The first studio album from UŽUPIS began as a way to record some of my hand-built instruments which I call Wollesonics. I built these instruments specifically for an all percussion production of Macbeth directed by master magician Teller. To accompany the "Weird Sisters", I built a 10-foot “Diddley Bow” out of music wire, 2 x 4’s and styrofoam ice buckets. I built a zither with exposed threaded rods to give Lady Macbeth a ghostly soundscape while she washes her bloody hands. I built a “Slide Vibe“ that bends pitches by dipping metal bars into water to sonically portray Macbeth's dissent into madness. In addition to the Wollesonics, I brought my set of 15 large sheep bells I acquired from the Campanacci Floris bell making family of Tonara, Sardinia.
We came into the famed Figure 8 studios with no set songs. The forms and textures and songs grew out of the instruments. Crack engineer and sound swami Phil Weinrobe experimented with hydrophones, electronics and triggers that blended extremely well with the Wollesonics. With Will Shore’s intuitive, sensitive production and masterful vibe playing and Dalius Naujo’s unconventional poetic drumming, we ended up with more than enough music to make DIRT -the premiere full length album from UŽUPIS!
- Kenny Wollesen
1. SLIDE INTO NOTHING
2. RAIN CAROUSEL
3. DAL LIUS 04:34
4. WEIRD SISTERS
5. TIME AND TIDE FLOW WIDE
6. STREET RIDERS
7. DRAMA IN UŽUPIS STREET
8. CRYSTAL SUBWAY SCENE
9. COMPASS
10. MALADROXIA
11. PAST LIFE
All songs by Užupis
WILL SHORE - electric vibraphone | vibraphone | marimba
Sasha Dobsonpresents her authentic self on Girl Talk featuring Peter Bernstein,
out September 10, 2021
“Dobson has the genes and a strong musical foundation to make powerful, uplifting music”
— NPR Music
“An eminently listenable voice: sensuous but diffident, and devoid of showy pretense”
— The New York Times
“[Sasha Dobson] has jazz in her genes”
— San Francisco Chronicle
Singer, composer, master lyricist and multi-instrumentalist Sasha Dobson has performed across the world as both a leader and first-call collaborator. The stylistic chameleon has released projects with such defining voices as Norah Jones, Chris Byars, Don Was, Jay Lane, Jesse Harris, Mikael Jorgensen and Charlie Burnham; she has composed with Bill Murray, opened for Willie Nelson and toured with Neil Young. Now, with the release of Girl Talk, Dobson issues her most personal recording to date. Ten tracks of original compositions and enduring favorites feature a core trio of Neal Miner on bass, Dred Scott and Kenny Wollesen on drums and album guest artist Peter Bernstein on guitar — and unveil Dobson’s intrinsic fascination with spontaneity and the resonant bebop tradition. Girl Talk will be available as a digital download, CD and vinyl LP on September 10, 2021.
“Over the years, I developed into a guitarist and songwriter,” says the New Yorker, “But in my heart and soul, I am a jazz singer and improviser. And this album represents something essential that I needed to do.”
Dobson’s wit resonates across her phrasing. Raised inside the music by her father, pianist Smith Dobson who played for two decades with Bobby Hutcherson, as well as Art Pepper and Red Holloway, and her mother, highly sought vocalist Gail Dobson, a young Dobson internalized nuances of the music early in her artistic development. That active listening and sense of time has allowed her to craft a self-renewing career among countless diverse expressions, but she always returns to the music that’s a part of her.
“I’ve loved playing in diverse projects as a guitarist, drummer and vocalist, but I am always listening to jazz when I am home. That’s my happy place,” she says.
Sasha Dobson by John Fell
Now she’s released her own. A fiercely receptive interactivity emerges on Girl Talk at every turn, particularly between Dobson and Bernstein. “There’s something about working with Pete that just sparked a flame,” says Dobson. “I felt motivated to push forward through these ideas — kind of what I set out to do in New York as a jazz singer and as an artist.”
Engineered by Colin Monacs and Andy Taub, and mastered to digital and vinyl by Vadim Camby and Bill Scibbe, respectively, Girl Talk came together in two sessions with Dobson at the production helm. Written between the band’s first studio date before the pandemic hit, and their second, scheduled during the lockdown, Dobson original “Better Days” features Wollesen on drums and spotlights her sophisticated concept of harmony, master-level song interpretation and deep connection to the blues no matter which feel she’s channeling in the moment. Throughout “You’re the Death of Me,” another of Dobson’s originals, she and Bernstein sit in a groove together, buoying each other from one phrase to the next.
The album’s title track showcases Dobson’s effervescent, at times wry sense of humor as well as her sacred connection with longtime collaborator and close friend, singer-songwriter Norah Jones who recorded backing vocals to the Neal Hefti tune remotely during the lockdown. Despite the artists recording their parts at different locations and times, Dobson’s lock-in with Jones reflects their intuitive pacing and phrasing as well as Dobson’s expert storytelling. “The lyrics are a little quirky and subversive,” she says, “a little counter, counterculture [laughs].”
“The Great City” crept into Dobson’s consciousness during the lockdown. At a time when she witnessed New York gutted from the inside, she meditated on its pain and resilience, electing to film a music video as a tribute to the city she loves so much. Bernstein proffers a swinging statement on the Curtis Lewis composition, while Dobson’s signature improvising follows the head out. Miner’s presence on Girl Talk extends beyond the low end. Apart from a strong pulse and melodic foundation, his contributions include arrangements for “Sweet and Lovely,” “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” and “Autumn Nocturne.”
“Neal is one of my best friends of all time,” says Dobson, who connected profoundly with the bassist-composer in Manhattan’s West Village when she was 18. The two have been playing together for more than 20 years. Their hookup during live performances radiates from the bandstand and pulses across Girl Talk whose title track Miner introduced to Dobson. “After years of collaboration,” says Dobson, “we are one and the same when it comes to feel, tempos, arrangements and repertoire.”
Sasha Dobson by Megan Schlow
Dobson feels fortunate to have world-renowned Brazilian percussionist and good friend Mauro Refosco contribute nuances of mood on “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” and “These Boots Were Made for Walking,” along with Steven Bernstein and Ian Hendrickson Smith. “Mauro is the cat,” says Dobson, who frequently plays off his choices and against elastic grooves he pulls and bends and integrates from countless regions across the world.
Apart from two dates in the studio with her core trio, the pandemic compelled Dobson to lean heavily on tracking as she added personnel and prepared the album for mixing — a practice the sonic purist never thought she’d engage, but one that offered unexpected perks, including vital remote contributions from her brother, vibraphonist and multi-instrumentalist Smith Dobson, based in San Francisco. The sibling-artists were able to collaborate for the first time. “He’s an incredible musician and one of my favorite drummers,” says Dobson, “but he’s also a chameleon like me.”
“All the records I’ve made in the past — under my name and as collaborations with other artists — have been an explosive new learning experience,” she says, “but the one thing I haven’t done in my 20-year career so far is record what I can do, and what I was raised to do.” For Dobson, it sure is good to be home.
With her high-quality trio with Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen, Sylvie Courvoisier presents her eleventh album on Intakt Records: Intakt CD 300. In both her playing and her composition she shows neoclassical influences mixed with European improvised music and the experimental nonconformismof the New York downtown scene. The nine pieces on D'AGALA are dedicated to people who admired and influenced Courvoisier. The title tune is for pianist Geri Allen, "one of three dedicatees who passed away as this June 2017 recording was in preparation – the others being guitarist John Abercrombie and French politician, women’s rights advocate and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil. Two pieces are for sculptors, Martin Puryear who merges organic and geometric forms, and Louise Bourgeois. On “Bourgeois’s Spiders,” Courvoisier is all over the piano – plucking or strumming strings inside, or playing with one hand inside and one on the keys, or rattling around on the metal frame. Sometimes the band sounds like a trio of percussionists; they’re that rhythmically acute", writes Kevin Whitehead in the liner notes and adds: "Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier sometimes treats it like a playground".
Modern Lore finds Lage playfully flipping the script he followed on his acclaimed 2016 Mack Avenue debut, Arclight. That album — produced, like Modern Lore, by Lage’s friend and collaborator, the singer-songwriter Jesse Harris — was his first trio set on electric guitar and found Lage inspired by the sounds and the attitude of the freewheeling, pre-bebop jazz era, when, as he puts it, “country music and jazz and swing were in this weird wild-west period.” This time he incorporates the sensibility, if not the outright sound, of early rock and roll, a similarly hybrid form driven by rhythm, personality and a passion for the electric guitar.
Orphic Machine is an ambitious project from clarinetist/composer/bandleader Ben Goldberg, which is arguably a way you could describe any Goldberg project, but he reaches both further out and further back to find his chief motivation this time. Instead of taking his primary cues from a music beacon like Steve Lacy, Thelonious Monk, or even Bob Dylan and Sebastian Bach, Goldberg found inspiration from an old college professor back at Brandeis University in the late ’70’s.
Back then, poet Allen Grossman taught a course on “The Representation of Experience” which introduced Goldberg to the idea of thinking about things unconventionally. Those ideas planted seeds in the young Goldberg that never left him, but also became more poignant during a recent period of deeper reflection. That’s when he decided to revisit Grossman from both his personal recollections and Grossman’s book of maxims The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers — a sort of poetry about the role of poetry in mankind — to craft a set of music around these powerful precepts.
Since this is an album built around philosophical poetry and Goldberg is an instrumentalist, it presented a special challenge to Grossman’s former student; though one he’s not unaccustomed to facing. It’s the way he met the challenge that makes Orphic Machine (on sale from BAG Production Records/Royal Potato Family) succeed as a musical tribute to the ideas he encountered over thirty-five years ago. First, he needed Grossman’s verses to be recited in such a way that the words and the melodies blend into a seamless single being. Enter violinist Carla Kihlstedt, whose breathy, lithe delivery brings to life the words, singing them as if it were another instrument.
For this endeavor, in fact, there are an assemblage of exceptional musicians but knowing Goldberg’s career, he clearly picked them because his deep familiarity with them and trust in them, another key ingredient that makes this abstract idea convert into concrete results. Joining Goldberg’s clarinet and Kihlstedt’s violin and vocals are Ron Miles (trumpet), Rob Sudduth (tenor sax), Myra Melford (piano), Nels Cline (electric guitars), Kenny Wollesen (vibes), Greg Cohen (bass) and Ches Smith (drums). Goldberg knows exactly how to deploy all this talent at his disposal, where everyone gets solos but it never feels like they are the variety; it’s all part of the overall fabric of the music. Often more prominent is how, in using jazz and classical music arrangement techniques, they work together to form the complex character of each of Goldberg’s compositions, each of which slices across musical boundaries in forming mini-suites on every track.
Take, for instance, “Immortality,” beginning with Cohen’s ruminative bass figures, segueing into a soft march to match Kihlstedt’s floating recitals, and a chamber sequence sandwiched a rock shuffle that thanks to Cline’s rhythm guitar sounds not too unlike the Rolling Stone’s “Beast of Burden.” Gradually, a dominant note emerges, seemingly from Wollesen’s vibes and gets increasingly insistent as one by one everybody joins in playing it to bring the song to a rousing conclusion.
For most albums, that would be the apogee, but several other tracks are just as aspiring. “Reading” is launched by just a handful of sung poetry, followed by Cohen’s own interpretation of the phrases on bass, and some crafty layering of clarinet, sax, trumpet and violin and vibraphone followed by a swinging solo turn by Melford. The other players return with the meticulously weaved score, a perfect balance of jazz and avant chamber music. Cline’s menacing guitar lurks just behind the front line, embedding yet another element into an eclectic mixture. “Care,” at least as it begins, is a pretty folk strain which suits Kihlstedt’s voice rather well. A syncopated motif led by Smith’s pliant rhythms makes up a key part of an arrangement perfectly fit the elegant, sophisticated melody that unfolds. That would be plenty good enough for this performance but Cline breaks out with some stinging blues phraseology just as Kihlstedt completes her final stanza.
The whole package of these ten tunes culminates into the title song. After a delicate piano intro by Melford, Kihlstedt’s airy voice suddenly appears out of nowhere, repeating the line “The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings,” which may appear weird in print but the ingenuity lies in Goldberg fashioning music around these and other Grossman aphorisms in such a way that they don’t sound weird at all…and even makes perfect sense sometimes put in this context. The song proceeds in a quiet, almost chamber music manner until Cline’s signature Nordic rage takes over more than nine minutes in, leading a circular figure that recalls (but does not mimic) the extended coda of the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” It puts a raucous exclamation point on the album, a release that seemed to be building up and lurking for the entire project. And yet, totally unexpected.
Allen Grossman, by the way, passed away just last year. Orphic Machine is a testament to the immortality of forward-thinking ideas that keep the soul of its originator alive after the body has passed. It’s also testament that a part of Grossman remains alive in Goldberg, who has sublimely assimilated so many disparate influences, and is able to distill them into a product he projects through his own, kaleidoscopic lens.
