything which could fit in a category. It is music that evolves, following its own logic of feeling, interaction and sonic pallette: highly unpredictable yet very focused. Maroney's "hyperpiano" becomes a different instrument in his hands, with all kind of materials muting the strings, vibrating along, or any other kind of bizarre sound that can be extracted from your standard piano. The new sounds that are created push Dresser along on the same route, re-inventing the bass as well. This does not mean that this music is experimental per se. Art is at the center of what they do, using their skills to generate feelings and intellectual play, with at times even beautiful passages, and through all the sonic novelty, jazz, blues and classical music emerge, like wisps of memory, in a great synthesis of sound. It is better than the two previous albums, soberer and richer at the same time, and strangely enough more focused despite the difference in recording dates.
The piano trio is probably one of the most common ensembles to be heard in jazz, and truth be told, I am a little weary of them, preferring the expressiveness of a horn section. Yet once in a while, a piano trio comes forward that has something new to tell. When I listened to WHO Trio's "The Current Underneath" (Leo Records) a couple of years ago, I was immediately enchanted by the sheer musicality of the project. This one, "Less Is More", is even better. The trio consists of Michel Wintsch on piano, Gerry Hemingway on drums and Bänz Oester on bass. I have rarely come across a band who can create the perfect marriage of tension and lyricism, like this trio does. The "less is more" concept really describes the music well, there is lots of open space, but there is also tension in every note being played. Every sound is full of restraint, as if it only hints at the vast hidden world that made it possible, yet that remains unseen. Implicit music. The note that isn't played is as important as the one that is. Real beauty is revealed by suggesting it. Despite this sparsity of notes, the music itself makes sense. There is a simple beauty in it, with evolving melodic concepts, interesting compositional structures, and some extended techniques. Each piece is different, though, but all tracks fall within the same logic and supertight control. If the Japanese saying is true that beauty is "controlled passion", then this album is for sure a great example of it.
Steven Bernstein is the master of traditional tunes in new clothes, of neat arrangements with a good sense of humor, yet often with more attention paid to the entertainment value of the music than to its artistic development. At times, the humor still prevails on this album, but it is much more refreshing and creative than much of what Bernstein has been involved in in the past years. He is accompanied by Marcus Rojas on tuba and Kresten Osgood on drums. The music is still rooted in tradition, with klezmer, folk, Latin, swing and blues often providing the backbone of the pieces, but the music is all about exploration, improvisation, interaction and musical expressivity. And it's good to hear Bernstein in this role. His playing on the slide-trumpet is excellent, Rojas is brilliant, filling in for the bass-line and often sounding as a bass, yet he also manages quite well to be the second horn too, adding musical color that works really well, as on the slow and somewhat dark "Scaramanga". Kresten Osgood is a drummer who deserves wider attention (more on him soon). Despite the obvious fun the three musicians have on some tracks, as on "So Lonely I Could Cry" or "Eastcoasting", other tracks bring deep melancholic feelings, such as "Khumbu". Nice. I wish Bernstein could continue in this vein. He has obviously more to bring than just entertainment.
By comparison with this band of four sexagenarians, many of today's young musicians sound old, stale and devoid of creativity. These four musicians, even if they took part in the creation of free jazz, modern jazz, free improv and new music, kept their fresh attitude to music, as a fluid thing to play with, to use to express emotions, to cry, to weep, but also to enjoy. The quartet consists of Irene Schweizer on piano, Oliver Lake on alto saxophone, Reggie Workman on bass, Andrew Cyrille on drums. They are so good that it sounds as if they have been playing for years, and those are really kudos for Schweizer's seamless integration in this routined trio. The music was recorded live at the Taktlos festival in Switzerland in 2007. Not all tracks present the full quartet. Each member of the trio has the pleasure to play a duet with the great swiss pianist: "Timbral Interplay" is a long and fascinating duet with Cyrille, "R.I. Exchange" with Workman, "Phrases" with Lake. "Ballad Of The Self" is just Trio 3 without piano. These are all quite enjoyable, but the best pieces are the ones with the full quartet, offering the richness you can expect from such a long musical experience. And again, they still have a new story to tell, after so many decades.
German artist Thomas Hornung has the habit of making many quick drawings, most of which he discards, and some he archives. Guitarist Scott Fields made this CD to accompany these drawings and to mimick their creation. The CD consists of 98 tracks, ranging from 8 seconds to 1 minute. In this short period, there's hardly anything to tell, and that's what it sounds like: short snippets of sound, with no apparent sense. Unless this makes sense to you : "Eventually I decided to convert some (as it turned out 171) of his drawings into a multi-page graphic score. To do that I made a matrix of pitch rows and numbers that represent playing techniques. Then I reversed Thomas's drawings so that what was black became transparent. Finally I lead each drawing over the matrix and used what was visible as an element in an extended, modular composition". It is pretty painful that you need to explain all this, and much more, in two pages on the liner notes. In my humble opinion, music is about music, not about some intellectual and cerebral creation. Click on the cover above to see how much notes remain after the "color reversion". The point of this approach totally eludes me. There are about five trillion other ways to organise notes based on external circumstances, most of which are possibly more valuable than the approach taken here. I have no problem that other art forms can generate inspiration for musical evocations, quite to the contrary, but not through such a mechanistic intellectual process. What Fields does, is just to create randomness. There is no link whatsoever between the drawings and his music. And none of the 98 pieces actually has anything to tell. They're just a few sounds on one or several strings. Less interesting than a bee buzzing around your head. The good news is that "I had 254 takes, 171 of which I kept (...), a month later I culled the 171 acceptable takes down to 99, one for each track possible on the CD". We were saved from listening to a triple CD.
Fattigfolket is a Swedish-Norwegian band with Gunnar Halle on trumpet, Putte Frick Meijer - on bass, Hallvard M. Godal on saxophones and Ole Morten Sommer on Drums. I had not heard of the band until I came across this album on eMusic. It starts out nicely, with a very open tune, not much theme, but lots of emotional expressivity, but this high quality is not kept through all compositions, gliding away into more mainstream approaches. I had hoped to have identified again some adventurous Scandinavians, but they are often a little too middle-of-the-road to my taste. The playing is good, so are the ideas, but a little more audacity to find their own voice is needed. "Bulle I Bussen", "Bare Päls" and "Skjult Drage" demonstrate that they have something to tell. Promising.
