Articles by Daniel Barbiero
Leo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri
by Daniel Barbiero
Coming to New England: Emerson, Ives and Brown When trumpeter/composer Leo Smith returned to the United States after having spent 1969-1970 in Europe, he settled not in New York, as most jazz musicians might be expected to do, or even in Chicago, where he'd spent a fruitful several years in the 1960s. Instead, he chose to settle in New Haven, Connecticut.New Haven at the time was, as it largely still is, an economically straitened, post-industrial college town—on the ...
Continue ReadingThe Creative Musicians Improvisers Forum: New Haven's AACM
by Daniel Barbiero
The late 1960s through the 1970s and '80s were difficult years for jazz and jazz-derived improvised music, but they were also years that saw musicians—by necessity—respond to these difficulties with creative solutions. With first the rise and then the commercial dominance during those years of rock music and the corresponding eclipse of jazz, creative musicians in various parts of the country began to organize themselves into artist-run groups in order to ensure the survival of the music both commercially and ...
Continue ReadingMarco Colonna: The Second Coming
by Daniel Barbiero
In improvised music no less than in composed classical music, the period from the 1950s forward has seen the invention and development of new and expansive instrumental techniques. Along with the expansion of technical resources has come a corresponding evolution of musical poetics grounded in the idea that performance techniques and gestures, when engaged with a certain degree of self-consciousness, can serve as the fundamental material basis for an expressive musicality. Such is the case with the music of The ...
Continue ReadingPolyorchard: Red October
by Daniel Barbiero
Polyorchard is a free improvisational group with a flexible membership; the one constant is Raleigh, North Carolina double bassist David Menestres. The group has taken the diverse forms of string trio, trio of strings and keyboard and mixed group of brass, reeds and strings. Earlier this month (I write at the end of March) they played the DC area alternative space Rhizome in a trio configuration of Menestres, keyboardist Jill Christensen and violist Dan Ruccia; in Red October, the group ...
Continue ReadingJohn McCowen: Solo Contra
by Daniel Barbiero
John McCowen's Solo Contra presents an EP-length, finely-sketched portrait of a rarely heard instrument: the contrabass clarinet. It also marks the most recent stage in an eclectic path through music that's taken him from the extremes of raw energy to the subtleties of timbral micro soundworlds. After having been involved with hardcore punk as a vocalist, McCowen took up saxophone and flute, subsequently studying bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet with Eric Mandat at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. ...
Continue ReadingBassDrumBone and the New Haven Jazz Renaissance
by Daniel Barbiero
When they first began playing together in New Haven, Connecticut in 1977, the trio BassDrumBone--bassist Mark Helias, percussionist Gerry Hemingway and trombonist Ray Anderson--were called OAHSPE. The name, which Anderson recalls having heard in Seattle from a source he understood to be Native American, is supposed to mean “sky earth and spirit." It is coincidentally also the title of a “new bible" purporting to be the words of “Jehovih and his angel ambassadors" [sic] which had been channeled by New ...
Continue ReadingSestetto Internazionale: Aural Vertigo
by Daniel Barbiero
The Sestetto Internazionale is a truly international group of European musicians, having been put together by Finnish soprano saxophonist Harri Sjöström for a September 2015 tour of Finland. In addition to Sjöström, the sextet includes fellow Finn accordionist Veli Kujala; the masterful Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo; UK violinist Alison Blunt; and the Germans Achim Kaufmann and Ignaz Schick on piano and turntables, respectively. This exciting live recording captures the ensemble's concerts at Helsinki and Turku, each of which is ...
Continue ReadingJoão Pedro Viegas/Guy-Frank Pellerin/Silvia Corda/Adriano Orrù: For Massas
by Daniel Barbiero
Those of us who work at the edges of the musical establishment--free improvisers, experimental musicians, unclassifiable sound artists of all types--inhabit a small community. Part of that community is our audience--an important part, no matter how small it might. I've heard more than one artist say that he or she would be happy to play for an audience of just one serious, engaged listener, if it ever came down to that. (And sometimes it has--I've seen it.) As ...
Continue ReadingThe Free Musics by Jack Wright
by Daniel Barbiero
The Free Musics Jack Wright 316 Pages ISBN: 1537777246 Spring Garden Music Editions 2017 Saxophonist Jack Wright's first encounter with free jazz occurred in 1967, when a chance meeting with Charlie Haden resulted in Wright's being invited to see Haden play with Ornette Coleman. Wright, who had been a conventional jazz saxophonist, describes the music as having struck him as “chaotic" and the experience as having been “traumatic." Nevertheless, five years later he ...
Continue Reading
