ANOTHER DYNAMITE WEEK with WONDERFUL DISCS FROM DAVE DOUGLAS' KEYSTONE, 4 from TZADIK (PAINKILLER, ZORN'S FILMWORKS ANTHOLOGY, DAVKA & NI HAO!), MARTY EHRLICH, JENNY SCHEINMAN, COOPER-MOORE'S TRIPTYCH MYTH, FOUR GENTLEMEN OF THE GUITAR (ROWE/AMBARCHI/FENNESZ/NAKAMURA), 5 from CIMP (PRINCE LASHA & ODEON POPE TRIO, JOE McPHEE & TRIO X, STEVE GAUCI TRIO, JAY ROSEN SOLO & CHRIS KELSEY TRIO), EDDIE GALE'S DVD, ANDREW d'ANGELO TRIO, ANNA HOMLER, VINNY GOLIA, 2 from FRODE GJERSTAD, 2 from PETER HERBERT, 2 from PETER JACQUEMYN, 4 from SUBLIME FREQUENCIES, DAVID GRUBBS & SUSAN HOWE, ARP/SCHWITTERS/HAUSMANN plus HISTORIC DSICS from MONK & TRANE, SCHLIPPENBACH/PARKER/LOVENS, KRYSTALL/NEIDLIGER w/ CECIL TAYLOR & BILLY HIGGINS, BASTRO & SERPENT POWER! FIRST, SOME IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS

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ErstQuake 2 (Erstwhile Label Festival)
Collective: Unconscious, NYC, 279 Church St., 212-254-5277

This Friday, September 23:
Mark Wastell/Tim Barnes
Keith Rowe/Tomas Korber
Julien Ottavi/Dion Workman
Joe Colley/Jason Lescalleet
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura

Saturday, September 24:
Joe Colley solo
Toshimaru Nakamura/Taku Unami/Sean Meehan
Tomas Korber/Tim Barnes
nmperign/Jason Lescalleet
Keith Rowe/Julien Ottavi

Sunday, September 25:
Greg Kelley/David Daniell/Sean Meehan
Keith Rowe/Mark Wastell
Taku Unami/Margarida Garcia
Tomas Korber/Julien Ottavi
Toshimaru Nakamura/Mark Wastell/Tim Barnes

Festival pass: $50 for all 3 nights plus $2 service charge
Single night admission: $20 plus $1 service charge
Advance tix available by PayPal to erstrecs@aol.com (no paper tickets will be issued, please tell them the name/names to put on the admission list along with your payment). Word is that tickets are almost sold out!

In addition, there will be a matinee show at the same venue, Sunday at 2:30 PM, Daniel Menche and Hive Mind, two separate sets, $5, no advance tix (not included in the festival pass, this is separate). - Tickets are almost gone, so order them now!

Erstwhile is one of the most important and influential experimental music labels to emerge in the past decade. Forget about those tired & predictable festivals like CMJ and check this festival out for some truly challenging music! - BLG

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JIMMY LYONS - The Box Set [5 CD set] (Ayler 36/40; EEC) SPECIAL WHOLESALE PRICE!!!
Immensely important, historic and much anticipated box set featuring the incredible alto saxist supreme Jimmy Lyons, Cecil Taylor's longtime collaborator and considered to be the link between Bird's bebop and the sixties free/jazz scene. The personnel features Karen Borca on bassoon, Raphe Malik on trumpet, William Parker & Hayes Burnett on basses, Paul Murphy & Sidney Smart on drums and the late Jimmy Lyons on alto sax throughout.
The five discs consist of live dates from 1972-1983 and were recorded at Studio Rivbea, Soundscape, Tufts University and in Geneva, Switzerland. Included is a solo set and an interview with Mr. Lyons. In stock now and we are just as psyched as you!
IMPORTED 5 CD Box Set with an impressive booklet!
5 CD Set for $80 [Act now - this offer will not be repeated when we restock!]

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DAVE DOUGLAS - Keystone [CD + DVD] (Greenleaf Music 03) Keystone features Dave Douglas on trumpet, compositions & co-production (w/ David Torn), Marcus Strickland on saxes, Jamie Saft on wurlitzer piano, DJ Olive on turntables, Brad Jones on bass and Gene Lake on drums. The trial and tribulations of silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle is a classic American tragedy, so says Dave Douglas in the impassioned and informative liner notes. The music on the first disc was inspired by Arbuckle's silent films, circa 1915. "Fun, innocence, caring and devotion, as well as a wicked sense of humor and the absurd". Dave and his superb electric jazz sextet do a superb job of evoking these often sublime and dreamy spirits. I am reminded of Miles Davis' late sixties band, when Herbie Hancock was working his magic on an electric piano for the first time. Jamie Saft is the perfect choice for this, his Wurlitzer electric piano has a most mesmerizing sound, bending notes in his own unique way. Dave's muted trumpet also has a most magical sound. DJ Olive's turntables bring this most into the present and he also provides some sly sonic spice throughout. The groove at times is phat and funky, yet never too obvious or overstated. Young saxist, Marcus Strickland, has a powerful presence on tenor, as well as a fine, cerebral tone on soprano sax. Disc 2 is a DVD featuring the silent film, "Fatty & Mabel Adrift" from 1916. It is a wonderful, ridiculous, hilarious and touching 34-minute story. It may seem odd to hear music from nearly a century later accompanying this film, yet it somehow works. Fatty saves Mabel from an abusive suitor and then marries her. The old suitor is determined to get revenge. I won't reveal the rest of the story, but it is certainly a touching and tasty treat. - BLG
This project was commissioned by The Paramount Center For The Arts in Peekskill, New York. The premiere performance will take place there on October 1, 2005.
CD + DVD for $16


FOUR FABULOUS NEW DISCS FROM THE GREAT TZADIK LABEL:

PAINKILLER [JOHN ZORN/BILL LASWELL/HAMID DRAKE] - V.12: Zorn 50th Birthday Celebration (Tzadik 5012) A powerful and breathtaking meeting of masters. With the tight rhythm section of Laswell and Drake, who have a long history working together in a variety of bands and contexts, and the empathetic insanity of Patton and Zorn, this set was as much of a surprise to the musicians as it was to the pumped up crowd that were lucky enough to hear it that night. Although billed as Painkiller, this once in a lifetime unit was really something completely different. At times hilarious, exhilarating, outrageous and transcendent, this is music only the New American Underground could create. East Coast meets West Coast meets Midwest: New York, California and Chicago come together in this twisted, funky improviser's paradise. 50TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION SERIES
CD $14

JOHN ZORN - The Best of Filmworks - 20 Years of Soundtrack Music/1986-2005 (Tzadik 7350) Film and film music has had a tremendous impact on the life and work of composer John Zorn, and his own soundtrack work reflects his affinity, love for and deep knowledge of the medium. As of this writing he has released sixteen volumes of film music-twenty years of work on over twenty-seven films, and dozens of commercials. Drawing upon his talented downtown musical community, the players on these recordings reads like a 'who's who' of modern music: guitarists Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot and Arto Lindsay; keyboardists Jamie Saft, Wayne Horvitz, Peter Scherer and Anthony Coleman; string players Mark Feldman and Erik Friedlander; bassists Bill Laswell, Greg Cohen and Trevor Dunn; percussionists Joey Baron, Bobby Previte, Kenny Wollesen and Cyro Baptista-the list goes on and on. As one would expect, Zorn's methods in the soundtrack world are remarkably unique, and have resulted in some of the most unusual and creative music for films in the past several decades. This CD is an excellent introduction to the burgeoning sixteen volume series and features twenty-seven tracks handpicked by Zorn for this rare "best of" compilation. As a bonus is an unissued track from Zorn's most recent soundtrack release 'Workingman's Death', and a lovely 28 page booklet.
TZADIK ARCHIVAL SERIES CD $14

DAVKA - Davka Live (Tzadik 8104) An exciting live set of new material from one of the most consistent and creative bands in the Jewish Music scene. Combining a deep knowledge and respect for tradition with a creative imagination, the music of Davka continues to delight music fans the world over with its lyrical passion and sweet sense of swing. Their fourth CD for Tzadik is perhaps their best yet, blending their meticulous craftsmanship with the exciting edge of a live engagement. Over seventy minutes of music including nine songs never before released. TZADIK RADICAL JEWISH CULTURE SERIES
CD $14

NI HAO! - Gorgeous (Tzadik 7259) Another vivacious all girl band from Kansai, an area in Southern Japan that has been the home of some of the most exciting new rock bands of the past several decades (Boredoms, Afrirampo, OOIOO, Omoide Hatoba). Featuring the distinctive singer from Limited Express (has gone), whose first CD was released to great acclaim on Tzadik in 2002, Ni Hao is a trio of two basses and drums with all three girls singing in complex contrapuntal arrangements that Brian Wilson would have been proud of. Everything one would expect from a Kansai band is here - looping riffs, unexpected twists and vocals that stroke, caress, smash, stomp, scream and kiss. Ni Hao leaves you begging for more. TZADIK NEW JAPAN SERIES
CD $14


TRIPTYCH MYTH [COOPER-MOORE/TOM ABBS/CHAD TAYLOR] - The Beautiful (Aum Fidelity 035) This is the second swell disc from Triptych Myth, so much more than your average piano trio. Each of the three musicians involved have contributed compositions to this dynamic disc. William Parker's liner notes are indeed as inspiring and thoughtful as is the music. The piece, "All Up In It', erupts right from the gitgo with intense energy and focused abandon. "Frida K. The Beautiful" is about a Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, who was stricken with polio at 6 and run over by a streetcar at 18. She went on to become an inspirational painter and activist, the piece itself is something of great beauty. In and out, this special trio covers so many feelings, vibrations, ideas, stories with their consistently creative playing. Mr. Parker mentions dropping this disc over Iraq (instead of bombs), not a bad idea since this music embodies a true healing force. Perhaps the label could read "Om Fidelity". - BLG
CD for $14


JENNY SCHEINMAN with BILL FRISELL/RON MILES/DOUG WIESELMAN - 12 Songs (Cryptogramophone 125) Guitarist Bill Frisell joins violinist Jenny Scheinman on her fourth CD as a leader. 12 Songs features Frisell's unique guitar sound and Jenny's mysterioso fiddling as they weave jazz, world music and Americana into rich tapestries of sound. Scheinman, who has recorded with Norah Jones and tours with Bill Frisell's band, is joined by cornetist Ron Miles and a cast of highly acclaimed New York musicians on a sepia-toned journey, equal parts old-world and contemporary. In stock soon, Bruce's review next week.
CD $16


MARTY EHRLICH - News On The Rail (Palmetto 2113) Featuring Marty on alto sax & clarinet, James Zollar on trumpet & flugelhorn, Howard Johnson on tuba, bari sax & bass clarinet, James Weidman on piano & melodica, Greg Cohen on bass and Allison Miller on drums. Wow, Marty has chosen some wonderful players for his new all-star sextet. The superb writing brings out the best in all of these fine musicians, who sound like a small big band. I am familiar with all of the players involved except for Ms. Miller, who is also a splendid drummer. In many way I am reminded of my favorite Blue Note dates from the mid-sixties, classic records I continually go back to and still marvel at. Marty's righteous, bluesy tone on the funky gem "Hear You Say" is undeniably infectious. Everybody's favorite tuba player, Howard Johnson, also stands out playing them groovy bass lines with James Zoller's equally earthy muted trumpet. On "Light in the Morning", the gorgeous, yet mysterious harmonies of the flute, clarinet(s) and flugelhorn are completely enchanting. The title track features some superb clarinet from Marty, an engaging melodica solo from Mr. Weidman, as well as some sublimely twisted harmonies for the horns. "Dance No. 2" has a fascinating, slightly bent repeating rhythm line at the center with layers on intricate horn parts and Ms. Miller's drums swirling around the central figure robustly throughout. Marty has a unique way of combining older jazz styles with new ones simultaneously, especially on "Seeker's Delight", which features odd Latin-like rhythms, an inspired clarinet solo from Marty, a great trumpet solo from Zoller and another fine solo from Weidman on piano. "Keeper of the Flame", a tribute to the late saxist Sam Furnace, closes this disc in an immensely touching way. Marty's alto sax , Howard's baritone sax and James' flugel all take superb, solemn solos that really do caress our hearts and souls with an assured elegance. - BLG
CD $15


PLEASE REMEMBER THAT DMG GETS ONLY 15 COPIES OF EACH OF PAUL DUNMALL'S DUNS RELEASES, THAT'S IT. BRUCE ALWAYS TAKES ONE, LEAVING 14. IF YOU ARE NOT A WEEKLY MAIL-ORDER CUSTOMER, PLEASE RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW. BRUCE WILL REVIEW THE TWO NEW DUNS TITLES LISTED BELOW NEXT WEEK IF THERE ARE ANY LEFT TO SELL. (9/21/05 - BLG)


PAUL DUNMALL/MARKUS STOCKHAUSEN/PHILIP GIBBS - Tapaleit (Duns 047; UK) CD $14

PHILIP GIBBS/TONY HYMAS/PAUL DUNMALL - Neen (Duns 048; UK)
CD $14


EDDIE GALE - Trumpet & Water: Up Close And Personal (Creative View 200501) This is an endearing half-hour movie featuring the legendary trumpeter Eddie Gale. It takes place in San Jose, California, Mr. Gale's West Coast home, a place very special to Eddie's history and art. A place where the mayor awarded Eddie the distinction of being the resident "Ambassador of Jazz" in 1974. Eddie plays a muted and un-muted pocket trumpet next to a river and it sound swell. Excerpts from Eddie Gale's Now Band stunning performance at the Vision X Festival from June of this year is used on the soundtrack as we are driving down the coast-line highway. There shots of Eddie walking down to the beach with the sound of the waves as the soundtrack. He plays "When the Saints Come Marching In" as well as other tasty snippets and tunes on the beach as the sun sets. There is something quite enchanting about watching Eddie play his haunting ballad directly to the sun. A touching solo version of "Remembering John (Coltrane)" is followed by a number of different solo trumpet excerpts, each unique in showing an idea or feeling. When Eddie does an exercise with two sticks, it looks as if he conducting the ocean's waves. Unlike Eddie's performance at the Vision Fest with his band, which was super tight and exhilarating, this is much looser, yet still quite gripping at times. He sounds as if he trying to tame the ocean's fury and does quite an admirable job. It ends with a beautiful, meditative lullaby on transcendent muted trumpet as he drives back from the shore. The Eddie Gale Now Band performance from Vision X will also be coming out in the near future, in the meantime you can still dig this little treasure. - BLG
DVD $20


KEITH ROWE/OREN AMBARCHI/CHRISTIAN FENNESZ/TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA - Four Gentlemen Of The Guitar [2 CD set] (Erstwhile 46) This is another extraordinary Erstwhile all-star quartet disc. It is taken from three live performances at Musique Action in Vand'ouevre and Les Instants Chavires in Montreuil, both in France, as well as the FIMAV Fest in Victoriaville, Quebec in May & June of 2004. Although the title of this group and disc is somewhat misleading, all four of these sonic sorcerers do or have play(ed) the guitar. From listening to this marvelous, electronic sounding music, you might not think of these sounds coming from guitars, yet there were three guitars onstage at the Victo Fest, which I attended. Keith Rowe is the godfather of experimental electric guitar and plays his guitar laid down on top of a table, manipulating it in a variety of ways with different objects. Australia's Oren Ambarchi usually just plays a few notes on his guitar and then manipulates that sound for most of the performance. I find this music to be filled with suspense, extremely selective noise(s) and slow-moving, yet well placed activity. Erstwhile has defined its own place in the wide world of modern music, this provocative two disc set is one of their greatest works. If you have the time and patience to deal with this challenging music, this disc will help enrich your life. This very weekend (September 23-25), Erstwhile will be celebrating with its own annual festival of sonic delights. Check the entire line-up at the top of this newsletter. I hope to see some of you all there. - BLG
2 CD set for $21

OREN AMBARCHI - Triste (Southern Lord 46) "Highly recommended!!! We are honored to release something by experimental guitarist: Oren Ambarchi. Besides collaborating with sunn0))) on the forthcoming "Black One" album, Oren has allowed Southern Lord to release this solo album. The recordings of "Triste" were previously available on limited edition LP/vinyl format only. This Southern Lord release combines the original LP recordings + some remix collaborations by Tom Recchion. It is available here for the first time in compact disc format. The "Triste" material is reminiscent of Orens playing on "Grapes from the Estate". Oren has transformed the guitar sound/tone into a dark, tonally extreme, percussive instrument. Imagine stripping sunn0))), or Earth of all its distortion and layers, down to a singular pure immense tone. He then plays and arranges these subsonic tones melodically creating beautiful drone sound-scapes. Glacial minimalism at subsonic depths! "Triste" is packaged in a mini'-gatefold LP sleeve. Thick constructed cardboard with immaculate printing.
CD $14


RICHARD THOMPSON - Grizzly Man [soundtrack] (Cooking Vinyl 360) Produced by Henry Kaiser, this is guitar legend Richard Thompson's self-composed and recorded soundtrack to the recent Werner Herzog film. The personnel features Richard Thompson on guitar & bass, Jim O'Rourke on piano & guitar, Danielle DeGruttola on cello, Damon Smith on acoustic bass and John Hanes on drums, with Henry Kaiser guest guitarist on one track. Although Richard Thompson did much of the composing on this fine mainly instrumental CD, a third of the pieces were co-composed by Danielle, Damon, Henry and Jim. I met, heard play and had dinner with Danielle DeGruttola and Damon Smith at Henry Kaiser's house last year. Both are lovely folks. Both are among the best of the Bay Area's fruitful improv scene. Drummer, John Hanes, has worked with Henry in different bands throughout the years. Jim O'Rourke needs little introduction, as he is a gifted producer, composer and currently, a member of Sonic Youth. Richard Thompson remains the favorite guitarist of many, as well as being a fine songwriter and singer, his career will reach its third decade in a couple of years. The one thing he rarely gets to do is compose instrumental music, so this is indeed a treasure. His utterly distinctive guitar sound and playing are often at the center of most of these pieces, both on electric and acoustic guitars. At times touching on his acoustic, at times astonishing on his electric, always creative and always evoking a number of feelings and spirits. Danielle's superb cello is also featured on a few of these pieces, we need to hear from her. I haven't seen this much discussed film yet, but the music holds up nicely on its own. Mr. Kaiser is both a friend and admirer of Mr. Thompson, hence the project sounds like a true labor of love and respect. The production, sound and balance are just perfect. There is an ancient solemnity and sadness at the center of much of Richard Thompson's music that is captured here just right. - BLG
CD for $16


ITARU OKI UNIT With NATSUKI TAMURA/SATOKO FUJII/KEIZO NOBORI et al - Live (Polystar; Japan) Personnel: Itaru Oki- trumpet, flugelhorn, bamboo flutes; Keizo Nobori- tenor saxophone; Natsuki Tamura- trumpet; Satoko Fujii- piano; Hiroshi Funato- Bass; Jin Mitsuda- drums.
"Japanese trumpet player Itaru Oki is one of the pioneers of the free jazz scene in Japan, but for the past thirty years he's lived in France, first in Lyon and now in Paris, where he collaborated with fellow free-minded expatriates such as bass and synthesizer player Alan Silva, bass player Kent Carter, drummer Sunny Murray, and many other European musicians, such as bass clarinet player Michel Pilz. Oki's playing references the rich musical environment in which he was raised. His father played the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute associated with Zen Buddhism, and his mother was a master of the koto, a Japanese horizontal harp. Oki is also kind of a mad scientist who likes to play on invented brass instruments, such a trumpet-French horn hybrid with two bells, or a trumpet with eight valves.
In recent years the underrated Oki has been operating his Japanese band, which has not yet garnered due recognition outside Japan. The Itaru Oki Unit consists of Oki on trumpet, flugelhorn, bamboo flutes and toys; the prolific Tokyo-based couple Satoko Fujii on piano and pianica and Natsuki Tamura on trumpet and toys; Kobe-based tenor saxist Keizo Nobori; and the young and fiery rhythm section of Hiroshi Funato on bass and Jin Mitsuda on drums. This outfit recorded two discs on 2002, Iroha-Uta, Vol. 1 and Iroha-Uta, Vol. 2 on the independent Kobe-based label Fudebusho, plus last year's live release from its shows at the free jazz haven of Tokyo, the Shinjuku Pit-Inn club, on Polystar, a better-distributed label that is also releases other Fujii and Tamura discs.
This live disc demonstrates Oki's rich musical imagination, and his sense of adventure and quirky humor, in the presence of very sympathetic players. His treatment of the popular Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson standard "Bye Bye Blackbird" only occasionally references the original melody. This opening track begins with bird-calls, created by Oki and Tamura on flutes, then slowly evolves into the basic outline of the standard, now as a trumpet duo. Then Oki, Tamura and Fujii recklessly deconstruct the standard and it ends as Oki and Tamura improvise on the shreds of the original melody, turning it into a marching tune. "Ontakesan" is post bop tune that features Nobori as the main soloist, sounding like a young David Murray, with propulsive backing from Funato and Mitsuda.
"Haiku" features poetess Kazuko Shiraishi (who wrote the liner notes to Oki's Anthologie Lyon-Paris , Ohari, 2002), who improvises on absurd 17-syllables haiku poems, mocking noteworthy haikus and driving the Unit into occasional laughter. This track is a collage of ceremonial Japanese playing and free playing that tries to cope and follow Shiraishi's funny images. Nobori's composition "L for B," based loosely on a blues scale, was recorded by the Unit on Itora-Uta Vol. 1, but here it gets a much-energized treatment, with all players getting their fair share of solos and swinging hard. The closing track, the Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Hausen standard "Like Someone in Love," receives a more conventional treatment from all players and features Fujii on a rare occasion as an interpreter of standards. After experiencing this Unit performing at the Shinjuki Pit-Inn, I can testify that this live disc offers only a glimpse of Itaru Oki and his co-conspirators' exhilarating musical world, which transcends boundaries of East and West, ancient and new, or conventional and free playing." - Eyal Hareuveni
CD $24


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FAST ON THE HEELS OF THE ARCHIVAL FIND OF THE DECADE [GILLESPIE/PARKER AT TOWN HALL, $15] COMES ANOTHER EQUALLY MAJOR FIND!

THELONIOUS MONK QUARTET With JOHN COLTRANE - New York November 29th 1957 (Blue Note) This never-before heard jazz classic documents one of the most historically important working bands in all of Jazz history, a band that was both short-lived and, until now, thought to be frustratingly under-recorded. The concert, which took place at the famed New York hall on November 29, 1957, was preserved on newly-discovered tapes made by Voice of America for a later radio broadcast that were located at the Library of Congress in Washington DC earlier this year [2005]!
CD $17

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JOE McPHEE - Everything Happens For A Reason (Roaratorio 09; USA) In the ever-growing discography of master musician Joe McPhee, his solo albums have stood out as supreme ur-texts of his consummate improvising and compositional skills. Joining the ranks of such landmark records as Tenor, Graphics, and As Serious As Your Life, EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON is an unadorned showcase of this influential pioneer in the world of creative improvised music. Recorded live in Austria in November of 2003, EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON features McPhee on pocket trumpet, soprano and alto saxophones. A limited edition of 482 copies on 180 gram vinyl, with a Judith Lindbloom silkscreen print on rice paper and liner notes by McPhee. LAST COPIES
LP $19


NEW ON CADENCE'S 'CIMP' LABEL... REVIEWS NEXT WEEK

TRIO X [JOE McPHEE/DOMINIC DUVAL/JAY ROSEN] - Moods: Playing With The Elements (CIMP 328) Featuring Joe McPhee on saxes & trumpet, Dominic Duval on contrabass and Jay Rosen on drums. Seventh fabulous release from our favorite CIMP/Cadence all-star trio
CD $15

PRINCE LASHA & ODEAN POPE TRIO - Mystery Of Odean Pope (CIMP 330) with Tyrone Brown on bass and Craig McIver on drums. Many folks thought the legendary west coast saxist, Prince Lasha (pronounced Lashay'), was dead or had just disappeared. He recorded more than a half dozen great records, many with Sonny Simmons, throughout the sixties and seventies. He recently resurfaced and was featured with the Odean Pope Sax Choir at the Blue Note. Local poet and Vision Fest MC Steve Dalachinsky got a chance to speak with Mr. Lasha at length during those nights at the Blue Note. The two records Lasha recorded with Sonny Simmons and the two with Eric Dolphy are all classic dates, so we do look forward to this new date with the great Philly saxist Odean Pope and his trio.
CD $15

STEPHEN GAUCI TRIO With TODD NICHOLSON/J CARLSTEDT - First, Keep Quiet (CIMP 326) CD $15

CHRIS KELSEY With FRANCOIS GRILLOT/JAY ROSEN - Wishing You Were Here (CIMP 329)
CD $15

JAY ROSEN - Songs For Samuel (CIMP 327) Solo drums effort, certain to be special, from one of our favorite local drum heroes.
CD $15


VINNY GOLIA - Clarinets: Music for Like Instruments (Nine Winds 279)
CD $14


ANDREW D'ANGELO TRIO With ANDERS HANA/MIKE PRIDE & MORTEN J OLSEN - Morthana With Pride (Doubt 105; Japan) You gotta love Andrew d'Angelo, one of the funniest and most ridiculous musicians known. Have you ever seen him doing somersaults on stage with the Matt Wilson Quartet?!? The story goes that Andrew (alto & bari sax & bass clarinet) met Anders Hana (electric guitar & effects) and Morten J. Olsen (drums) in the bathroom of the Molde Jazz Fest in Norway in 2001. Anders and Morten were only 17 & 18 at the time and they all played at a jam session later that night, which was totally over the top, certain to offend jazz snobs at the fest. Their first official gig was at the Knitting Factory a month after September 11th!?! They are joined here by local hero Mike Pride on drums, effects and screaming. Mike Pride is no doubt the only musician to ever play with Anthony Braxton and tour with punk legends MDC (Millions of Dead Cops). As you might imagine, the music here is a splendid hybrid of jazz, punk and noise, super-tight and in-your-face! On the first track, Mike's vocals are hilarious, he screams out, "My Prostate" which is also the song title. When I played this in the store, these two old ladies couldn't stop laughing. As I get older and my hair turns grayer, I keep thinking that my days of listening to hardcore punk are in the past. Yet, every so often I long for those days when I would go slamming or occasionally stage diving, fearing not if I would get hurt. This music is quite well played, tight and exciting. There are a few quieter, freer moments as well, all played taste. If you are a jazz snob, you will probably hate this. If you more open-minded, you might actually enjoy this blistering jazz/punk insanity. Don't say I didn't warn you. - BLG
CD $22


FRODE GJERSTAD TRIO WITH PAAL NILSSEN-LOVE/O STORESUND - Last First (Transparency 79)
CD $14.00 AVAILABLE

FRODE GJERSTAD With NICK STEPHENS - North Atlantic Drift (Transparency 112; USA)
CD $14


CHARLIE HADEN LIBERATION MUSIC ORCHESTRA - Not In Our Name (Verve 494902) Not In Our Name is the first new studio recording in 14 years by legendary bassist Charlie Haden with his Liberation Music Orchestra. Recorded in July 2004 after a highly successful European tour. Like their debut album on Impulse (recorded in 1968), this new CD features extraordinary arrangements by Carla Bley who also conducted this 12-piece ensemble. Material includes covers of Ornette's "Skies Of America", Frisell's "Throughout", Metheny/Bowie's "This IS Not America", and "America The Beautiful" medley [get the theme here?] as well as classical pieces from Dvorak and Barber
CD $17

JOEY SELLERS BIG BAND With TONY MALLABY/JOHN O'GALLAGHER - Jazz Aggregation: El Payaso (Nine Winds 217; USA)
CD $14



GUESTS OF THE DMG INSTORE SERIES LEFT US WITH SOME HARD TO GET DISCS...

ANNA HOMLER With GEERT WAEGMAN/PAVEL FAJT - Homler Waegeman Fajt (Lowlands 02; EEC)
CD $14

PUPPETINA [ANNA HOMLER/STEPHANIE PAYNE] With ETHAN HOLTZMAN - Piewacket! (Pasha Nina Teen 01) This features Anna Homler on voice & toys, Stephanie Payne on keyboards, mbira, samples, loops & voice and their guest Ethan Holtzman on accordion. Our old friend and bizarre, yet charming vocal sorceress came to visit and perform here at DMG this past weekend with contrabassist Peter Jaquemyn. It was a joyously weird set. Anna left us with her new duo disc from Puppetina for children of all ages (3+). It is certainly one of the oddest and most enchanting vocal discs I've heard in quite a while. Anna sings in her own invented language, ever so exquisite and alien. There are layers of keyboards, mbira, samples and vocals, magically sewn together, but never too dense. At first I was unsure of how much children would appreciate this, yet there is a quaint innocence at the center of this. It sounds like lullabies from another cozy dimension. Anna also layers her voice(s) nicely, creating wonderful harmonies with herself. In some ways, I am reminded of the child-like music/magic of Pascale Comelade, who also uses toys in most inventive ways. If I lived in L.A. (yuck) and had kids myself, I know who I would have perform at a party for children and their parents both - Puppetina, of course! - Do you ever long for the days when you were a child and life was less complicated? Well then, this delightful disc is for the child in all of us. - BLG
CD $10

UNTITLED SONGS [V.A. With Anna Homler, Asmus Tietchens, Stephen Vitiello, Achim Wolleschied, et al] - Untitled Songs [2 CD set] (Sirr 20; EEC)
CD $20 [only one copy, first one gets it!]

BASSINSTINCT [PETER HERBERT et al] - Bass Instinct (Camerata 25089; EEC) BassInstinct is a contrabass sextet from Austria, which includes the wonderful Peter Herbert plus five other bassists with whom I am unfamiliar. Mr. Herbert composed or arranged about half of the pieces, with one Mingus cover, two traditional pieces and two pieces written or arranged by band-member, Ernst Weissensteiner. Contrabass ensembles are pretty rare. Although there have been a few bass quartets in recent years at Victo and at the Vision Fests. BassInstinct don't use pickups or amplification, so their sound it exclusively acoustic. I dig the way certain members play the rhythm parts by tapping on their basses as the others play those difficult written lines in unison or harmony. This disc is superbly recorded in stereo so that one can hear the sounds panned across the stereo spectrum. The sextet perform Marcel Khalife's "Taquassim 3", which is a sumptuous middle-eastern delight. Khalife is an oud player from Lebanon. On "Wie gut wars", each bassist strums one chord at a time, ever so elegant, melodic and filled with suspense, as one bassist solos. Mr. Herbert has composed some challenging and intricate music for the sextet, on "Kurz-Long", the group is broken into sections, some plucking, some bowing, some banging, yet all tightly worked out. Charles Mingus' "Meditations" is a wise choice as Mingus was also a master bassist and composer. The group is again broken into sections, with layers of lines and harmonies moving together superbly done and most haunting in their execution, with some amazing solos. Herbert's 8-part suite, "Filmrequiem", explores different approaches and landscapes for the six contrabasses. Each part of the suite involves different combinations of players and different techniques of playing the bass. Herbert has obviously found some kindred spirits in these other bassists' ability to play these difficult ideas or sounds. The two traditional tunes are unexpectedly soothing and rich in graceful melodies. "Funky Freedom" is pretty funky, without being too silly, although basses do seem to inspire some dancing among the common folks. The last tune, "Cujoo" is a rather lightweight ditty that had me humming along immediately. The funky bass solo is a complete gas and will have you snapping your fingers in no time. Overall, a swell disc considering it features six bass players, only. - BLG
CD $14

PETER HERBERT - Naked Bass (Buzo Records 508356/Austria) This is the second incredible solo contrabass offering from the Austrian bassist Peter Herbert, who also lives in NYC some of the time and tour constantly. Peter composed 10 of the 15 pieces here, with contributions from fellow bassists Mark Helias, Joelle Leandre and Mark Dresser, as well as pieces by Marcel Khalife and Alexandre Tannous. This disc is well recorded, the bass sounds warm and naked, as in completely acoustic. Each piece tells a little story and deals with a different approach to the bass. I love the way Peter taps on the bass as if it were a percussion instrument. His bowing also has a magical resonance, with notes ringing or humming in the air. What I like most is that all of these pieces have a most melodic sensibility, none are too "out there" to scare the somewhat more conservative listener. Each of the five pieces by other composers, give an idea of what each of their sound(s) is/are like, without sounding too much like them. An interesting challenge for Mr. Herbert, who still sounds like himself, yet is always evolving and searching for something new. I especially like Joelle Leandre's "for Peter H.", which moves in mysterious ways and features some eerie bowing and intense plucking. Mark Dresser's "for Glen Moore" is another delight, it is animated work for the great bassist from the group Oregon. A tour-de-force for its entire 54 minute duration. - BLG
CD $14

PETER JACQUEMYN - Kontrabas Solo (Logos 05/Belgium) I hadn't heard of Belgium, contrabassist, Peter Jacquemyn, until very recently when he appeared on a triple bass disc with Peter Kowald and William Parker. Over the past year, I've noticed his name on a few other discs as well, with musicians like Fred Van Hove, Andre Goudbeek and Carlos Bechegas. I was not prepared for his wonderful playing with L.A. vocal wiz, Anna Homler, at our store last weekend (9/18/05). For those of you at the High Zero Festival in Baltimore this weekend, you are indeed in store for a treat.
Mr. Jacquewyn uses 1,2 or 3 bows, soda cans, plastic bags, crumpled paper and assorted objects on his acoustic bass. He is also a sculptor and seems to approach his bass in an unusual way. This fine disc, 'Kontrabas Solo' was recorded with no overdubs and no electronic manipulation. His sound is original and quite striking. It doesn't sound as if he is playing a bass, just some strange object with different strings. You can't tell whether he is using two or more bows or just bowing different strings simultaneously. At the end of the second piece, I felt as if I have transported to another (acoustic) dimension. Absolutely bizarre and often brilliant. The ever-bent bowing is often unnerving and filled with strange spirits. This has much more in common with out-there string manipulators like Philip Gayle, than it does with those who deal within jazz guidelines or barriers. Obviously this cat is in a world of his own. Are you ready to enter that weird world? I thought so. - BLG
CD $16

PETER KOWALD/WILLIAM PARKER/PETER JACQUEMYN - Deep Music (Free Elephant 3; EEC) Featuring Peter Kowald, William Parker and Peter Jacquemyn all on contrabasses. Mr. Jacquemyn was on a fine quartet disc with Kowald called 'Dubbel Duo' from last year. This should be another great endeavor from three wonderful bassists.
CD $17

GUNDA GOTTSCHALK/PETER JACQUEMYN - E Pericoloso Sporgersi (Valve 7099; EEC)
CD $14

CARLOS BECHEGAS/ANDRE GOUDBEEK/PETER JACQUEMYN - Open Density (Forward 4; EEC)
CD $16

SIGN OF THE RAVEN [PETER JACQUEMYN/JEFFREY MORGAN/MARK SANDERS] - Sign Of The Raven: Live At The Loft Cologne (Uton 15; EEC)
CD $16


MARK DRESSER - Unveil (Clean Feed 43/Portugal) It goes without saying that a program of solo improvisations for double-bass by Mark Dresser will be overflowing with technical innovations for both the instrument and humans hands, but you can read the excellent liner notes by Dresser and Bill Shoemaker if you want the technical details of the radical transformation of the instrument being documented here. I'd rather tell you how the music feels. It's breathtaking, startling, mysterious, seductive, and sometimes terrifying. What's especially remarkable about Dresser is that the intensely unconventional usage of the bass on center stage by itself here is equally present in his ensemble work. He lives and breathes the monstrous swath of sound details that can be extracted from every gesture in every musical situation he puts himself in, not just his solos. As such, he's figured out what all these new sounds mean musically, how they move in the space of time. He understands the drama of every variation in note shape, the power of different gestures to rupture or repair momentum, the endless parameters of groove, the overtone implications of every shift in bow pressure. He already knows how to make music with all the radical sound possibilities he's mastered; he's not using the solo context to separately and newly work on this stuff. In fact, it feels like he's playing pieces long shaped into entries to the repertoire of some abstract cultural tradition he's mastered, as if he's created a new kind of ethnic music for a culture of one person, proving yet again that music doesn't need to be universal (a logical impossibility); it just needs to overlap enough for us to experience something profound.
This imaginary avant-folkloric music may seem exotic and filled with meaning that doesn't reach us foreign listeners, but we can still tap into an underlying human bond and vicariously thrill to the ecstasy of his performative variations on a previously chiselled aesthetic. These thoughts are prompted by the overlap in multi-directional string-soundings between these attacks on contrabass fiddle and Kazue Sawai's attacks on her koto, because Sawai's relationship to some kind of ethnic aesthetic stabilization is concrete and obvious. Like Sawai, Dresser has opened up a huge space of sound shapes for long, thick strings mounted on an expanse of wood, retaining structural concerns with linear pitch movement and pulse, but directing unprecedented creative energies into blowing up individual gestures to the size of self-contained sound-universes raging with the drama of harmonic envelopes and dynamic contours. Besides linear logic and exploded-note structure, Dresser's recent body of bass explorations unveiled here has re-demarcated the frontier of vertical structure for string instruments. Dresser takes simultaneous contrastive sound events on the bass and recalibrates their foreground/background relationships to create parallel movements. The incidental artifacts inherent to the physical gestures of activating strings and creating pitch nodes are unveiled and given a chance to assert their own preferences. Instead of solos, these are often like duos, trios, and quartets for the multiple lives of the same strings. These pieces are confrontations with the sound-monsters lurking in acoustic instruments that reach peaks at least as high as those strategized by Giacinto Scelsi, Iancu Dumitrescu, and Iannis Xenakis. Ecstatic subtle sound terror and triggers for unnamed and unknown emotions. This is a landmark in contemporary music and deals with a lot of different ideas than Dresser's earlier work or any other bassist's work. The role of notation, multitracking (one track), and symbolic externalities is also minimal on this release; it wisely allots most of its attention to Dresser's most fruitful method: free improvisation. It was recorded expertly, transparently, and massively by Raz Mesinai in NYC between 2003 and 2004. -Michael Anton Parker
CD for $17


HERB ROBERTSON NY DOWNTOWN ALLSTARS - Elaboration (Clean Feed 42/Portugal) This is like a dream come true for fans of these five musicians. Herb Robertson. Tim Berne. Sylvie Courvoisier. Mark Dresser. Tom Rainey. Anything could happen with this lineup. What actually happened is that the group was instigated by Robertson for a festival appearance, and he wrote out an elaborate piece with 12 sections for different subgroupings and guides to improvisation, resulting in a continuous 48-minute piece that brought out the most experimental, non-jazz tendencies of all five players. Extended techniques, drama, faint textures, cataclysmic terror, otherworldly harmonics, illusions of electronics. It's all here. The good stuff. This is way better than good though; it's guaranteed a spot in my year-end top 5. Astonishing and monumental would be better descriptions. Dresser's playing is a revelation as always, with his characteristic rapid alternations between massive, churning, violent gestures and pinprick details. His style is a rare example of timbral discontinuity adapted as a primary musical parameter for an acoustic instrumentalist, an unlikely achievement given the inherent timbral stability of most acoustic instruments. It's entirely rare and refreshing to hear Berne and Rainey in a situation where pitch and pulse parameters are so resolutely de-emphasized, and it extends the side of their musicality that came out publicly for the first time with Paraphrase. Berne does some pretty harsh stuff here, but what's especially interesting is a section where Dresser is way out in Dumitrescu-land and Berne muses on some gentle, soulful melodies at the same time. Contrasts like that are sublime in themselves, but also underscore the openness of the players to less obvious approaches. In most of his playing situations, Rainey gets a chance to play sick grooves and generate ecstatic forward motion, but he's equally inspired as a timbral innovator who can make magic happen with just extended techniques like Gerry Hemingway.
This disc is a perfect way to make the point to anyone who only recognizes Rainey as the ultimate post-jazz groove ubermensch. He goes a lot deeper than dazzling drum-kit grooves and is truly a complete musician and advanced conceptualist who understands the total musical situation as much as the musicians who play the leader/composer roles. In fact, he could easily fill such roles himself if it were necessary, but given the musical situations he works in, I gather it's not necessary and he can function instead as a co-composer in the process of real-time instant composition integral to most of his groups. Rainey's ingenuity is in almost every nook and cranny of Elaboration, and he funnels his groove-impulses into really unexpected passages of oblique motion, like when him and Courvoisier create and sustain an amazing seesaw rhythm using irregular cycles of overlapping extended techniques. Courvoisier's playing is jaw-dropping at times, and there's an extended passage that features her working both inside and on the keyboard of the piano, interacting with Rainey and the others in subtle combinations, and working up to a terrifying free jazz piano freakout that could make a person faint! Obviously accepting an equal role as an instrumentalist in a performance collective despite his organizational leadership, Robertson is in his comfort zone here as a musician who tends towards this kind of difficult-listening improv as his preferred context. He subverts the identity of his trumpet and cornet to suggest dozens of other instruments, with an unparalleled mastery of muting techniques. There's a fertile younger generations of experimental trumpeters these days, but Robertson is still the reference standard for the total musical package on the instrument, freely reconciling multiple streams of the avant-garde like no one else. More than anyone else in this piece, Robertson is the one who sneaks into a passage and changes the harmonic or textural structure before you even notice he's there. The potential of this quintet is incalculable, yet fully realized on this recording. It will take dozens of listens to really get a solid handle on the music here, but let's hope the group convenes again while we're busy listening. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $17


ALVIN LUCIER/BARTON WORKSHOP - Wind Shadows (New World 80628) The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never explanatory (the goal of science) but, like all art, revelatory. This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in the usual sense of this term. On the contrary, it is the physical behavior of sound itself that he so elegantly reveals, each work unveiling an otherwise hidden or ephemeral aspect of aural phenomena and allowing us time to witness its beauty. He achieves this by ruthlessly excluding any trace of self-expression, or indeed anything extraneous to the phenomenon itself. The Barton Workshop has been the only group to really work closely with Lucier in terms of doing portraits of his work (the first in 1995), commissioning new works (40 Rooms, Bar Lazy J, and Q) and performing older/extant pieces. This 2-CD set is the fruit of this long collaborative process.
2 CD set for $28

HANS ARP/KURT SCHWITTERS/RAOUL HAUSMANN - Dada Antidada Merz (Sub Rosa 195; Belgium) Three major artists of the European Dadaist avant-garde read from their own texts. German-French sculptor, painter and poet Hans Arp, who was very close to Tristan Tzara when he created Dada in ZUrich (from a very rare recording), photomontagist and co-founder of the Berlin Dada movement, Raoul Hausmann (some rare pieces from 1918 to 1957 -- recorded by Henri Chopin) and the great Kurt Schwitters, twentieth century's greatest master of collage who reads his only two recorded merzpoems, "Anna Blume" and "Ursonate" (both recorded in 1932). Including photos, texts and historical introduction (translated in German, French and English). Alongside the seminal Sub Rosa Luna Park CD (a collection of avant-garde voices 1913-1974) Dada Antidada Merz represents more definitive documentation of early Dada/avant-garde output (edited by Marc Dachy once again) -- significant aural documents, previously impossible to access.
CD $15

DAVID GRUBBS & SUSAN HOWE - Thiefth (Blue Chopsticks 15; USA) With Mats Gustafsson on reeds and Nikos Veliotis on cello. "Thiefth is the first collaboration between poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. The two were brought together when the Fondation Cartier in Paris proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been an ardent reader of Howe's for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe's poetry and her voice immediately intrigued. In late 2003, the two set about to create performance versions of 'Thorow' and 'Melville's Marginalia,' two of Howe's longer poems. Drawing from the journals and letters of Sir William Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, 'Thorow' evokes the winter landscape around Lake George in upstate New York and the historical violence of our national identity. Howe and Grubbs engage the lake's icy surface as well as the voices that haunt the unseen world beneath. 'Melville's Marginalia' explores Herman Melville's notations in books he owned and loved - marginalia in which he sometimes argued with the authors. Grubbs brings together a diverse collection of sound sources, referencing Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, Howe's splitting of words, melting snow, and flight patterns overhead.
CD $14



FOUR MORE EXTRAORDINARY DISCS from THE SUBLIME FREQUENCIES LABEL:

NIGER [V.A.] - Magic & Ecstasy in the Sahel [DVD] (Sublime Freq 022) A celebration of life in the Sahel region of Africa, this film showcases many of Niger's venerable music styles. Tuareg electric guitar trance rock, Bori cult dance ceremonies, Fulani folk, and roadhouse gospel rave-ups are some of the segments included in this latest "folk cinema" classic from Sublime Frequencies. Filmed in December of 2004 on location in Niger, director/editor Hisham Mayet delivers a spontaneous, raw, and inspiring collection of images, music, and ceremony (again with a single camera presentation) from a nation mired in poverty and continual post-colonial disappointment. Quoting from Mayet's liner notes: "This is not music as commodity, this is music as survival. There is a saying in Niger that goes, 'when we die we know we are going to heaven because we already live in Hell,' well I think it's more like the purgatory that we all live in and they sure have managed to transcend with an incredible natural resource: Music. Dig it!"
DVD $20

RADIO PYONGYANG [V.A.] - Commie Funk and Agit Pop From the Hermit Kingdom (Sublime Freq 023) Schmaltzy synth-pop, revolutionary rock, cheeky child rap, and a healthy dose of hagiography for Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, this is the now NOW sound of North Korea! A hermit kingdom with a rich folk history and an even richer tradition in over-the-top praise for the ruling House of Kim, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea remains a diplomatic thorn and a cultural Never Neverland. Boasting a heady mix of Stalin opera, Tokyo karaoke and brooding impressionism, the sound of present-day Pyongyang distills into warped agit-pop and lost-in-time commie funk. If you've ever wondered what goes on in North Korean music, this is your vehicle for exploration. Christiaan Virant has visited this mysterious land and has assembled this amazing audio collage. Captured within are rare live recordings from various performances and mass games demonstrations, sounds lifted from People's Army television dramas, samples from hard-to-find CD releases obtained in the capital, and of course, news reports from the "real" Radio Pyongyang, which continues to broadcast to this day, albeit under the new, strikingly anodyne moniker "Voice of Korea."
CD $14

GUITARS OF THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE - Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar [Burma] Vol. 2 (Sublime Freq 024) Follow-up to 2004's well-received Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (Burma) Vol. 1. Shan State is Myanmar's largest province and larger than the entire state of New York -- a massive sub-tropic tableland with an average elevation of 3,000 feet, perfect for the cultivation of poppies for which it is well known as the center of the "Golden Triangle." Never before presented outside a tiny minority of the Burmese community, this unbelievable collection of garage and psychedelic rock, raw folk-blues ballads, and country-western styled music is a product of Shan and Pa'o musicians hailing from the early 1970s. Discover the music of Lashio Thein Aung (aka the "Burmese Texan"), Khun Paw Yunn (a "Black Shan" Pa'o rocker) and Saing Saing Maw: the original Shan legend who wrote and sang garage psych-rock songs, usually backed by a tight unit of organ, bass, drums, and perhaps the most stinging electric guitar in Burmese history. There is little reliable information about these mysterious pioneers and most Burmese have never even heard this material. Compiled by Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls), the cuts on this CD are almost impossible to find in ANY form or quality. They were transferred directly from old cassette tapes and a few tracks have dropouts (some of them quite severe). Most of the master tapes are thought to have been lost or destroyed many years ago so this may be the only link to a phenomenal "lost scene" and Sublime Frequencies is thrilled to resurrect it for those interested in folk, rock and pop styles from lesser-known regions of the globe.
CD $14

CHOUBI CHOUBI! [V.A.] - Folk & Pop Sounds from Iraq (Sublime Freq 025) Meticulously selected from Iraqi cassettes and LPs found in Syria, Europe and the Iraqi neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan, this unique collection of folk and pop styles displays a wealth of outstanding music that is exclusive to Iraq and has rarely been showcased abroad. There are many reasons why Iraqi music stands alone in the dynamic world of Arabic music: one example is the unbelievable rapid fire machine-gun rhythms fluttering atop the main tempo. This is the work of a unique nomadic hand drum called the khishba -- also known as the zanbour (Arabic for "wasp"). A style prominently featured here is the infamous Iraqi choubi -- a driving rhythmic style that can include fiddles, double reeded instruments, percussion, bass, keyboards and oud over its signature beat. Other styles featured are the basta (an urban Baghdadi style), the bezikh, and the pulsating hecha. Also heard is the mawal -- a vocal improv that sets the tone of a song, regardless of the style. Additionally there are three cuts from Ja'afar Hassan's 1970s record, Let's Sing Together. Being a folk-rock record, it's a true anomaly for Iraq. Hassan was a mouthpiece for the Iraqi Socialist movement just a few years before Saddam Hussein. But most of the music in this collection was produced during the Saddam period between the 1980s and 2002. Since the 2003 invasion and the wholesale disassembly of the country, classic tracks like these may already be part of a disappeared past.
CD $14





DMG SCRIBES BRUCE LEE GALLANTER & MICHAEL ANTON PARKER REVIEW SOME RECENT OFFERINGS:


THE CLAUDIA QUINTET - Semi-Formal (Cuneiform 217) The third amazing Claudia Quintet disc features the same personnel as the previous gems: Chris Speed on tenor sax & clarinet, Ted Reichman on accordion, Matt Moran on vibes, Drew Gress on acoustic bass and John Hollenbeck on drums & compositions.
"For me, the pinnacles of postmodern accordion groove music are Nimal, Amoebic Ensemble, and The Claudia Quintet. In fact, the rambunctious opening moments of this disc invoked the fondest possible thoughts of the Amoebics. But it's the profoundly original and familiar feeling of The Claudia Quintet itself that quickly took over my mind and body. After all, this is a group that's already released two absolute monster albums perched at the highest levels of recent creative music. The Claudia Quintet is by now an established institution that already serves as a definitive reference point for the untapped potential in creative music based on acoustic instruments and the rehearsal method. Half the story comes from the juxtaposition of the instruments themselves and the distinctive personalities behind them. John Hollenbeck is a virtuoso drumkitter who can slip between just about any style known for the instrument and reconcile the coloristic impulses of free improvisors with the groove spectrum, also a rare drumkitter who knows how to use a full range of volume as an independent variable. Matt Moran is the only game in town as far as I'm concerned when it comes to creative vibraphone music. He's technically and conceptually gifted to the point of disbelief. Chris Speed's clarinet and tenor saxophone have been put through the burning-coals R&D department in over a decade of tremendous activity with some of the era's key projects in creative improvised music. Ted Reichman's accordion is one of the definitive voices of the past decade's downtown NYC scene. Drew Gress' impeccable doublebass has been at the center of jazz masterpieces of various persuasions. That half of the story is a swirling, glorious epic of timbres and improvisational acumen all brought fully to bear on the music at hand. The other half of the story is the fertile mind of John Hollenbeck, synthesizing so much of what's great about music in 2005 with absolutely no regard for the conventions of any genre. This is one of the guys who just seems to do everything right, a creative dynamo who raises the bar for everything he tackles.
'Semi-Formal' is a rare disc I feel like I can recommend to pretty much anyone without any hesitation or qualifications. It seems impossible not to be sucked into this dream-world of overlapping, shifting pulses, burning, intricate grooves, infectious melodies, crystalline textures, and floating harmonies. This is neatly constructed and tightly played music as accessible as Stereolab, Tortoise, Zappa, or MJQ, with smooth, curvy, delicate, warm sounds that don't make any demands on the listener's timbral tolerances. At the same time, it's clever and very serious music with enough detail and complexity to nourish the most demanding ears. One of my favorite aspects of The Claudia Quintet is Hollenbeck's use of snazzy, ecstatic post-jungle grooves played in real-time on acoustic drumkit. Gress' bass is mixed more like a pop record than a jazz record, giving the grooves a booming sonic presence that reveals all the great nuances of the woody tones at the same time it hits you in the gut. "They point...glance...whisper..then snicker" is a great example of this amazing acoustica-as-IDM feeling with vibraphone sustains draped over the grooves and glistening in the sunlight. Some of these pieces flow together into mini-suites and as much as I want to gush over the timeless magic of the core acoustic timbres of the group, this disc gains a lot of its depth from a few passages where a whole bunch of secondary instruments of mixed pedigree (piano, keyboards, fan, pedal steel guitar, acoustic and electric guitars, baritone horn) give the album an overall flow of mysterious and seamless tangents into fresh soundworlds. I saw this group play a lot of this material live a few days before they recorded the album and I was blown away. I'm back on the clouds again hearing this audiophile recording, and it won't be long before it logs dozens of hours in my stereo just like the first two Claudias have. Monster classic #3 from a group that everybody should hear. I really mean everybody, not just the insular avant-garde community." - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $13


SATOKO FUJII FOUR - Live in Japan 2004 (Natsat 3022/Japan) Featuring Satoko Fujii on piano & compositions, Natsuki Tamura on trumpet, Mark Dresser on contrabass and Jim Black on drums. Although the amazing Satoko Fujii Trio, with Mark Dresser & Jim Black, has been playing together for some seven years, with a half dozen discs out, this is the first quartet disc for this particular personnel. Added is Satoko's husband and longtime musical partner, Natsuki Tamura. I caught their astonishing set at the Guelph Jazz Fest a couple of weeks back and I'm glad to have this powerful document/disc in my/our possession. It starts off quietly with "Ninepin" and builds slowly, yet boldly from there. Natsuki plays some fine hand-muted trumpet, as Satoko works at the keyboard and inside the piano. The ever-dynamic downtown all-star rhythm team is consistently creative throughout, they sound like no one else. Jim Black's unique approach to his kit is both fascinating to watch and a mystery to figure out when you listen to him on record. He does a lot of nimble little tricks like using a zither or autoharp or wind-up jewel box upon his kit. The quartet soon hit their stride as they breeze through Satoko's challenging, almost prog-like composition with it's intricate twists and turns. Satoko's majestic piano shines beautifully on certain passages. Dresser plays the first of a few incredible bass solos, completely distinctive, just a short preview of things to come. The true masterpiece here is the epic-length (36 1/2 minute) "Illusion Suite", the title track from a previous Satoko Fujii Trio disc. Once again beginning softly with the mysterious sounds of bowed bass and cymbals, other worldly piano and odd trumpet fragments. They soon enter the great charted groove, again maneuvering tightly around the curves. They eventually progress into freer terrain with a marvelous, expressive drum solo from Jim Black. No matter how "free", things get, there is always a thread or logic running through this entire work, building again into charted areas. At the set in Guelph, I felt that Natsuki's trumpet was at its very best, each passage or solo showing a different approach to modern trumpet playing. The set at Guelph and the recent set at Tonic were each performed to a packed house and (word is) that each one was outstanding with standing ovations from the roaring crowd. Certainly, one of this year's most extraordinary live documents. - BLG
CD for $23


MARCLAY/TONE/WOLFF [CHRISTIAN MARCLAY / YASUNAO TONE / CHRISTIAN WOLFF] - Event (Asphodel 2032) Insane lineup, anything could happen. This could be a punishing noise jam. I'm relieved to report it's not at all. Instead we get fascinating sounds sculpted into ephemeral structures with enough space in the mix to enjoy their unrecognizable shapes in passing. Tone (pronounced [to-ne] or "toe" + "net" - "t") is the grandfather of glitch. From the very early days of CD technology in the mid-80s he's been experimenting with an aesthetic of digital failure, using an exacto-knife to place tiny pieces of scotch tape on the underside of compact discs that will trigger complex and unpredictable skipping behavior from the CD player. He's a CD player and a CD player player. Needless to say, some people will find a barrage of irregular skipping CD sounds to be unbearably unpleasant. I find them beautiful and I was so moved the first time I played his landmark solo album on Tzadik (Solo for Wounded CD) I literally shed tears of joy and felt the experience was so sacred I have never played it a second time, though I will someday. His collaboration with Judy Dunaway in which he did his thing to a disc of Dunaway's balloon improvisations was released as a 7-minute excerpt called "Bluebird" on Dunaway's seminal Balloon Music release on CRI-Emergency. I mention this because in my opinion (and surely only my opinion), it's the greatest piece of music ever recorded and I've played it around 2000 times. (I also couldn't help but thinking that there were some similar balloon sounds in one section of this piece!)
That's why a new release from Tone is a major event in my view, and that's why his solo album had that effect on me. This trio must've intentionally been assembled with a conceptual motivation to represent three forms of medium-deconstructionism, because alongside Tone's deconstruction of CD technology we have Marclay's seminal turntablism, and the wild card of the group, Christian Wolff, using an analog cassette machine in ways I can only guess at, possibly related to Howard Stelzer's celebrated techniques. Marclay actually plays records here, not just the turntable itself, so there are fleeting fragments of familiar but anonymous musical sounds in the mix, but most of the sounds here are electro-acoustic abstractions. Wolff uses a bass guitar and percussion in addition to the cassette machine. As a whole, this is a paradigmatic example of electroacoustic improvisation in the most literal sense, not the strange and arbitrary sense it's been abused with in recent years. It's roughly similar in several meaningful ways to the two classic trio albums released by Howard Stelzer (cassette machines), Jason Talbot (turntables), and Vic Rawlings (modified cello, open-circuit electronics). While not overly dense or noisy, this is very active music constantly jumping from one random burst to another. Repeating rhythms are freely accepted as part of the mix when they emerge, most often from Tone's skipping CDs, though they're ecstatically irregular and herky-jerky despite their micro-structural repetitiveness.
Wolff's history with the bass guitar and musical experimentation of this general nature goes back several decades as part of his storied path of deeply inspired avant-gardism stemming from John Cage's circle, but in practice he's the least advanced experimental improvisor of the three, and I suspect the blame for the occasional gratuitous cheesy electronic pitch sweep or old-school academic flourish lies with him. Marclay and Tone, on the other hand, have focused instrumental vocabularies refined by extensive performance in these kinds of situations. They accept more restrictions in their methodology and enjoy correspondingly greater cohesion in their sound worlds. While Wolff's contributions are hard to identify for me in general, whatever he's doing, this is music is absolutely fabulous for the most part. Of course, it's a constant stream of arcane information very difficult to attach subjective judgements to, but there are dozens of moments that I've caught in my ear-net, marinated in my mind, and nibbled or gulped with gourmet delight. I'm sure this will continue to sound totally different each time I play it, but the important thing is that it's enticing enough to be reapproached instead of played just once or twice for curiosity-satisfaction. This is a real gem of revelatory sound combinations done with enough restraint and timbral integrity to warrant serious listening. While just now seeing release in 2005 as a edited 50 minute continuous piece on this CD, the recording was made in 1998 as part of a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Vermont. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $14


MI3 - We Will Make a Home For You (Clean Feed 39/Portugal) Featuring Pandelis Karyorgis on electric piano, Nate McBride on bass and Curt Newton on drums. "If you asked me to make a long enough wish-list for musical projects, I'm sure I'd wind up asking for a trio with an elite post-jazz keyboardist smearing a Fender Rhodes electric piano over a snap-crackle-pop free jazz rhythm section. You can imagine how great it felt to have any such wish pre-empted by a disc that jumps right into the stratosphere with a leadoff take on Dolphy's "Gazzelloni" that fits the proposable scheme as tight as I could hope for. This disc just destroys me, and I've even been cranking it louder than I'm prone to just to bathe in the celestial ringing textures of the Fender Rhodes. The keyboardist is an unlikely candidate to join the ranks of Craig Taborn, Judith Berkson & Jamie Saft... in the vanguard of post-jazz electric piano experimentalism, Pandelis Karayorgis.
Here's a consummate baton-holder for the piano jazz tradition who has gone as deep as anyone else of his generation into the acoustic nuances of the instrument applied to the canon of Monk, Ellington, et al. Amazingly, he's managed to transfer his connection to Monk to this radically different timbral and phrasal situation, with four of the nine cuts here being revelatory passes through the well-thumbed Monk songbook. A left-field gem from Hasaan Ibn Ali rounds out a program with space left for three Karayorgis originals, including a take on "Disambiguation" that makes for an incredible side-by-side with the version on his splendid Leo release with Mat Maneri, Michael Formanek, Tom Rainey, and Tony Malaby; I can't help but feeling the edgy sustains and amoebic note shapes Maneri characteristically brought to the piece are being handled by the incredible sound possibilities of the Rhodes keyboard in Karayorgis' hands. Doublebassist Nate McBridge and drumkitter Curt Newton form one of the best rhythm sections you could possibly ask for to play this music. This is one of the ultra-elite groove units of the recent era in jazz. They backed Ken Vandermark in the Tripleplay trio that Clean Feed broadcast to the world last year and Boxholder introduced in 2000. They were the engine that drove Joe Morris' landmark Symbolic Gestures release on Soul Note and one of the monumental Joe Morris Quartet opuses with Mat Maneri. And those are just the better-known exploits.
mi3 is possibly the new peak in the pairing's long history; the trio had a chance to become a throbbing unified organism with a long-running weekly house gig for an avant-jazz series in the Boston area. Newton and McBride just explode all over the place here and swing like there's no tomorrow in between. Newton is one of the great connoisseurs of gourmet drumkit timbres; every cymbal hit, rim tap, and snare roll reflects both top-notch equipment and the kind of precise touch that separates sublime dynamic slopes from time-keeping prairies. The timbral nuances he brought to the Steelwool Trio (with Vandermark and Kessler) are the crucial factor that made it a major highlight of 90s jazz. He's also the kind of weathered jazzer totally comfortable dealing with the fringes of his chosen specialty--look no further than his legendary erstwhile unit Debris and their travels from Berne-inspired cellular groove permutations to aggressive jazz-rock skronk. Beautifully recorded, the disc is really driven by the magical timbres of the three instruments, unblemished by the inevitable cliches of an acoustic piano. Karayorgis doesn't limit himself to the straight Rhodes sound; he uses some choice guitar pedals to take things even further out into that zone of blissful fuzz-buzz-sponge-texture wafting of Soft Machine, Isotope, late 60s and early 70s Miles Davis, etc. Canterbury fans take note: this is THE avant-jazz disc you've been waiting for. Just on the basis of the woozy processed electric piano vibe and texturalized melodicism, I would also recommend this one to fans of Squarepusher's One Rotted Note. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $17


JACK ROSE - Kensington Blues (VHF 092) To be frank, if you have even a passing interest in John Fahey's classic acoustic guitar solo music, this new Jack Rose album will blow your mind. Rose is the real deal, an old-school shamanic vessel for timeless musical truths about melody and repetition. Some years back, after already being established and acclaimed as a drone-guitar whiz, Rose immersed himself in Fahey-inspired fingerpicking technique to reach that next level of technical mastery. His playing here is the result of this development and shows both boggling dexterity and a profound connection to that ineffable something that sits at the deepest center of a musical soul. Whatever it is, Rose has an iron grip on it. The pieces here range from a vintage Fahey feeling (including one cover) to a light, cheerful Peter Lang feeling and raga-inflected microtonality as close to Brij Bushan Kabra as you can get without losing the personalized immersive drone-flow that sets Rose apart as a creative musician. As a bonus, this disc is recorded with perfect clarity. As far as I'm concerned, this is an instant classic and completely essential for any fan of acoustic guitar in the Fahey/Basho vein, who will be pulling it off the shelf to play again and again for decades. I've played it about 15 times already in the past month or so, and it hits that spot everytime. You know what spot I'm talking about, the "real music" spot. The "I'm a human and my senses are truly alive" spot. A major achievement I can't imagine anyone being disappointed by. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $14


N.R.A. [TATSUYA NAKATANI / VIC RAWLINGS / RICARDO ARIAS] (free103point9 Audio Dispatch) This documents a 2004 session by the trio of Tatsuya Nakatani (floor tom, singing bowls, cymbals, rubbing and scraping implements, etc), Vic Rawlings (open-circuit electronics, prepared cello), and Ricardo Arias (balloon kit). This is a whole lot of disjointed rumbling, scraping, buzzing, squelching, crackling, scrabbling, rubbing, squeaking, and related delicacies for the modern ear. It's probably the most puzzling electro-acoustic improvisation I've ever heard, neither lowercase subtlety nor dense noise, but rather a complete avoidance of any common approach to improvisation. It's really remarkable to be able to hear all these fascinating sounds and not have them fit together at all like this. I'm unusually familiar with these musicians, having heard at least 15 concerts or recordings from each of them, and easily over a hundred altogether. I know their sound vocabularies in and out and typically have strong and profound reactions of pleasure hearing their innovative sounds and concepts. It amuses me to report that I've found this recording to be by far the strangest and most impenetrable music I've ever heard from any of them. This was originally slated for release on Locust, but somehow got delayed and just finally wound up on a local NYC label. I've had it for months and I've played it a good 30-40 times, but I haven't gotten one step closer to making any sense out of these sound combinations. I've tried all manner of approaches to cracking this nut--playing as background music while I do email, playing while driving by quiet farms, while driving with windows open in Manhattan and cranking it above traffic sounds, while driving with windows closed, listening with rapt attention on headphones, on an empty stomach, a full stomach, staring at the wall, staring at the floor, staring at the ceiling, staring at my elbow, at low volumes, high volumes, eyes closed, eyes open, while laying on the couch, while standing on my feet, while standing on my hands--I'm not joking about any of this, by the way--you name it, I've tried it. I love these sounds, but I still have no idea how they fit together. There is nothing remotely unpleasant about any of it, though. It's not annoying or noisy. It's just a puzzle that might not have a solution. The people in the world who should hear this CD are precisely the people who understand why this is a glowing recommendation. Why it's a rare and profound treat to be able to interact with sound and never be given answers about it's meaning to eventually become disillusioned by. Why subjective responses to music can be utterly superfluous distractions. A minor miracle. - Michael Anton Parker
CD-R for $9


HARRIS EISENSTADT - The Soul and Gone (482 Music) This program of solid old/new jazz is the shiny fruit basket of drumkitter Harris Eisenstadt's visit to Chicago to lead a sextet of young but accomplished musicians through the familiar and idiosyncratic twists and turns of his crafty compositions. The lineup: Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), Jeb Bishop (Trombone), Jason Mears (alto sax, b-flat clarinet), Jeff Parker (el. guitar), Jason Roebke (contrabass). At its least interesting, this is hot, generic 60s/90s jazz with the heads and solos we know and love. At its most interesting, it reveals a head full of multi-directional creative impulses planted on Eisenstadt's shoulders. For me, the highlight of the disc is the 15-minute "Posauno Y Schlagwerk > Between a Rock". A Berne-ish collapsing funk theme hooks me into the proceedings early on. A collective round of short-note jabs at the theme gets the blood flowing more. Eisenstadt's precise and expressive drumkit accents create powerful packets of energy and reveal him as a relative newcomer to the fold of elite drum-kit stylists of the current era--Black, Arguelles, Wolleson, Hollenbeck, etc. Adasiewicz's vibraphone sounds great playing hanging chords midway through the piece, and between the vibes vibe and the slow/fast tempo overlays I think of the mighty Claudia Quintet for a while, but things keep changing and the next section has a fascinating passage for vibraphone, electric guitar and drumkit; it's a very mellow, squirrely, and impressionistic sound that strikes my ears as a recent innovation in the jazz vernacular dating back no more than ten or fifteen years.
Alongside Eisenstadt, the most impressive and consistent performance on the disc comes from Jason Roebke, and in this piece it's easy hear that he's a somewhat different breed of musician than the others who's heavily invested in avant-garde contexts aside from this kind of jazz work. He seems to relish an opportunity to work at the fringes of bass technique and introduce edgy timbres and textural concerns. When he start growling, the others wrap around him with a riveting collective improv, offering the multiple layers of parallel activity I love to hear in avant-jazz (think Fonda-Stevens quintet). Another creative departure from conventional jazz forms is "Seed (for Henryk Gorecki)" with its slow and delicate swell to moderately vigorous activity levels over the course of 8 minutes. As a whole, Eisenstadt's project is a good example of a 90s avant-garde jazz aesthetic that takes eclecticism as an axiom, puts a primary emphasis on swing and groove, and makes only passing reference to free jazz as one of many formative elements gleaned from the jazz continuum and beyond. There's a similar spirit to the Vinny Golia Quintet, with a genuine passion for flat-out in-the-pocket jazz in the post-Dolphy and post- Blue Note traditions, balanced with an selective interest in ideas from free improv and academic notationalism. I certainly don't mean to suggest the playing is anywhere near the same level as Golia's unit, but then again, what is?!! The overall approach and quality is in the same ballpark as the Vandermark 5, taking a lot of different angles on jazz and post-jazz possibilities. As traditional soloists, Adasiewicz and Parker may be undistinguished, but the coloration of vibraphone and electric guitar (including extended techniques with subtle feedback, screwing around with the pickups, etc) is very effective in a few passages where they have an orchestral and textural function, and Eisenstadt's compositions generally make fine use of the rich timbral palette he selected for the project and relieve much of the burden on the individual player's to carry the music through their own lines. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $14


MATS/MORGAN BAND - Thanks for Flying With Us (Cuneiform 215) Something happened to the grooves between Bruford's 1979 One of a Kind and 1980 Gradually Going Tornado. They got bigger, bolder, and simpler. It's this merging of fusion and post-disco electro-pop that defines the new Mats/Morgan album, a pure funfest of exuberant, riffing, wailing synth and exuberant pop beats with just enough offbeat accents to keep the Bruford feeling. Exuberance. Yes, that's what Mats/Morgan is all about. This new album will come as a shock to anyone only familiar with the live recordings of their last release entitled "Live", a prog-fusion blowout widely cited as an instant classic for the genre and ample fodder for Morgan Agren's reputation as one of the world's hottest fusion drummers. Although at least one track here, the barnstorming "Proppeller Hast", would fit right in on Live, Agren hardly drops a hint of his prowess on this album. In total contrast to Live, there's no fast, complicated drum fills or dazzling virtuosity to be found anywhere. Instead, the rhythms have a machine-driven, bare bones, propulsive pop feeling. These guys have never attempted to stay within the boundaries of fusion in the first place. They're more concerned with writing songs, whether or not vocals are used. As you'd expect from a Cuneiform release, the human voice only make cameo appearancesare on this release, and that will be good news to anyone who's puzzled over the horrid yet undeniably entertaining ultra-cheese vocal pieces the group has done in the past, especially on Radio Dada and The Music or the Money (disc Mats). There's actually a pretty funny "spoken word" segment on the title track here, and some faux-Northettes female choral vocals to be found.
The first cut, "Sinus", almost literally quotes a huge chunk of a National Health piece with virtually the same great analog synth tones, one of the reference points that's came through strongly on Live too, but with more Bruford-esque rhythms. It's almost like what I can imagine National Health would sound like if they kept going into the 80s and adapted to the electro-pop zeitgeist and phased out the jazzy, intricate style of Pip Pyle. That's only the first cut, though. Most of the album has a really strong 90s sound, and draws a good bit from dance styles like techstep and jungle, all the while featuring Mats Oberg's irrepressible and catchy synth extravaganzas. The group has always been scattered over a wide range of styles, and the hard-edged pop grooves and Larry Fast / Synergy style emphasized on this album have been in their repertoire from the beginning. De-emphasized or absent on this new album is the style they heavily mined based on Zappa's synclavier music, the stop-start manic prog-fusion of Live, and the straight vocal pop numbers. Pared down to very modern, high-tech grooves, the album is very cohesive and focused, with a few smooth ballads to offset the aggressive electro-romps. Aside from the album proper, the disc contains 27 minutes of wildly varied bonus tracks, and here's where you'll find some evidence of Agren's drumkit talents, especially on "Live Neff", which finds acoustic piano and acoustic drumkit tearing it up in the manner of Chick Corea's Acoustic band with a very hot fire lit beneath them. Another bonus track featuring just the core duo, "Alive in Enskede", has a ripping "live jungle" passage from Agren. I was pretty surprised and delighted to hear the final cut "Ivan", by far my favorite of the disc, which captures the sound of one of my favorite albums from the first wave of jazz-inflected post-jungle IDM in the mid-90s, Endemic Void's Equations, with an awesome 70s analog keyboard sound, also calling to mind David Sancious' great solo albums from the late 70s. At 74 minutes, this disc is chock full of goodies for those who can fly with the wacky Swedes and digest their special brand of cheese. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $13


FORGAS BAND PHENOMENA - Soleil 12 (Cuneiform Rune 218) Imagine my surprise to put on this disc of recordings from March, 2005 (live performances from Le Triton in France) and be immediately transported to the familiar violin-led soaring fusion sound of classic Jean-Luc Ponty, which is some of my all-time favorite music. For me, Ponty's work in that period (between 1975 and 1978, to be exact) is one of the untouchable peaks in fusion history, and Forgas Band Phenomena don't scale the same heights of compositional richness or instrumental virtuosity by any stretch, but this is a superb program of music in a style sadly neglected these days and it will be welcomed as warmly by 70s fusion junkies like me as it will be abruptly avoided by others for its unabashed and naive embodiment of the genre's cliches. As it turns out, this material should have the feeling of an earlier era, because it's primarily a reworking of veteran fusion drumkitter Patrick Forgas' pieces from an aborted 1978 album under the same group name.
For this project, Forgas harnessed seven other musicians mostly a generation or two younger than him to finally bring his baby into the world of public documentation after 25 years of neglect and occasional incubation. Unsurprisingly, aspects of 80s and 90s fusion have crept into the music as well, like the occasional use of a hard rock -tinged guitar style that recalls Gongzilla, and some digital keyboards that are my only serious complaint about the disc. Thankfully it's a rare blemish that will not prevent anyone from enjoying this excellent album, but occasionally there's a truly horrible "what were they thinking?" moment of dreadful digital synth cheesiness mixed in with the overall quite nice analog-flavored keyboard work. The three-piece horn section certainly calls to mind some of Billy Cobham's mid-70s work, like Crosswinds or Total Eclipse, and the more laid-back moments of The Eleventh House from the same period, but a comparison with Cobham's largely funk-infused 70s work brings out a crucial aspect of the Forgas Band Phenomena sound: its mellifluous, very non-funk rhythmic feeling (one of the key similarities to the Ponty work mentioned above).
In a way, it strikes me as a very prototypical non-Zeuhl French fusion sound, but I don't know if there's any real substance to that impression. Perhaps these are people who felt a stronger affinity with Claude Debussy than James Brown? The violin-heavy passages on the disc call to mind the sprightly mid-70s folk fusion gems of Flying Island. The mellow, loungy, smooth passages in alternation with driving, energetic passages is another hallmark of mid and late 70s fusion archetypes. Overall, what we have is simple, straighthead fusion based around vigorous rhythm section vamps, solos and unison themes with bright, lush conventional melodies and harmonies, distinguished by its broad orchestral palette and long suites of themes recycled and developed along a familiar post-Mahler arc. Non-avant fusion is a minor presence in the Cuneiform catalog, but this definitely sits aside the past two decades of work by Hugh Hopper and Phil Miller previously documented, and has a similar shade of easy-listening Canterbury along the lines of the softer mid-70s work of Ian Carr's Nucleus. As with all Cuneiform releases, quality is never an issue; it's just a matter of what style of music you like. It may not hold a candle to Ponty's best stuff, but if you like that general fusion sound, this is 70 minutes of polished, somewhat ambitious, and fully realized vintage fusion that cannot fail to delight. - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $13


DJAM KARET - Recollection Harvest (Cuneiform 219) I've been tickled pink by every Djam Karet album I've heard, and this is yet another welcome example of their heavy prog twin-guitar sound that still retains the special feeling of their early classics. In fact, I can hear little fragments on this new album that seem right off Burning the Hard City (I should know--I played that album dozens of times when I was a teenager!), and I think it has as much to do with the signature drumkit style of Chuck Oken as anything else. He's one of the all-time greats of prog drumkit, with a fusion-informed style that jumps out almost as distinctively as Bill Bruford. It's great when a musician has "a thing" that you know and love, really one of the special pleasures of being a fan that ages like fine wine. This is real barnstormer like The Devouring, with that fluid and spacy sound perfectly balanced against a fusiony, raging guitar attack. It's just the ticket for fans of Nelbelnest, Larks/Red and post-Thrak eras of King Crimson, Spaced Out, and other classics of avant-prog with a thick, aggressive, melodic guitar/keyboard style and throbbing, surging, aggressive bass guitar. This is peak Djam Karet and would be as good of an intro to the band as the earlier ones. Recollection Harvest really smokes! In addition to this full new studio album Recollection Harvest, the disc also contains a shorter album called Indian Summer in a totally different style. Actually, I've never heard anything like this from Djam Karet, though I haven't heard their recent spate of self-released discs, so it might not be their first foray into these waters. In the past they used to alternate between a hard-prog style and a space/ambient style, often merging the two wonderfully, but on Indian Summer they're into something mellow and somewhat ambient-oriented, but more pseudo-ethnic-tribal and busy than their well-known beatless deep-space classics Suspension & Displacment and Collaborator. It's a bit like a lighter and brigher O Yuki Conjugate I suppose. I'm rather more excited about the Recollection Harvest part of the release, but I'll have to see if Indian Summer grows on me beyond "very nice". Kudos to Cuneiform for releasing such a great package with two separate albums in an economical and convenient format. This is the 7th Cuneiform release for Djam Karet and I have nothing but praise for all of them! - Michael Anton Parker
CD for $13


NDIO [w/ HUGH HOPPER] - Airback (Cuneiform 216) NDIO (Never Dance in Orange) features Frank van der Kooij on tenor & soprano saxes & bass clarinet, Niels Brouwer on guitars, Robert Jarvis on trombone, Paul Maassen on piano & organ, Hugh Hopper on electric bass & samples and Pieter Bast on drums. Dutch composer and saxist Frank van der Kooij wrote most of the material on this fine disc with two pieces by Hugh Hopper and one by Robert Jarvis. Hopper and van der Kooij have worked together in a couple of bands for the past 16 years. Hopper was the legendary electric bassist for Soft Machine from 'Volume 2' through 'Six', a most influential composer and player. Check out the lengthy article on Hugh in the September issue of The Wire.
Hugh's distinctive fuzz bass opens this wonderful disc, the tune "Big Bombay" is all his. The hypnotic repeating groove that made Soft Machine so magical is also in the center of much of this wonderful offering. The trombone and bass both play that great groove while the soprano sax and wheezing keyboards sail on top. Hugh provides some strange (backwards?) samples which float mysteriously in the mix. On the opening tune. trombonist Robert Jarvis and saxist van der Kooij, both of whom share a date on the Slam label, sound inspired throughout. On "Mr. Barn", Pieter Bast provides some nimble acoustic nylon- string guitar and tasty guitar synth, an instrument often not taken too seriously. Jarvis' "Landscapes" is an elegant work with majestic prog-rock keyboards and superb trombone and tenor sax solos over a fine jazz/blues groove. There are too many fine solos to mention and the saxes, trombones, keyboards and guitars all get their chance to shine on one song or another. Even more-so, it is the exquisite and occasionally engaging writing that really stands out here. What is so nice is that a few of these tunes are laid back and elegantly played with some tasty playing from all members of the sextet. No one needs to show off, with music this fine. - BLG
CD for $13




HISTORIC RECORDINGS, REISSUES & RESTOCKS:


PHAROAH SANDERS With JOE BONNER/MICHAEL WHITE et al - Elevation (Impulse 427602) Elevation, much like his previous Impulse! LP Black Unity, finds Sanders and his group less mindful of clear solos than creating sonic wallpaper in front of which occasional members peak out. The occasional presence of a male vocal chorus threatens to turn the entire effort into new age music, but, as on his breakout Karma, Sanders' whole is better than the sum of its parts. Recommended! ~ John Bush, AMG
CD $12

MICHAEL WHITE With PRINCE LASHA/CECIL McBEE - Land Of Spirit And Light (Impulse 427702) Former violinist for the legendary Fourth Way (sorry, nothing on CD), Michael White is still around and recorded a lovely duo disc with Bill Frisell a few years back. I recall a few fine albums the Mr. White recorded for Impulse in the seventies, as well as his work with Pharoah Sanders.
CD $12

GATO BARBIERI - Chapter Four: Alive In New York (Impulse 427402) As with the first three "Chapters" in this series, this album (whose first issue this is on CD) is easily recommended. Gato Barbieri was frequently heard at his best in the mid-'70s, featuring his very emotional tenor in melodic and highly rhythmic settings. This live set matches Barbieri with multi-instrumentalist Howard Johnson (who on this date plays the unusual triple of fluegelhorn, tuba and bass clarinet) and a strong rhythm section for four extended workouts. ~ Scott Yanow, AMG
CD $12

OLIVER NELSON BIG BAND - Live From Los Angeles 1967 (Impulse 427502)
CD $12

GABOR SZABO - Spellbinder (Impulse 04272; USA)
CD $12


DAVE HOLLAND & BARRE PHILLIPS - Music From Two Basses (ECM 1011) First U.S. CD issue of this classic ECM album from 1971, the label's 11th release overall. Recorded: February 15, 1971, Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwisburg, Germany; David Holland (bass, cello); Barre Phillips (bass).
CD $17


ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH TRIO With EVAN PARKER/PAUL LOVENS - Swinging The Bim [2 CD set] (FMP 114/115; Germany) Featuring Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano, Evan Parker on soprano & tenor saxophone and Paul Lovens on selected & unselected cymbals, drums and singing saw. All music by Parker/Schlippenbach/Lovens Recorded live by Jasper No on November 20, 1998 at BIM-Huis, Amsterdam. Produced by Lovens & Schlippenbach. This has been unavailable for the past few years.
2 CD $34


MARTY KRYSTALL/BUELL NEIDLINGER With CECIL TAYLOR/BILLY HIGGINS - This Way Is West (K2B2 3369) Historic recordings. More info next week.
CD $15



WHEN WE MENTIONED THIS LAST WEEK, WE FORGOT TO MENTION THE TWO 45' SEGMENTS THAT MAKE THIS EDITION SPECIAL!!!...

SUN RA & HIS ARKESTRA /& With ALL STARS: DON CHERRY/LESTER BOWIE/ARCHIE SHEPP/DON MOYE PHILLY JOE JONES et al - East & West Berlin [DVD] (Transparency 171; USA) [NTSC ALL REGION] Two Complete Sets [45' each!] with the Arkestra from East Berlin in 1986 - AND - 53' broadcast concert from the Philharmonie, West Berlin, October 29 1983, featuring the Sun Ra All Stars: Don Cherry, Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Archie Shepp, Lester Bowie, Richard Davis, Clifford Jarvis, Don Moye, Philly Joe Jones; plus two 1986 concerts in East Berlin and a 2' fragment from a French TV broadcast of 1970.
DVD $17



BASTRO [DAVID GRUBBS/BUNDY K BROWN/JOHN McENTIRE] - Antlers: Live 1991 (Blue Chopsticks 14; USA) "During the final year of their existence, Bastro was the power trio of Bundy K. Brown, John McEntire, and David Grubbs. Antlers is an attempt to represent what Bastro was doing in 1991. It represents a period in which Bastro seemed to be changing from show to show, playing intricately constructed instrumentals with utter abandon. Many of these instrumental pieces later morphed into Gastr del Sol songs. Compositions were in flux, with the band soon to follow. These are among its final recordings, but they sound less like death throes than chin scratchings and chargings onward. Antlers consists of cassette recordings made by audience members. It has a rough, blasting-at-you quality that perfectly suits these headlong performances. This enhanced CD also includes live footage of the group in Germany and Holland during their final tour."
CD $14

MEDITATIONS ON MINGUS [V.A.] - Weird Nightmare (Columbia; USA) "For producer Hal Willner's [veteran of wonderfully off-kilter but on-target tributes to Monk, Rota, Weill, and even Disney songs] Charles Mingus project, his central idea was as inspired as it was loony: He even incorporates the amazing instruments invented and designed by another equally maverick composer, Harry Partch, into reinterpretations of Mingus' work. By and large, it works, making Weird Nightmare a strange and wonderful one-off event. There's a central band at work based around bassist Greg Cohen and guitarist Bill Frisell, with guests including Gary Lucas, Bobby Previte, Vernon Reid, Leonard Cohen, Geri Allen, Don Byron, Elvis Costello, Robert Quine, Henry Rollins, Diamanda Galas, Robbie Robertson, Dr. John, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Chuck D! Highlights abound; when Partch's Marimba Eroica is struck during "Pithecanthropus Erectus," the floors of the listener's dwelling may buckle. Elvis Costello's reading of the title song is, well, eerily weird. One special high point is the version of "Gunslinging Bird" where text from Mingus' autobiographical Beneath the Underdog is angrily and righteously declaimed by Chuck D.; it's arguably as pure and forceful as anything he ever accomplished with Public Enemy and makes one wonder why he never pursued this seemingly rewarding path. There are several missteps as well, to be sure. Most egregiously, Keith Richards' sneering condescension on "Oh Lord, Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me," as though he had better things to do, is embarrassing. But eventually, it's simply the gorgeous music of Charles Mingus that carries the day, showing itself more than capable of shouldering the ghost of Harry Partch and the wayward inclinations of its interpreters. Most of the pieces glow in these unusual treatments, and make Weird Nightmare a must for any serious Mingus fan." - Brian Olewnick
CD $13

L STINKBUG [G E STINSON/NELS CLINE/STEUART LIEBIG/SCOTT AMENDOLA] - The Allure Of Roadside Curios (Starlight Furniture 16) Outstanding double electric guitar, electric bass and drums improv quartet of L.A.'s best players. Thought to have been out-of-print, yet we found a handful of copies.
CD $15

BIG MAMA THORNTON - In Europe (Arhoolie 9056; USA)
CD $10

THE SERPENT POWER/TINA & DAVID MELTZER - The Serpent Power/Poet Song (Akarma 053/054; Italy) Reissue of two Vanguard albums on one CD. "The Serpent Power's sole album (self titled, from 1967) is one of those lesser known gems from the San Francisco flower scene. Discovered and planted on Vanguard by ED Denson (Country Joe & the Fish and Fahey manager), their brand of psychedelic folk rock strongly resembles the intoxicating vibes of the Fish: a similar wheezing Farfisa, the occasional harmonica, and exquisite mellow guitar leads (not quite in the Barry Melton league, but that would be asking for too much). Great songs here too, with the epic 13-minute-long 'Endless Tunnel,' an Eastern-tinged acid jam spiced up with an electric banjo, being worth the price of admission alone. After the Serpent Power dissolved, David and Tina Meltzer, the creative force behind the band, recorded one further album for Vanguard. The resulting Poet Song LP from 1969 contains a mix of David's poems backed by music and folk songs sung by his angelic-voiced wife. The intricate arrangements on this grower are by Ed Bogas -- a service this forgotten soundtrack composer and the Bay Area's equivalent to Jack Nitzsche performed for many a SF legend." -- Frank van den Elzen.
CD $12

PUNK ATTITUDE [V.A.]/ DON LETTS dir. - Punk: Attitude [2 DVD set] (Capital Ent 08; USA) 270+ minutes total of: Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones, Black Flag, Patti Smith, The Damned, Dead Kennedys, Slits, NY Dolls, Stooges, MC5, X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie & The Banshees
2 DVD set for $30

GENTLE GIANT - Interview (DRT 357; USA) [2005 remastering, with a previously unreleased bonus live version of "Interview; overseen by Derek Shulman - DRT is his label! Includes "] Generally considered to be the last must-have recording from these progressive rock giants. Recorded at a frenetic pace, the band had the impossible task of topping their classic, Free Hand. While they didn't surpass the success of previous efforts, they did continue to propel their unique brand of complex music into surprising new directions. Interview is actually a concept album centering on a fictitious interview based upon the music business. There are the typical complex harmonies and intricate musical passages, but the real progress is in the group's expanded sound, thanks in large part to Kerry Minnear's stellar keyboard innovations. Although the songs are not as memorable as those on Free Hand, there isn't a weak one in the bunch, with the reggae-styled "Give It Back" being a standout. Unfortunately progressive rock was nearing its initial run as a popular form of music, forcing most prog bands to either adapt to the changing times or simply fade away. Unfortunately, Gentle Giant tried their hand at pop for a short and embarrassing time before disbanding. Gentle Giant's legacy began with their eponymously titled debut and ended with this one. Of note, The Beat Goes On label remastered and reissued this recording, including the excellent Free Hand, onto one CD, making it the best choice for both quality and value. - Robert Taylor, AMG
CD $13



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DMG RECOMMENDED CALENDAR FOR SEPTEMBER 23RD & BEYOND...


The Downtown Music Gallery Free In-Store Series Continues with/on


This Sunday September 25th at 6pm:
DEE POP & RODRIGO AMADO DUO!
Drum wiz & Clean Feed saxist perform a rare duo set!


Next Sunday October 2nd at 6pm:
RON ANDERSON solo guitar & oud!
Guitar great from PAK, RonRuins & The Molecules!


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TONIC is located at 107 Norfolk St. (bet. Rivington & Delancey Sts.), around the corner from the F train at Delancey. Here are some recommended sets for this week:


Sat Sept 24th at 8pm- one set only Peter Brotzmann Trio with Eric Revis & Nasheet Waits! Tenor Sax colossus returns!


Sun Sept 25th - at 8 & 10pm - 2 sets- Shelley Hirsch, Kazu Uchihashi, Billy Martin, Ned Rothenberg & Stomu Takeishi! All-star downtown improv quintet with Kazuhisa Uchihashi, one Japan's finest guitarists! 11:30 - Oren Bloedow & Jennifer Charles!


Tues Sept 27th at 8pm- TONY CONRAD!


Wed Sept 28th- 8pm - Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille & Lotte Ancher! You no doubt know the great Ms. Crispell (piano) and Mr. Cyrille (drums). Ms. Ancher is an equally great saxist!


Fri Sept 30th- 8pm - Billy Martin & Socket w/ Cyro Baptista (percussion), Shelley Hirsch (vocal), Min Xiao Fen (pipa /ruan), Charles Burnham (violin), Calvin Weston (drums) & Shahzad Ismaily (drums / guitar) plus guests - always a blast!


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The Stone is located at the NW corner of Avenue C & 2nd Street
Performances take place at 8 & 10pm from Tuesday - Sunday nights
There are no advance tickets, first come, first served, there is no phone
There is no food or beverage served, just a serious listening environment
Admission for each set is $10. unless otherwise indicated
Check out the website for The Stone at thestonenyc.com

September 2005 is curated by Roy Campbell, Jr. Here's the rest of September's schedule:


Fri. & Sat., Sept. 23rd & 24th, 8 & 10 p.m. each night: John Coltrane birthday celebration, w/ Roy Campbell, Jr. (trumpets, flugelhorn, flute)/ Louie Belogenis (tenor saxophone/ Andrew Bemkey (piano, clarinet)/ Reggie Workman (bass)/ Rashied Ali (drums) - $20 for 1 set, $30 for both sets


Sun., Sept. 25th, 8 & 10 p.m: JOHN LINDBERG'S 'Winter Birds' CD release celebration John Lindberg (bass) w/ Baikida Carroll (trumpet)/ Steve Gorn (bansuri flute, soprano saxophone, clarinet)/ Susie Ibarra (drums, perc)!


Tues., Sept. 27th, 8 p.m: Ehran Elisha (drums) w/ Haim Elisha (piano)/ Sam Bardfeld (violin)/ David Bindman (tenor saxophone)/ Roy Campbell, Jr. (trumpets, flugelhorn, flute)/ Ken Filiano (bass) (group called Kinetic Music)

Tues., Sept. 27th, 1O p.m: Matt Lavelle (trumpet) w/ Roy Campbell, Jr. (trumpets, flugelhorn, flute)/ Lewis "Flip" Barnes (trumpet)/ William Parker (bass, misc. instruments)/ Michael Thompson (drums) (group called Trumpet Nemesis)


Wed., Sept. 28th, 8 p.m: Roy Campbell, Jr. (trumpets, flugelhorn, flute), w/ Daniel Carter (reeds, brass)/ William Parker (bass, misc. instruments)/ Rashid Bakr (drums (group called Other Dimensions in Music)

Wed., Sept. 28th, 1O p.m: Roy Campbell, Jr. (trumpets, flugelhorn, flute), w/ Steve Swell (trombone)/ Sabir Mateen (reeds, flute)/ Hilliard Greene (bass)/ Klaus Kugel (drums)


Thurs., Sept. 29th [Roy's b'day], 8 p.m: Roy Campbell, Jr. (trumpets, flugelhorn, flute), w/ Andrew Bemkey (piano, clarinet)/ Chris Sullivan (bass)/ Michael Thompson (drums) (group called TAZZ), special guests Steve Dalachinsky & Tyrone Henderson (spoken word)

Thurs., Sept. 29th, 1O p.m: Sabir Mateen (reeds, flute) w/ [?]


Fri., Sept. 3Oth, 8 p.m: Newman Taylor Baker (solo drums & perc)

Fri., Sept. 3Oth, 1O p.m: Rob Brown (alto saxophone) w/ Steve Swell (trombone)/ Joe Morris (bass)/ Luther Gray (drums)


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Click this link for upcoming FREE INSTORES at DOWNTOWN MUSIC GALLERY [NYC]


Click this link for upcoming events at THE STONE [NYC]

Click this for upcoming events at BOWERY POETRY CLUB [NYC]

Click this link for events at TONIC [NYC]