I have been dancing up and down all day on this new Hamid Drake album, which is a jazzy celebration of the rhythmic variations and possibilities of reggae music. Long after the album has ended, spontaneously the old Marley tunes of "Lively Up Yourself" or "Burnin' and Lootin'", came back to live in my head, although the album has no direct reference to the Jamaican or his music. Drake turns reggae into his own kind of music, adding hip hop vocals by Napoleon Maddox on vocals and beatbox, with Jeff Parker on guitar, Jeff Albert and Jeb Bishop on trombone, and with Josh Abrams on bass and guimbri. He also adds spoken word and singing, continuing the spiritual Hindu elements and the adoration of Kali, that he already worked with on "Blissful", his previous album.
The big difference here is the double trombone and bass line-up, with gives the band a warm powerful volume over Drake's brilliant polyrhythmics. Parker's guitar adds the right touches, predominantly rhythm guitar, with the occasional jazzy, rock-ish or reggae-ish solo escapade.
The other big difference is that the vocals are mostly sung or rapped, which fits better with reggae than with jazz (at least to me), but luckily the space they occupy is not very dominant. Despite the length of the compositions, it is very much a tight affair, with not many expansive time for soloing: the whole thing remains a group thing, but it's only when the two trombones interweave their solos as on "Togetherness", over the exciting rhythms, that the fun is total.
He also brings a new rendition of the hauntingly beautiful "Meeting and Parting", that was the highlight of his first Bindu album.
Sure, this is not jazz. But its exhilirating rhythms, the powerful rhythm and horn section, and Drake's unparalleled drumming make this album a real joy. Not everything works, but the drummer has created something quite unique and special.
Marinella Barigazzi lives in Milan, Italy, and is an author and translator of children’s books and also writes poems and short stories.
She is daughter of renowned Italian accordionist and composer Barimar, so music was always part of her life.
She studied the piano as an adolescent and deeply loves jazz and classical music, attending many concerts throughout Europe with a special attention to those of pianist Brad Mehldau.
Marinella Barigazzi lives in Milan, Italy, and is an author and translator of children’s books and also writes poems and short stories.
She is daughter of renowned Italian accordionist and composer Barimar, so music was always part of her life.
She studied the piano as an adolescent and deeply loves jazz and classical music, attending many concerts throughout Europe with a special attention to those of pianist Brad Mehldau.
The liner notes state: "The concept of the CD was to compose pieces with reference to jazz standards". Those pieces are called : "Don't Take The "B" Train", "Wintertime", "Caravanserai", "Unsophisticated Lady", to name just a few. The trio is Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky on trumpet, Andrei Kondakov on piano and percussion, and Vladimir Volkov on bass. The end result leaves me a little perplex. The technical mastery is high, and a pleasure to hear, and so is their knowledge of styles and genres. Their approach to music is more ambiguous: at times very serious, but interspersed with entertaining factors, even little musical jokes, which would lead you to expect that they do not take themselves or the music too seriously, but then the music is. It gave me the same feeling that I had when listening to Lester Bowie's The Great Pretender many years ago. Is it authentic artistic expression, or is it just plain entertainment? It is both. It's the same with the style. Some pieces, like the sensitive "Wintertime", are quite mainstream, but then on other tracks, like "Caravanserai", or "Standard", they move into areas few mainstreamers would dare to venture, despite the melodious moments. It is all great, but somehow also so full of ambiguity and internal conflict that it is disturbing. At least to me.
One could wonder whether the cultural capitals of the world have been moved to Cracow (Poland), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Lisbon (Portugal). Or let's say that at least of some of the best and daring music nowadays is performed and released out of those cities. Again, the small labels surprise with the least likely of commercial successes: solo percussion albums.Well, not quite solo. The first is accompanied by text, the second is a percussion duet, but the lack of melodic instruments does not mean lack of musicality, as is demonstrated here.
Vladimir Tarasov - Thinking Of Khlebnikov (No Business, 2009) ****
Russian master drummer Vladimir Tarasov is possibly best known to jazz audiences from the Ganelin Trio, but he already has eleven solo percussion records in his name, and many compositions for larger orchestra too. In all, more than a hundred albums.
This album is a reflection on a text on the Russion futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, which is joined on the CD as a pdf file. The text is in Russian.
Tarasov's playing is sparse, open, subtle, sometimes adding drama, but more often precise, cautious, gentle, barely disturbing silence, creating an organic harmony with a silent environment. No patterns, no repetition, just the infinite possibilities of sound, brought to such a level of abstraction that any sense of melodic evolution would be a vulgar disturbance of the purity he creates.
Lucas Niggli & Peter Conradin Zumthor - Profos (Not Two, 2010) ***½
The approach by Swiss drummers Lucas Niggli and Peter Conradin Zumthor is quite different. It is rhythmic, repetitive, with lots of bells and cymbal work, a feast of small percussion, yet there is a likeness with Tarasov in their willingness to work with open space rather than to fill it with empty sound. The second piece, "Where I End", for instance, is just the high-pitched tones resulting from the scraping of a stick on a cymbal. Most of the pieces are relatively short, with clear rhythmic compositions and structures. The last track is the opposite of percussion actually, but a half hour drone with shifting shades of color and intensity. Not what you would expect from a drums duet.
Sarah “FLAKE” Grosser is an Australian born, German-based author, lyricist and vocal artist. Exploding onto the scene with her self-published DIY John Zorn fanzine “Days of Zorn”, Flake quickly established a name for herself as an enthusiastic up-and-comer in the world of avant-garde. Shortly thereafter she penned follow up zines: “Zappa Every Day”, “The Jazz Hater’s Manifesto” and “Jazz is for Wankers”.
Flake’s fetish for drummers with fantastic hair is public knowledge and she encourages any potential candidates to form an orderly queue.
Her unmistakable writing style challenges pretentiousness, and if you don’t like it you can suck a lemon.
Very much a musical category in its own, Tin Hat integrates jazz with folk with street music with traditional music from Europe, with tangos and waltzes, with some touches of blues and klezmer, and some cinematic ingredients, but then with such compositional creativity, inventiveness and instrumental dexterity that it goes beyond the usual bland mixtures of styles you get in world music. This is as usual highly original and authentic music. And despite, or maybe because of its mix of influences, it is one hundred percent American. The band consists of Carla Kihlstedt on violin and trumpet violin, Mark Orton on guitar and dobro, Ben Goldberg on clarinet and contra alto clarinet, and Ara Anderson on trumpet, pump organ, piano, glockenspiel, percussion. Matthias Bossi joins on percussion on two tracks. So it's basically the same band as on their previous album, "The Sad Machinery Of Spring".
The album brings a selection of tracks from two live performances, one in Berkely in 2008, and one in Mallorca, Spain in 2005. Fans of the band will be happy to hear new versions of some of their best pieces, like "Helium", "Hotel Aurora", "The Last Cowboy", "Nickel Mountain", "Slip", "The Secret Fluid Of Dusk", and the title track. Many of those get a different approach because of the different line-up. And you also get some new tracks, sometimes with a joke included : "Anna Kournikova", (the Russian tennis player), is now replaced by "Ana Ivanovic", (the Serbian tennis player), for an equally melancholic tango.
A sweet delight.
Buy from Instantjazz. Album will be officially launched on March 9, but so you know it's coming.
Talking about listening experiences, this is an avant-garde experimental album that those of you with very open ears and strong hearts should listen to. It is one of the widest and deepest adventures into the sonic heart of the piano, including its entire cardiovascular system attached to it. It is a discovery of sound possibilities, that are utterly frightening while being soothing at the same time. Usually this stuff bores me to death after a while, but this one doesn't. It is so powerful that it's captivating.
Magda Mayas is a German pianist. She is clearly a musical visionary.
I'm not sure what the "desert ship" in the title refers to : is it an order? is it a reference to the camel? is it a reference to the legends of ships mysteriously ending up in the desert? I wouldn't know. No liner notes to explain it. It's an ambiguity and cleverness that characterizes the music of Satoko Fujii. She and her band are the perfect synthesis of modern music, going beyond jazz, integrating anything from classical over folk and traditional music, with jazz, free improvisation and avant-garde, but then pushing it all over the edge.
This enables her to explore composition/improvisation with a musical richness which is given to few.
The band is Satoko Fujii on piano, Natsuki Tamura on trumpet, Norikatsu Koreyasu on bass, Akira Horikoshi on drum, in short "Ma-Do", which already released the excellent "Heat Wave" in 2008.
She is also a master of contrast, just to give a few examples : putting almost romantic piano musings over a drums going berserk, as on "Sunset In The Desert", or starting a composition with a repetitive piano phrase over which the bass improvises, as on "Ripple Mark", creating some kind of reverse world hegemony, in which things are topsy-turvy. The totally unpredictable compositions, with angular turns, changing rhythms, the juxtaposition of carefully composed and structured elements with wild even violent excursions, the stark contrast of Tamura's sweet trumpet sounds with his unparalleled screaming, it's all here, again, with unrelenting intensity. A wealth of ideas, mood changes, taking the listener by surprise by each listen. Using contrast is one thing, but making it match is another: lyricism blends with noise, harmony with dissonance, impressionism with expressionism, fire with water.
It's story-telling time: "While You Were Sleeping", gives an eery picture of awful or menacing things that could happen in the dark outside world, while you are dreaming in peace, or it could be the reverse : the stuff that nightmares are made of : the piano strings that sound like a uncanny gamelan, the trumpet first whispering like a choir of zombies, then howling like the wails of the insane.
There is some familiarity to be found, somewhere, buried under the heavy thunder of the chords, the powerful pulse of the bass, the no-holds-barred drumming, which are disconcerting, knocking the listener out of his/her comfort level into the zone of the real listening experience, in which there is no possibility not to listen, not to be part of it. You are part of it, whether you want to or not.
The last piece's title, "Vapor Trail" is a good descriptive of the music, which comes as a kind of soothing finale, when catharsis has been reached, a moment of acceptance, of resignation, of awe for the beauty that arises after the violence, the fire has died down, after the sun has set.
Aloysius Ventham is from Edinburgh but now lives in Salzburg and works as an ethicist at the university. He frequents the local (and outstanding) jazz club, 'JazzIt', and can often be found in specialty cafés where he avoids practising his German by listening to music and reading Dostoevsky. He lives near various mountains with his wife (a far more accomplished philosopher), cat (Fellini), and two guinea pigs ('Special Agent Bruce Lee Private Investigator', and 'Pickles').
