Thursday, July 13, 2017
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Shelly Berg & David Finck - The Deep (CHESKY RECORDS 2017)
The duo album has tremendous lineage throughout Jazz history and on Chesky Records. The Deep adds another timeless pairing with Shelly Berg and David Finck complimenting each other on fourteen stunning new cuts, many of which were improvised on the spot. We are hearing them react to each other and create in real time with no discussion other than with their instruments, showcasing a lifetime of masterfully honed skill and experience. That this improvised material works so well with the standards they chose is further testament to the musicianship of Berg and Finck.
GRAMMY Nominated Shelly Berg is widely known for his collaborations with vocalists. He has performed, recorded, or arranged for Gloria Estefan, Patti Austin, Bobby McFerrin, Kurt Elling, Michael Feinstein, Renée Fleming, Gregory Porter, Aretha Franklin, Tierney Sutton, Janelle Monáe, Queen Latifa, Lorraine Feather, Monica Mancini, Rita Moreno, Ricky Martin, Kevin Spacey, Dionne Warwick, Carmen Bradford, and many more. Shelly is also the music director of The Jazz Cruise and maintains a busy, worldwide schedule of jazz festival and club performances.
Music can only be described with words, but for David Finck, music is a language all its own. He has played and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Aretha Franklin, Sinead O'Connor, Natalie Cole, Rod Stewart, Herbie Hancock, Ivan Lins, Al Jarreau, Tony Bennett, Paquito D'Rivera, George Michael, Rosemary Clooney and Andre Previn, to name just a few. Over the years, David has become one of the most sought-after musicians in Manhattan, equally revered for his work in jazz, popular, Brazilian and classical music. He's bridged musical diversity through his skills -- but even more so through his ability to hear music as language in an almost literal sense.
Part of the Chesky Binaural + Series, all recorded with a single microphone, the band appears right before you with this spacious, lush and multi-dimensional recording. Now headphone users will hear the same three-dimensional sound and imaging as audiophiles have for the past 25 years with Chesky Recordings. Also these new Binaural+ Series albums capture even more spatial realism for the home audiophile market, bringing you one step closer to the actual event. You will hear some of the most natural and pure music ever recorded.
01. Fellini's Waltz 05:39
02. Solar 02:32
03. For Gunther 06:37
04. Dindi 08:00
05. For John Lewis 02:26
06. Peri's Scope 04:53
07. Why Did I Choose You? 05:11
08. Glacier Lake 03:43
09. 3rd World 03:42
10. Whistling Away The Dark 06:04
11. Lunar 02:32
12. If You Never Came To Me 05:52
13. The Deep 04:20
14. Just You Just Me 05:13
HDtracks: http://bit.ly/2tQnEpL
iTunes: http://apple.co/2tp1ium
Amazon: http://amzn.to/2tZGMSP
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Fink - Fink's Sunday Night Blues Dubs (2017)
1. Hour Golden (FSNBDUB) 06:53
2. Black Stetson (FSNBDUB) 09:14
3. Little Bump (FSNBDUB) 05:01
4. Hard To See You Happy (FSNBDUB) 04:32
5. Cold Stetson (FSNBDUB) 04:39
‘Fink’s Sunday Night Blues Dubs’ Out Now -
R’COUP’D / Stream / Download: https://fink.lnk.to/fnbdYO
Listen to the official playlist: http://fink.lnk.to/playlist
Follow Fink -
Facebook: http://found.ee/fink-fb
Twitter: http://found.ee/fink-tw
Soundcloud: http://found.ee/fink-sc
Spotify: http://found.ee/fink-sp
Peter Evans / Agustí Fernández / Mats Gustafsson - A Quietness of Water (NOT TWO RECORDS 2017) - A Quietness of Water (NOT TWO RECORDS 2017)
On the album’s first cut, “Once in a Rented Room,” Evans’ trumpet sounds like an Egyptian mizmar, a euphonium, a wounded animal, warning sirens. When he emits a hellish growl, one fears it may be, in fact, a howl from one’s own unconscious primal depths. Evans, at once, sounds like an air raid siren and a dive bombing kamikaze. He hums into his trumpet like a kazoo. He tongues the mouthpiece. He plays the spit collecting in the tubes. He holds a note past normal human capacity while its microtonal changes mess with our desire for resolution. And that’s just Evans. Fernandez pounds the piano keys occasionally, but mostly he is inside the piano, rending it like an industrial combine at a metal recycling plant. Gustafsson puffs, grunts, and desperately inhales and exhales through his stops.
Next, on “Persistent Hope,” Fernandez’s eerie scrapings remind us a haunted house. Gustafsson woo-wooo-wooos like a ghost. Evans’s trumpet whirls like a Hammond organ with a Leslie speaker playing the soundtrack for an old silent movie. Then things really get weird. The sax and trumpet snarl at each other until an entire angry animal kingdom wakes: elephants roar, zebras whinny, monkeys whoop and screech. For a moment, things calm down, yet soon enough the whole haywire jungle machine goes nuts again. There’s an end-of-the-world bedlam in the guts of Fernandez’ piano. Gustafsson sobs and wails and moans. Evans feeds back like a guitar flung in front of an overdriven Marshall stack.
“I Speak to Hear,” the third track, puts us in the mind of a gentle rain, at first, then, after a bang like a gunshot, Gustafsson whoops and hollers, thwump-thwump-thwacking percussively. Together he and Fernandez beep-beep-flurp-squawk. Evans overblows his trumpet. It squeals like he’s letting air out of a pinched balloon. He plays long, lippy, rising notes, makes kissy noises, and plates saucy smorgasbords of sound. Gustafsson’s playing alternately sounds like an upright bass plucked pizzicato, or like his stops have transmuted into bongos. Evans veers from sounding like a Theremin to blowing through a mouthpieceless trumpet, pistoning the valves, whistling, and choo-chooing.
On the fourth song, “Thoughts,” named after a tiny Robert Creeley poem — “Am I dying? / I am beautiful. / Either way.” — the trumpet and the piano sound, surprisingly, like a trumpet and a piano until the song begins to have too many simultaneous disquieting thoughts. They race and zoom. Gustafsson is a fog horn; Evans, an ocean liner sounding an alarm, which turns into thick static. Fernandez flogs the piano, which refuses to give up the ghost, even when it sounds like a downed powerline wildly jetting and sparking in the icy street. Gustafsson’s rather lovely, breathy solo transforms into thwumping and yelling as if he’s frightened by a nightmare. Evans blows through the trumpet which discovers it is a flute, whale song, a flock of ducks being mass murdered, and the suction tool at the dentist’s.
The final song, “A Quietness of Water,” finds Gustafsson sounding almost like a cello section. Fernandez’s piano plinks like an autoharp or a hammered dulcimer or sprung springs. Evans’s breath through the trumpet is white noise, which for a moment pierces like an oboe, then turns into a pervert’s heavy breathing into the phone, a suitcase dragged across Berber carpet, a NASA radio signal fizzling before the crew is lost, a fire alarm, a Tour de France ambulance, a teakettle at the boil . . .
As I listened again and again to A Quietness of Water, I noticed how often Evans reminded me of the flute section in the second movement of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, and how the trio, with all its manic bravura, suggests the entirety of an orchestra. There are emotional swarms that leave the imagination reeling, dark dramatic swells, trilling notes that float above the rest, hectic conflicts as if a violin section were bowing tremolo, and rumbles from bass drums like a dark night of the soul descending. There is vigor and joy; anguish and ambition. There are rude, blatting raspberries, terrifying explosions of sound, and an epic sweep.
Which is to say, A Quietness of Water is, finally, beautiful.
A Quietness of Water tantalizes us with its strangeness and its teasing refusals to satisfy what we thought we were supposed to expect—or even want. Evans, Fernandez, and Gustafsson wield a variety of extended techniques, playing their instruments in untraditional, unconventional ways. It isn’t so much that they are playing jazz as they play the trumpet, the saxophone, and the piano for all they’re worth. They ignore, or transcend, the expected uses not only of their instruments but of their breath and bodies. They smash the iconic twists and turns of the jazz tune. They are not producing “special effects”; this is just the way they play. It is how they say what they must say. Their songs exist outside plot structures. Their music develops circuitously, like thinking does, and when these three think together, things get too complicated for even a battalion of critics and therapists to unravel. This is pugnacious music. It affects its listener physically, physiologically. The song is an arena; the playing an event. Like all great music, it rewards a listener who listens carefully and often. It is a new translation of the language of “jazz” that requires immersion to develop fluency.
Robert Creeley wondered, on a rainy day, “What am I to myself / that must be remembered, / insisted upon / so often?” A Quietness of Water asks equally existential questions. It poses problems about the nature of our desire for jazz and the ways we define it. It joins a profound improvisatory conversation that is unceasing. This is not music to “enjoy.” It defies usual satisfactions. It provides no rest for our perturbed spirits. This is jazz as experience—as pathos. I don’t know if there are aesthetic categories to judge whether the music or the playing are “good” or “bad,” but Evans, Fernandez, and Gustafsson leave me thinking that the music they make is beautiful because of the sublime ways they just make it up.
(review courtesy of Rick Joines and freejazzblog.org)
1. Once In A Rented Room (11:40)
2. Persistent Hope (10:28)
3. I speak To Hear (10:10)
4. Thoughts (12:19)
5. A Quietness Of Water (12:00)
Peter Evans – trumpet
Agustí Fernández – piano
Mats Gustafsson – sax
Recorded September 17, 2012 at Garnison7 Studio, Vienna, Austria
Mixed July 21, 2013 at FCM Studio, Barcelona
Titles inspired by Robert Creeley
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Cene Resnik Watch for Dogs Trio - Shades of Colors (NOT TWO RECORDS 2017)
01. Shades of colors
02. Kraljeva slika
03. Kosovelovo domotožje
04. Zemlja (Suite of Crngrob)
05. Volcano — The Steamer
06. Thieves came quietly
07. Agitación natural
08. Satellites
09. Articulation complete
10. Conversations that never stop
Cene Resnik – tenor saxophone
Giovanni Maier – double bass
Zlatko Kaučič – drums, cymbals
Brötzmann / Swell / Nilssen-Love - Live in Tel Aviv (NOT TWO RECORDS 2017)
1. The Greasy Grind
2. Ticklish Pickle
Steve Swell – trombone
Paal Nilssen-Love – drums, percussion
Peter Brötzmann – saxophone, clarinet
Sigurdur Flosason & Lars Jansson Trio - Green Moss Black Sand (STORYVILLE RECORDS 2017)
Along with the Lars Jansson Trio, Flosason captures the Nordic nuances with fervour and precision. Lars Jansson is a Swedish jazz pianist and a composer, and the Lars Jansson Trio counts Jansson as well as the Dane Thomas Fonnesbæk on double bass, and the Swede Paul Svanberg on drums. Flosason is from Iceland and is trained as a classical alto saxophonist. Although he primarily plays jazz, he has worked extensively with various Scandinavian musicians such as Cathrine Legardh, Kjeld Lauritsen, and Kristian Leth, and has composed both jazz music and classical pieces. The musicianship, generosity and friendship of the group make the musical images of rural Iceland come to life.
01. Fragile Growth 5:23
02. Serenading the Moon 5:05
03. Black Sand 8:01
04. Stillness in the Storm 5:15
05. Green Sky 4:56
06. Lava 7:22
07. Spring Water 6:23
08. Slanting Rain 5:57
09. Moss 4:56
10. To the End of the World 6:35
11. Wasteland 5:30
Sigurdur Flosason: Alto Saxophone
Lars Jansson: Piano
Thomas Finnesbæk: Double Bass
Paul Svanberg: Drums
Monday, July 10, 2017
Bren Plummer - Moldy Figs (2017)
Employing sonic simplicity hand-in-hand with harmonic complexity, Bren Plummer makes chamber music conceived in a vivid imagination and founded in rigorous musicianship. His imagination extends to the titles of his compositions and descriptions of the pieces.
The name “Sycophantic Chanteuse” echoes an uneasy truce maintained by musicians and singers for decades. “It’s a difficult relationship between instrumentalists and vocalists in jazz,” Bren says. “As far as singers go, I’m really into Sarah Vaughan. She’s my favorite of all time.” Having established that high standard, he observes of the title, “I’m not actually mad at anybody. It’s just a code name for a tune.”
Preparing for the recording, Plummer wrote parts that could have been adapted to a variety of instrumental combinations. When he decided on vibraphone as one of the chordal instruments, he researched possible players. “Susan Pascal’s name came up,” he said. ”She is a really good reader, her touch is amazing; her dynamics, her sense of balance. The musical choices she made were delightful.”
“Yellow 5, Yellow 6” is another code-name title. It captures a feeling Plummer had when he was hotel-bound in a strange city substituting in the bass section of a symphony orchestra. “It’s like what you might see on a painting’s title card at a museum,” he said, “so it’s reminiscent of fine art, which is one of my great passions.”
Plummer assured the album’s drummer that the title “Albin DeVonne” has nothing to do with him. It’s the name of a character Bren imagined—a con artist with a fake name based on syllables meaning “of” that are adapted from various languages. There’s nothing fake about the piece’s expansive feeling, its suspended chords and openness.
In jazz, “Moldy Figs” is what beboppers once called traditionalists and then, ironically, what boppers themselves were sometimes called as musical trends changed. Not easily categorized, Plummer’s “Moldy Figs,” goes its own straight-ahead way with rewarding solos and a stimulating exchange of four-bar phrases between Bren and guitarist Frank Seeberger. They were students at the New England Conservatory when Plummer was earning his bachelor’s degree. “Frank played in one of George Russell’s bands and I played in the other,” Bren recalls of studying with the great composer and arranger. His master’s and doctorate are from the University of Washington.
Plummer and Thomas Marriott have known one another since middle school, when they were both members of a Seattle Public Schools all-star group. Later, both were in the Garfield High School band that over the years Clarence Acox has led to championships in dozens of national and international competitions. Of Marrriot’s burgeoning success, Bren says, “I moved away for college, but when I’d come back for the holidays and seek Tom out, he was famous. He’d walk into a room and get a standing ovation, and he wouldn’t even have his horn with him. Tom can go to New York to play for a week then come back here, and he’s accepted equally in both places.”
Scott Brown’s Roosevelt High School jazz program is the counterpart of Acox’s across town at Garfield, equally successful in competitions. Plummer says, “Stuart McDonald was the ace tenor at Roosevelt High when I was at Garfield. ‘Wow,’ we used to say, ‘this guy is really good.’ He and I have been playing a lot lately. He’s still totally killer.”
Of “Hard Time,” Bren says, simply, “It’s a hard tune, hard to improvise over.” The ascending melodic line emphasizes the tune’s character. “There may be a bit of extra-musical narrative in the title,” he grins, “but I’m not doing anything that would wind me up in prison.” “Cockroach” came to Bren after he watched a gritty movie about a Harlem gang war. “ILK” tells how he feels about his wife, Kathryn. “Maitasun” is the Basque word for love.
—Doug Ramsey
Doug Ramsey blogs about jazz and other matters at Rifftides, www.dougramsey.com
Sycophantic Chanteuse
Yellow 5, Yellow 6
Albin Devonne
Moldy Figs
Hard Time
Cockroach
Ilk
Maitasun Itsasoa
Bren Plummer: double bass
Thomas Marriott: trumpet
Stuart MacDonald: alto saxophone
Frank Seeberger: guitar
Susan Pascal: vibraphone
D'Vonne Lewis: drums
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