Monday, November 28, 2016

Nat Birchall - Creation / Guiding Spirit / Akhenaten (2016) 3 CD


The music of Nat Birchall joins with a long-flowing conversation in jazz. His chosen tongue is that of the spiritualised musical discourse whose vital source can be found in the sacred testaments of John Coltrane, and which was channelled most directly by his fellow travellers Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and his wife Alice. Many others followed where Coltrane led, giving voice in music to the esoteric renewal of the soul and mind that lent spiritual strength to the black counterculture, and complemented the political radicalism of the late 1960s and 1970s.

This rich vein of spirit music has rarely been tapped by British jazz musicians, and Birchall is one of the few to have been drawn to it with the conviction of heart that it demands. For these are the sonic and spiritual spaces where the colossi of an earlier age declaimed and confessed with sacrificial passion, from within the flames of revolution. 

Ultimately, it has been the sonic pathways offered by jazz that have provided Birchall with the clearest way to channel the resonances of the higher heights, wherefrom timeless musical messages might be revealed. 'It seems to me that's it's the most direct way of tuning in to this higher source. That music seems to me to display this connection to whatever this higher source, this higher energy, might be. It seems to connect to it the most, more than other music. You can hear it in other musics to a certain degree sometimes, but this seems to be almost purely of that nature. That's what really motivates me the most.'

All music is a spiritual communion - it is a talking in tongues, a present conversation with the past and the future, a dance with technology, a branch held out to a stranger. It speaks to the old and the young in a language that is beyond language, it expresses and elicits emotion and thought at once, it is both bodily and mental, noise and silence, intention and accident: it is the dissolution of opposites, the fleeting noise made eternal prayer, the transubstantiation of spirit into sound.

Music is the expression of unity, in which difference is both accepted and resolved, and from which a mended world might be born. To make music is, as Roland Kirk observed, to talk with the spirits. We are lucky that the music of Nat Birchall allows us to hear the sounds of their world once more.

Akhenaten (2016)

Guiding Spirit (2016)

Creation (2016)



Randy Kaye Quintet (feat. Enrico Rava) - Brooklyn 1967 May 24th (Tears for a Year Gone By) [PHILOLOGY 2016] 2 CD


Un documento di valore storico assoluto: non si può definire in altro modo il doppio CD che la Philology pubblica a nome del batterista Randy Kaye, entrato negli annali del jazz soprattutto grazie alla sua lunga collaborazione con un polistrumentista avventuroso come Jimmy Giuffre.

Nato nel 1947 e scomparso il 2008, Kaye suonò anche con il clarinettista Perry Robinson e il contrabbassista David Izenzon, con i quali costituì lo Uni Trio, con il vibrafonista Bobby Naughton, la vocalist Sheila Jordan e poi con i francesi André Jaume e Remi Charmasson. Durante una jam ebbe pure l’occasione di suonare accanto a Jimi Hendrix. L’album si intitola “Brooklyn 1967, May 24th: Tears For A Year Gone By” e vede riunito attorno a Kaye un notevole gruppo formato da Enrico Rava, all’epoca attivissimo sulla scena jazzistica newyorkese più innovativa, alla tromba, dal sassofonista Joel Peskin (che si ascolta anche al clarinetto basso), dal pianista inglese Peter Lemer e dal contrabbassista Steven Tintweiss (collaboratore di Abert Ayler e di altri uomini del free jazz).

I nastri delle registrazioni date alle stampe dalla Philology sono rimasti chiusi in una cassetto per decenni e riportate alla luce grazie al figlio di Randy Kaye, Justin: ora tutti possono finalmente ascoltare una musica dinamica, intensa, specchio di un periodo storico in cui il jazz era una musica in costante evoluzione, viva e pulsante. Note di copertina di Enrico Rava!! 90 minuti di musica su 2 cd.

Disc 1
01. Apricot Lady (feat. Enrico Rava) 13:54
02. Pretty Sweet (feat. Enrico Rava) 15:45
03. Tears for a Year Gone By (feat. Enrico Rava) 13:56

Disc 2
01. Laughter (feat. Enrico Rava) 13:34
02. What Little Girls Are Made Of (feat. Enrico Rava) 17:53
03. To Angel with Love (feat. Enrico Rava) 9:41

Randy Kaye, drums
Steven Tintweiss, bass
Peter Lerner, piano
Joel Peskin, tenor sax & bass clarinet
Enrico Rava, trumpet



Pretty Sweet