Articles by Karl A.D. Evangelista
John Lindberg / Karl Berger: Duets 1
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
There are many kinds of duo albums, but the more successful ones treat the burden of cooperation as a psychological, and not merely aesthetic, endeavor--conscious that a sense of human sensitivity is necessary to register great conversation (much rarer, it would seem, than intelligent art). None of this goes to say that pathos and fury can serviceably replace careful planning and good ideas, only that closeness demands intimacy and, well, two people alone are often closer than two people in ...
read moreSteve Lacy: New Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden 2002
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
Steve Lacy wore as many hats as any musician of his generation: instrumentalist par excellence, free music innovator, master composer, solo saxophone trailblazer, poetry buff, Monkian doyen, salvager of the soprano, world traveler, inspirational offbeatnik. The evolution of Lacy's aesthetic catholicism is a wonder to trace, dissect, and absorb, and it's fascinating to hear, even now, what late pieces have been added to the puzzle.
New Jazz Meeting documents the saxophonist's contribution to a real-time remixing of a piece by ...
read moreJ.C. Jones: Hosting Myself
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
Outline and mien peg J.C. Jones as the prototypal improvising bassist--long and lanky, slumped into his instrument with a sort of focal intensity, like a surgeon--or a butcher--teasing at thick guts. The cover photo of Hosting Myself has all the bearings of an ancient iconology, and there are surely mystical undertones to that title--as if Jones's music were an act of self-sacrifice, a sonic communion.
As a bassist in the solo idiom, Jones engages among the holiest of practices; the ...
read moreTaylor Ho Bynum & Tomas Fujiwara: True Events
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
The duet is an idea idiom: the scaffolding of improvisation laid bare, like wires gutted from a conduit. Here, musical dialogue becomes something about communicating, or miscommunicating, through paper cups. It's far less obvious that an improviser is making no sense, or has no sense, and/or no ideas, than when musicians are speaking ear to ear.
True Events hazards--if hazard could describe music so careful--scrutiny, packed, coiled, and double-coiled with ideas. A less generous judgment might call this a well-studied ...
read moreRob Reddy's Gift Horse: A Hundred Jumping Devils
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
Rob Reddy's music conveys motion--a rare thing in an era when jazz often seems like the stuff of historians, when even the most astute artist might fail to create anything genuinely new. Doubtless, though, Reddy is a capable creative voice, and A Hundred Jumping Devils is far more than mere repertory work or pastiche.
Following the William Carlos Williams quote from which the album takes its title, Devils longs to be free from the torment of its materials, and in ...
read moreJD Parran & Mark Deutsch: Omegathorp: Living City
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
The spirit of the exotic weighs strongly on Omegathorp: Living City, the most recent collaboration between reedman J.D. Parran and stringman Mark Deutsch. It's no surprise: Parran was a crucial member of the Black Artists' Group--the seminal St. Louis artists collective and one of the first formal musicians' organizations to champion freely improvised black music--and Deutsch is an acclaimed performer of North Indian classical music. Nonetheless, there is hardly a trace of tension about the album; what might, in lesser ...
read moreSatoko Fujii: Kobe Yee!! & Undulation
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
The Japanese-American axis of improvisation has a long and eventful history, further complicated in an age of confused identities. Satoko Fujii, one of Japan's brightest and most forward thinking musicians, wears this story on her sleeve, emerging from the bedrock of cultural confusion with, at last, the hope of progress.
Born in 1958, Fujii has cultivated an idiosyncratic approach to piano playing, composition, and arrangement, melding diverse, often conflicting narratives. Her music is stylistically elusive; it bears the inklings of ...
read moreWorld Saxophone Quartet: Political Blues
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
Political conscience occupies a special place in the quintessence of modern jazz, fueling, in its most heated moments, the stuff of blunt insurrection. It remains to be seen whether Political Blues, the most recent offering by the World Saxophone Quartet, occupies the same territory as those few moments of musical activism that have not only informed but also crucially affected the practice of revolution--Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite (Candid, 1960) is one, Charlie Haden's first Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!, 1969) ...
read moreGeoff Farina / Luther Gray / Nate McBride: Out Trios, Volume 4: Almanac
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
There's a tremendous amount of ambivalence about the Atavistic label--all at once a paragon of progressivism, championing a rich legacy of forward-thinking free music, and among the foremost agents in the historicizing of free jazz. The atavism here suggests much more than an earlier, more primal passion; there is, more crucially, the sting of old processes at work, embalming the new and unfamiliar.
It's particularly heartening, then, when an album like Almanac rears its head. The Out Trios series, meant ...
read moreBoxhead Ensemble: Nocturnes
by Karl A.D. Evangelista
Derek Bailey, the doyen of free improvisation, took note of the surprising survival tactics of the younger generation of improvisers--"the kind of manoeuvers sometimes found necessary to safely negotiate the mire thrown up in culturally inclement times, sometimes compromise, sometimes regression. Much has changed since Bailey wrote Improvisation (Da Capo, 1980), from which the foregoing quote was plucked; the improvised music landscape has long since cycled past those initial rounds of creative exhaustion, and the palette of the improviser has ...
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