By Steve Gijssels A quick update on new solo clarinet albums. We try to keep track of what’s happening out there, and offering you this list of possibly interesting albums will already be the first step. Our latest collective overview already dates from a 2014, which does not mean that we did not review solo … Read more
Florian Arbenz – Conversations #1 (2021) **** About a year ago Swiss drummer and composer Florian Arbenz released the first of his planned dozen “Conversations” recordings. Conversations #1 with Brazilian guitarist Nelson Veras and American trumpeter Hermon Mehari. Arbenz’s CV features tours with Greg Osby & Dave Liebman, and a duo recording with Osby from … Read more
By Eyal Hareuveni German experimental guitarist and luthier Hans Reichel (1949-2011) invented in the mid-eighties of the daxophone, a single wooden blade – the tongue, not longer than 330 mm and no wider than 30 mm and no deeper than 5 mm – attached to a tripod and connected to contact microphone(s) and played with … Read more
And we did not review all his output. Today and the following days, we’re giving you an update. … but let’s start with the beginning, and that means literally back to the early days of his career as a leader … By Steve Gijssels Joe McPhee – Black Is the Color (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2021) … Read more
By Gary Chapin Flow Trio & Joe McPhee – Winter Garden (ESPDisk, 2021) The liner notes for this one explore the beginnings of “free jazz” and namecheck Guiseppei Logan’s eponymous 1964 ESP album. It’s an apt shout out because listening to Winter Garden I felt it was almost a platonic ideal of a free jazz … Read more
By Kenneth Blanchard Ken Vandermark is a virtuoso on at least two instruments. One is the saxophone. Two is the impossible integration device. The various Vandermark 5 recordings were certainly instrumental in the ontogeny of my ear for jazz. Each V5 recording gave me something that I could hear and comprehend, as well as something … Read more
By Paul Acquaro It was a windy, warm mid-summer day when I sat down with a saxophonist Jose Lencastre in the concrete amphitheater of the Gulbenkian gardens in Lisbon. We talked about his music, the flowering Lisbon scene, and his new baby, who was – at the time – about the same size of his … Read more
By Lee Rice Epstein First thing first, given this audience tends to prefer physical media, inarguably digital is the right, best solution for this release. Yes, inarguably. Here’s why: the last major group performance recorded before 1973, The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor or Nuits De La Fondation Maeght, Vols. 1–3, is one set split … Read more
Cellist Guilherme Rodrigues, from Lisbon, has been living in Berlin for six years, developing musical partnerships with musicians across intersecting scenes. His simultaneous roles find him a part of Lisbon’s Creative Sources Recordings record label, musical director of Berlin’s Hosek Contemporary Art Gallery, and member of the Berlin based Reanimation Orchestra, among many other activities. … Read more
By Matty Bannond 23 billion kilometers away from Earth, something is communicating with humankind. It sends photos of our watery planet. It transmits data about the space beyond the Sun’s heliosphere. And it has inspired four young musicians in Leipzig to create an album of startling emotional depth that, like the Voyager 1 space probe, … Read more