We've been fortunate to be in the studio with some of the best musicians in the world. We've had amazing conversations with music lovers, vinyl enthusiasts, journalists, radio DJ's, music agents, photographers, graphic artists, art enthusiasts, podcasters, poets, and writers. We've produced our first series of vinyls that we are very, very proud of.
Season One
This year, the acclaimed novelist Douglas Kennedy is writing original work reflecting on the 2017 series and building a text that ties the entire series into one piece. Mr. Kennedy is the author of twelve novels, including the international bestsellers Leaving the World and The Moment. His work has been translated into 22 languages, and in 2007 he received the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
We are enormously excited to be collaborating with Tendance Floue for the 2017 season of Newvelle Records. Tendance Floue is a Paris based collective of fourteen photographers formed in 1991. Beyond their individual approaches, the fourteen photographers, in a collective spirit, have launched into a photographic adventure of a different order, all-encompassing and akin to performance.
You might know him from bands such as Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit, Momentum, Lana Trio or Nakama. But how well do you really know him? Take the chance to get to know drummer Andreas Wildhagen intimately well on Nakama Records' 6th release - No Right No Left: "In order to eliminate right and left, one has to imagine a view which is not rooted in a subject or object. If we lack a reference point, right and left disappears. Right and left, good and bad permeate society, but music itself can step outside of this. This record is 40 minutes of drums and percussion moving through different sonic and rhythmic territories. Most of the time it is rhythmic/gestural, often superimposing two or more tempos at the time. With a few exceptions, the titles are a play on perspectives. What we perceive as fast may be ultra slow-motion from a different point of view."
Featuring an all-star multi-generational cast with flutist Nicole Mitchell, clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, trombonist Michael Dessen, pianist Joshua White, drummer Jim Black, and newcomer David Morales Boroff on violin.
Featuring an all-star multi-generational cast with flutist Nicole Mitchell, clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, trombonist Michael Dessen, pianist Joshua White, drummer Jim Black, and newcomer David Morales Boroff on violin.
Mark Dresser makes music in a vast variety of settings and contexts, but the dauntingly prolific bassist always seeks to create space for the unpredictable play between form and freedom. On his new album Sedimental You, slated for release on Clean Feed in early November 2016, he’s assembled an astonishingly creative cast that embraces the intuitive and emotionally charged nature of his improvisational imperative. Riveting, playful and often revelatory, his compositions emerge out of a shifting matrix of specific musical personalities and the often dismaying swirl of current events.
Working with a supremely gifted septet, Dresser brings together emerging talent and revered veterans from East and West Coast scenes. In many ways, Sedimental You builds directly on orchestrational concepts he’s been exploring in smaller ensembles, and relationships he’s honed via telematic connections (which enable musicians in different locations to perform live in real time via high speed/high bandwidth links.)
None of the music is programmatic, but the porous nature of the compositions means that the world’s joys and woes seep in. Mocking denunciations and ache-filled reveries flow into open-hearted evocations of beloved colleagues, both departed and still very much with us. Dresser notes that he always writes with specific musicians in mind, “and I really had Marty’s clarinet sound in my ear. I’ve had lots of groups with Michael Dessen, who’s a virtuoso trombonist and an invaluable collaborator in my groups and telematic projects. And Jim Black is a force of nature, who I worked with most often in New York and on Japanese tours as the rhythm section for Satoko Fujii.”
Dresser started working with Nicole Mitchell after she joined the faculty up the road at UC Irvine, a relationship expanded by collaboration via telematics. He’s played several high profile concerts in her ensembles, and she’s become an important part of his West Coast quintet. “She’s a wonderfully open collaborator, a great soloist, with superb musicianship and a buoyant musical spirit.” Dresser says.
San Diego pianist Joshua White is a rapidly rising star who’s toured internationally with Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls project. With a potent array of influences at his fingertips, from gospel and spirituals to free improvisation, he quickly fell in with Dresser after the bassist moved to town and discovered “an amazing talent with incredible ears and intuition,” Dresser says. “He’s a fearless improviser whose musical instincts I completely trust.”
The album’s wild card is violinist David Morales Boroff, the youngest player on the project. In a serendipitous connection, he’s the son of esteemed folk guitarist Phil Boroff, who happened to give Dresser’s mother guitar lessons back in the 1970s. “David's got a freaky ear,” Dresser says. “I’d give him one of my tunes and he’d be at the piano reharmonizing it. He has a beautiful violin sound and a soulful lyricism that belies his age "
The album opens with “Hobby Lobby Horse,” a tricky tune built from bass line up with a derisive hitch in the groove. The title track slyly refers to the 1932 Tommy Dorsey hit “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” Drawing on the cadences of the original, he recalibrated the harmony to evoke its sound and mood. The heart of the album is “Will Well (For Roswell Rudd),” a startlingly tender piece that Dresser conceived with the trombone legend (and frequent collaborator) in mind. He first played the tune in a trio with White and drummer Kjell Nordeson, but this extended version brings out everyone’s sumptuous lyricism, particularly when Mitchell’s throaty alto flute winds around Ehrlich’s woody bass clarinet. “It’s an incantation of sorts for Roswell,” Dresser says.
Dresser’s strikingly beautiful tribute “I Can Smell You Listening (for the late Alexandra Montano)” evokes the boundless spirit of the extraordinary mezzo-soprano who contributed memorably on the 2005 Dresser/Denman Maroney album Time Changes (Cryptogramophone). An extended melodic line that rises and falls, fades and reappears, the tune features some of Ehrlich’s most ravishing clarinet work. He offers a different kind of lament with "Newtown Char,” a piece he created in response to the unfathomable massacres in Connecticut and Charleston, SC. Structurally and emotionally, it’s the album’s centerpiece, a plaintive unfurling melody keyed to the thick, woody sound of Ehrlich’s bass clarinet. The album closes with the brief, elegiac theme “Two Handfuls of Peace (for Daniel Jackson),” a celebration of the revered San Diego tenor saxophonist who died in 2014 at 77.
Amidst a steady flow of recent albums, Sedimental You stands out as Dresser’s most ambitious work as a bandleader. April saw the release of The Moscow Improvisations by Jones Jones, a volatile collective trio with Russian percussionist Vladimir Tarasov and ROVA saxophonist Larry Ochs. And in March the talent laden SLM Ensemble released Source (Liminal Music), a large group project co-led and conducted by Sarah Weaver featuring masters such as vocalist Jen Shyu, flutist Robert Dick, percussionist Gerry Hemmingway, and saxophonists Jane Ira Bloom and Marty Ehrlich.
Born in Los Angeles, Dresser has been a creative force since he first started gaining attention in the early '70s with Stanley Crouch's Black Music Infinity, a free jazz ensemble that included Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, James Newton, and David Murray. He earned a BA and MA from UC San Diego studying contrabass with Bertram Turetzky. While on a Fulbright in Italy studying with maestro Franco Petracchi, Dresser was recruited by Anthony Braxton for his celebrated quartet with Gerry Hemingway and pianist Marilyn Crispell. Dresser made the move to New York in 1986 and spent a decade touring and recording with the reed visionary. A ubiquitous force on the Downtown scene, he worked widely with masters such as Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, and John Zorn.
A prolific composer and recording artist, Dresser developed many pieces for the Arcado String Trio, and Tambastics, while receiving numerous commissions and recording his original scores for several classic silent films, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Since returning to Southern California in 2004 to join the UCSD music faculty he’s maintained creative relationships with many of his New York associates, though the move west coincided with his renewed focus on solo bass performance and telematic research. Recommitted to working with larger groups, he’s once again the catalyst for a roiling creative community, work that earned him a prestigious Doris Duke Impact Award in 2015. More than impactful, Sedimental You is music to recharge your ears, agitate your soul, and open your mind.
The word innovative and groundbreaking is dished out a lot these days but in this project the facts speak for themselves. Mn’JAM experiment have turntables doing it all from atonal sounds to melodies, rhythms or even harmonies; visuals synchronized in real time with the music; electronics in conjunction with electric and acoustic instruments; live looping and even quirkiness, just to name a few. It’s like being immersed in a live art experiment where conceptual laws give way to superb executions. And in this project there is no greater “self-inflicted” law than effectively integrating elements from and within different mediums. So when it comes to their debut album (a CD/DVD combo called Live with a Boom) the intention is to hold all of the parts ranging from the audio-visual elements in the performance to the way the DVD is shot, from the set design to the album artwork or the DVD authoring, to the same high artistic standard. Mn'JAM experiment make sure that all these parameters (digital, physical, audio, visual, design, etc) are artistically balanced and relevant not only on their own but especially when viewed as part of a larger conceptual umbrella.
If you zoom in on the music, the multi-medium integration also occurs. You’ll find a mix between empirical and rationally constructed elements; between acoustic, electric and electronic instruments; urban rhythms and traditional melodies, vocal loops and guitar solos, turntables and acoustic drums. Concentrating on the visuals in the performance, they are analogously a product of pre-composed material and live manipulation, mostly carried out by the guy behind the turntables. He is able to instantaneously control the images using the turntables and a series of pads and buttons thus not only syncing the visuals with the music in real time but also being able to improvise and “comp” visually. And even in the visuals there is more than one agent involved - the drums have triggers (on the bass drum and floor tom) that also manipulate the image occasionally! Overall, the combination and correlation between sound and image makes this performance a clear-cut synthetic experience. Even the set design juxtaposes elements from different mediums. You can find the visuals shown in different outputs (projected and on TVs). The technological elements contrast with the wood (the constant and connecting element in the set), you can see it on the walls, the floor (it's the main architectural element), but also present in TV frames, the lamps and even in the projection sculpture in the drum room. In order for the DVD viewer to have access to the visuals at all times, besides 2 projections, 20 TVs were meticulously spread throughout the recording studio.
The DVD has a very particular way of unveiling itself. When viewing this live DVD performance you will notice it is purposely composed with a continuous story telling character to it. This can be observed by the usage of transitions and cyclical references. What’s more, the visual material, as well as the way the DVD is shot, expands as the story develops. The visuals become less abstract and more colorful while the camera framing becomes wider and all-inclusive towards the end of the performance. Therefore, if you want to have the fullest experience possible, we advise you to watch the DVD as a whole. The authoring, similarly to the album artwork, also offers elegance with an edge. Mainly based on the black-covered artwork, it not only shows simplicity but also an animated way of interpreting the jibber-jabber letters that appear on the digipak once you slide the cover off. Regarding the artwork of the CD/DVD box you’ll be surprised how much it epitomizes the experiment. There are two different artworks both correlated to the authoring present in the DVD but each one based on different tunes in the performance. One is based on the visuals of the head-bopping opening tune R2D2 and the other is an emulation of the Moiré effect (created when sliding off the cover) present in the third tune, Fairytale.
There are many more things to mention like the fact that the DVD comes in 9 different languages with a generic as well as a track by track walk-trough documentary, a "videoclip" that is basically a visual explanation of the compositional process of the first tune, and finally, the option to listen to the DVD in 5.1 surround for an ultra-immersed experience.
Like a book that is still able to augment the reader’s knowledge and perception of itself in a 2nd and 3rd read, with every new viewing of this DVD more and more connections are revealed and deeper relationships are extracted. This experiment breaks away from just being another project that uses poetic and metaphorical delights to describe what they do and is literally a new platform in jazz.
The Jure Pukl Quartet’s music, led by the Slovenian saxophonist and recorded live at the legendary Thelonious jazz club in the bohemian Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago, is played as if there weren’t four musicians here, but just one—that’s how cohesive this group is.
That’s largely due to the fact that the saxophonist had worked with the rest of these musicians—with the exception of this project’s producer, guitarist Nicolas Vera—in New York. Pukl visits Chile frequently, where he has established himself on the local jazz scene. “Jure Pukl Live at Thelonious” forms the latest part of the innovative catalog of the label Discos Pendiente. Welcome!
Jure Pukl, tenor sax / saxo tenor
Melissa Aldana, tenor sax / saxo tenor
Jure Pukl Quartet
feat. Nicolás Vera / Pablo Menares / Félix Lecaros
special guest. Melissa Aldana
Live at Thelonious
1. False Accusation
2. Up & Over
3. Sequence III / Enko Dunko
4. Compassion
5. La rueda del tiempo
6. Bizgo
Jure Pukl, tenor saxophone
Nicolás Vera, guitar
Pablo Menares, double bass
Félix Lecaros, drums
Melissa Aldana, tenor saxophone on Up & Over
All compositions writen by Jure Pukl except La rueda del tiempo by Nicolás Vera
Recorded live at Thelonious, lugar de jazz on the 12th of January 2016, Santiago - Chile
Rec engineer: Diego Bustamante
Rec assistant: Diego Valenzuela
Mix and Mastering: Gonzalo González - CHT Estudios
Photo: Ana María Lara
Design: Cristián González S.
Thanks:
Jure wants to thank his family for constant support, his love Chiqui, new chilean friends and family, Nathalie Proulx and Jorge Valero, Marcos Aldana and family, Roberto Barahona, Susana and Rosita and everybody at Punta de Choros, Sergio, Marco Reyes and Orquesta Huambaly. Biggest thank you goes to Nico Vera, Pablo Menares and Felix Lecaros - you all sound beautiful on this one as well as you are beautiful personalities. I hope we will do much more in the future. Thank you Discos Pendiente for making this happening.
Nos vemos perros!
Discos Pendiente wants to thank Erwin Díaz & Thelonious, José Tomás Vicuña, Pepe Hosiasson, Chalo González, Diego Bustamante, Diego Valenzuela, Cristián González, Claudia Varas, Ana María Lara, Diego Pequeño.
Jure Pukl plays Selmer saxophones and is a D'Addario Performing Artist and plays exclusively on Reserve No. 3 reeds, Marmaduke mouthpieces and accessories, Fred Lebayle mouthpieces, EGR Ligatures and his saxophone is keept in form by Jon Baltimore Music company.
Félix Lecaros plays Istanbul Mehmet cymbals exclusively.
Segundo disco colaborativo del quinteto reunido bajo el nombre de La Resistencia, un elenco de jazzistas referenciales de la generación de 2000 y 2010, que en 2013 había estrenado la grabación del álbum La resistencia: Melissa Aldana (saxo tenor), Sebastián Jordán (trompeta), Nicolás Vera (guitarra), Pablo Menares (contrabajo) y Félix Lecaros (batería). Fue grabado en directo durante una actuación del conjunto en el club Thelonious, el 22 de enero de 2015.
Outstanding album by the quintet of trumpeter Sebastián Jordán, tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, guitarist Nicolás Vera, bassist Pablo Menares and drummer Félix Lecaros. Melodies as thick as clouds and as limitless in the imagery their loveliness incites. Recorded live at January 2015 performance at the Thelonious Jazz Club, the sounds from the crowd and the city bleed into the audio, which, in fact, just add to the personableness of the recording and the intimacy of the music.
The up-tempo tunes are all you could ask for if you’re looking for a thrilling ride, but it’s when this ensemble patiently works through a tune that it bleeds all kinds of feel.
Emotive and substantive and sincere… this straight-ahead modern jazz session is the kind of reminder that an old form of language can sound brand spanking new in the present day.
