Friday, January 14, 2022
OUT TODAY: Single from “Interpret It Well” / Ches Smith with Frisell, Maneri and Taborn (Pyroclastic Records)
Friday, October 8, 2021
Craig Taborn | Shadow Plays | Available October 8 via ECM
Monday, September 27, 2021
Ivo Perelman - Brass & Ivory Tales (Fundacja Słuchaj)
Friday, September 17, 2021
Craig Taborn Launches 60 x Sixty
Friday, April 23, 2021
Hardcell (Berne / Taborn / Rainey) - Sensitive (April 2021 Screwgun Records)
Thursday, February 18, 2021
Junk Magic – Compass Confusion (Pyroclastic Records)
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Diego Barber - Drago (February 19, 2021 Sunnyside Records)
There is only one way to enhance one’s performance and that is to practice until there is a level of confidence in act, and pride in the outcomes. Guitarist and composer Diego Barber seeks new challenges relentlessly. His pursuit of excellence in all his endeavors has led him to the extreme heights of classical guitar technique, contemporary composition and long-distance running, all of these requiring grueling regimens of focused study.
For his new recording, Drago, Barber departs from his recent focus on blending contemporary classical music and jazz to focus on electronic music, utilizing elements from both the classical and dancefloor models. A two-year long study of Logic music programming has led the fleet fingered string specialist to eschew the guitar for the most part to focus on composing pieces in a new and highly personal way.
Barber was attracted to the guitar very early in life and, once he set his sights on the instrument, he began to focus solely on mastering it. Classical repertoire from Bach to Brouwer continues to be an essential touchstone for Barber but he was also touched by the minimalists, like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Their repetitive looping structures appealed to Barber and he began to hear the connects between that and the development of Detroit Techno and the Electronic Dance Music coming from Berlin. Barber’s interest and infatuation with electronic music has been nearly as longstanding as that of his love for guitar.
There are quite a few classical and jazz artists that have delved into the world of electronic music. Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Tristan Perich, Francesco Tristano and Craig Taborn are just a few that have found intriguing ways to adapt their style to that of electronic music, both popular and experimental.
Like the widespread roots of the famed one-thousand-year-old Drago tree of his native Canary Islands, Barber spans decades to inform the compositional development of this music. Each piece comes from a different place, whether done in sonata form, built by loops or by musical cells. Many of the pieces were inspired by a sound that Barber heard or a rhythm that he generated while on one of his many long-distance races, thus many of the pieces are named for locations of these 50 to 100-mile ultra-marathons that Barber took part in.
Monday, February 15, 2021
Hafez Modirzadeh - Facets (March 5, 2021 Pi Recordings)
Facets is saxophonist/composer Hafez Modirzadeh’s latest radical entreaty against the cultural hegemony of the Western notion of equal temperament and his argument that musicians should be free to explore a variety of tonal possibilities, even on piano. His 2012 release Post-Chromodal Out! was the first documentation of this concept, where the piano was tuned to a variety of temperaments. Performed with pianist Vijay Iyer, The New York Times called that album “Dauntless… There’s heady discipline at work here, along with the stirrings of a hard-fought individualism.” With his new release, Modirzadeh has distilled the idea to a single re-tuning, which is performed in duets with three towering musicians in contemporary improvised music: Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey and Craig Taborn, each interrogating the piano’s new possibilities with imagination and ingenuity. Modirzadeh himself utilizes alternate fingerings and embouchure adjustments on his instrument to achieve intervals between major and minor, and the pieces sway with an elasticity reminiscent of Persian poetic meter. With eight keys re-tuned and the remainder left in equal temperament, the music explores the coexistence of familiar with unfamiliar, and in the process, discovers new logic and mysterious beauty within.
Modirzadeh, who the San Jose Mercury News has called “visionary,” described the imperative to re-tune the piano this way: “The standardized temperament for piano, as beautiful as it is, carries an unbalanced weight of influence over players and listeners, leading many to believe that there is no other resonance to work with but this one. This creates a value system that is unjust and ultimately limits the discovery of other, more personal tuning possibilities. By retuning the piano – the one instrument that imposes a dominant influence on the world’s music – the musician is freed to explore all tonal possibilities.” This urge is the culmination of a system he originally called “chromodality,” which he developed to explore the harmonic possibilities of integrating Persian tones with Western equal temperament. The concept has since evolved to allow all intervals to co-exist, which empowers each musician to use their own distinctive voice to explore music from a full palette of tonal possibilities, irrespective of cultural background. The tuning Modirzadeh has chosen for this program was one that spoke to him personally after much testing and tweaking. Vijay Iyer says of Modirzadeh: “The scope of Hafez’s synthesis of concepts across cultures is staggering. There is great detail in his critical engagement with traditional intervallic systems, tuning systems, and modes, and there is also a grand sweep to his vision across disciplines and historical eras. In spite of its technical complications, there is genuine heart to this music and a real spiritual clarity. Modirzadeh is not simply a ‘scholar’ or ‘musicologist,’ but a genuine artist, with a profound, lifelong stake in the unification of research, creative work, and personal inner quest that is expressed in his music.”
Interested in hearing the different approaches that each musician will bring to the concept, Modirzadeh has been inviting pianists from various disciplines to engage with this music. For the recording of Facets, Modirzadeh chose three of the most acclaimed musicians in improvised music: Kris Davis is recognized as one of the foremost pianists in jazz. Her release Diatom Ribbons (2019) topped most year-end lists as best album of the year. For a quarter century, Craig Taborn has been similarly recognized as a master of sheer invention on the piano. Tyshawn Sorey, who is a stalwart with Pi Recordings, has won recent praise for the premiere for his new works with the Seattle Symphony and Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Primarily known as a drummer, he brings the same sensitivity and openness to discovery as the other pianists. They were sent the scores in advance, but their first encounter with the actual re-tuned piano was at their respective recording sessions. Each musician works from the same set of pieces, spending time exploring the novel resonances, before running through the entire book of compositions. Modirzadeh gave minimal instructions, preferring to allow each musician to shape the music as they imagine it. As Modirzadeh said in an interview: “It takes more heart than head, with the intention of something beautiful.” He subsequently chose what he felt to be the most magical of these performances for this release.
Thursday, February 4, 2021
Roscoe Mitchell - Splatter (i dischi di angelica 2020)
Internationally renowned musician and composer Roscoe Mitchell, since his debut with Sound in 1966, has defined his style through an innovative approach towards composition in what is traditionally an improvised music genre, pre-empting the development of jazz and its relationship with contemporary music in the following decades.
Splatter, drawn from two concerts held at the AngelicA festival in Bologna in 2017, presents the most recent developments of this research, with two examples from his cycle Conversations for large orchestra. Started in 2016, it is based on the transcription and subsequent orchestration of what originated as his improvisations with the trio including Craig Taborn and Kikanju Baku, for the album Conversations I and II which was released in 2014.
Friday, October 5, 2018
Lotte Anker / Gerald Cleaver / Craig Taborn - Floating Islands (Three Pieces) CENTRIFUGA November 1, 2018
The album is a live performance recorded during CPH jazz festival in 2008. Floating Islands was issued on CD in 2009 on ILK music, and finally we are able to make this superb recording available on vinyl in a collaboration between ILK, Insula Music and Centrifuga.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Dan Weiss - Starebaby (PI RECORDINGS 2018)
Weiss has wanted to put this particular project together for over a decade. As with his prior output, it reflects his catholic taste in music, where jazz improvisation, doom metal, electro-acoustic music, Indian beat cycles, and innumerable other influences are all compounded into an outpouring of personal expression completely beyond musical boundaries. Starebaby, though, definitely tilts towards the heavy, and Weiss, in particular, cites as influences metal bands such as Meshuggah, Burning Witch, High on Fire, Gorguts, early Metallica, Wormed, and Confessor; electronic and electro acoustic composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bernard Parmegiani, and Luc Ferrari; and every type of jazz ranging from Sidney Bechet to Threadgill. It is also inspired by Season 3 of the television show Twin Peaks, whose surreal, ominous emotional landscape helped shape the overall feel of this music. The music ebbs and flows, surging to thundering swells of foreboding doom before tempering to quiet reflection, finding a deep space where brutal aggression meets ghostly vulnerability. The expansive soundscape ranges from fortissimo to pianissimo, grave to presto, and dense, roiling dissonance to exquisite, pellucid melodies.
According to Matt Mitchell: “One thing I admire about Dan’s composing it’s how he manages to transcend stylistic issues. Although heavy music is undoubtedly the primary inspiration for this batch of material, I notice here many updated examples of forms that I associate with Dan’s composing: strong, direct melodies; long cycles allowing for building towards ecstatic climaxes; multiple instruments asymmetrically orbiting each other. Unique to this project is the combination of a very strong and distinctive compositional voice and extensive contribution from each of the musicians. Although this is Dan’s music through-and-through in a very specific way, he asked for a lot of input, especially regarding timbre, and he provided many novel spaces in which to improvise or act as a sonic free agent. All these qualities taken together result in an extremely powerful and multifarious musical message, one in which it is a privilege to take part.”
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Dave Holland - Uncharted Territories 2CD (DARE2 RECORDS May 11, 2018)
Uncharted Territories, which will be released in 2CD and 3LP formats, reunites Dave Holland with saxophonist Evan Parker, a longtime friend from their early days in London. Theyre joined by Craig Taborn, on piano and electronics, and Ches Smith on percussion. In addition to quartet improvisations, they also broke off into every possible subset of duo and trio configurations. The group also recorded two compositions by Smith and one by Holland. A resulting 23 tracks present a series of deep, multi-layered conversations between the musicians, some of whom were interacting for the first time.
Saturday, March 3, 2018
Kris Davis / Craig Taborn - Octopus (2018)
On her 2016 album Duopoly, pianist Kris Davis highlighted her deeply attuned artistry as never before. Conceived as a set of rotating duo performances, Duopoly found Davis in the company of Bill Frisell, Tim Berne, Don Byron, Julian Lage, Marcus Gilmore and other musical giants. Of all these fascinating encounters, it was the pairing of Davis and fellow piano great Craig Taborn, that sparked further extensive collaboration. Soon the two pianists would embark on a 12-city tour of the U.S., with new music for the occasion. Octopus, a magisterial live album drawn from three of those concerts, is the result.
Recalling the Duopoly session with Taborn, Davis writes in her liner notes: “From the moment we started playing I felt instantly transported and free within the music, and had the sense we could go anywhere.” Taborn responded similarly: “It was remarkable how effortless and inspired it felt. It was immediately apparent that it was easy to make music happen in this pairing and that we were well matched in terms of both aesthetics and approach.”
With the support of The Shifting Foundation, Davis and Taborn set out to translate their in-studio rapport to the concert stage, which resulted in the Octopus tour: from Brooklyn’s Roulette to Seattle’s Earshot Festival, from the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC to the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Ron Saint Germain, engineer on the Duopoly duo sessions, came along on the road with a recording rig designed to capture two grand pianos in a variety of spaces.
Of Davis’s two contributions, “Ossining” is the more contemplative and restrained, inspired by the composer’s recent move to the Hudson Valley with her husband, the guitarist Nate Radley, and their son, Benjamin. The move took place while Davis was on the Octopus tour. “Moving is always stressful and I wanted to be there with my family.” she says. “My son was walking me through the new house on the phone while we were traveling to each city, telling me all about his new room and the backyard, which we didn’t have in Brooklyn. I was missing out on those first impressions, but I was happy to have a little piece of the experience with him on the phone that day.”
Davis’s subtle prepared piano on “Ossining” serves not only to differentiate the piano sounds but to heighten their rhythmic interplay: “When I wrote the piece, I was listening to some West African music and looking into how some of that music is constructed. I began studying this music when I was a student at Banff 20 years ago, studying with Abraham Adzenyah and have continued to be fascinated by it.”
There’s a very specific, conversational quality to this West African percussion music – trance-like repetition, variation, and contrapuntal pulse. Davis was drawn to this, as it placed her and Taborn on an equal plane from the piece’s onset. She elaborates “In performance, Craig and I intertwine a series of improvised repetitive rhythms, with the idea being that the whole supersedes the sum of the parts.”
The high dissonance and denser, more urgent rhythmic attack of Davis’s “Chatterbox” creates a striking contrast: brilliantly articulated masses of notes and harmonic ideas unfurl; Taborn ultimately grounds the piece in a more defined bass motion and Davis perceptively responds.
Taborn’s “Interruptions” transpire as three distinctly different pieces. “The ‘Interruptions’ were conceived as just that,” he reveals, “small composed pieces or objects that could be used within a larger improvisation to redirect or recondition the musical environment. They could be selected and dropped in at some point as a composed statement that interrupts another texture. They seemed to stand on their own enough as compositions, but I intended them almost as interstitial material. So there’s no through-line between them. I intended each one to change the musical space in different ways.”
Whether leading her Capricorn Climber quintet or her four-bass-clarinet-octet Infrasound; working with the great Andrew Cyrille as a member of Eric Revis’s trio; or lifting up recent music by John Zorn, Terri Lyne Carrington, Tom Rainey, Michael Formanek, Ingrid Laubrock and more, Davis is one of the groundbreaking artists of our time, hailed by Jason Moran as “a freethinking, gifted pianist [who] lives in each note that she plays.”
Taborn’s recent ECM releases Chants, Daylight Ghosts and Avenging Angel, along with his work in Farmers By Nature, Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth and many others, have earned him distinction as “one of the greatest living pianists,” in the words of his colleague Vijay Iyer. Together, Davis and Taborn have a way of merging into “one sort of shape-shifting organism,” as Davis ventures in her liner notes. Octopus, evoking limitless limbs and rapid, graceful, unpredictable movements, is the Davis-Taborn sensibility incarnate.































