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Jazz Articles about Chris Lightcap
Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet
by Don Ball
While Nels Cline has been playing the guitar-hero rock star for the past two decades with Wilco, he continues to release his own solo recordings under various names (including the Nels Cline 4 and the Nels Cline Singers, which, amusingly, contain no vocalists) tailored toward the avant-garde side of jazz (with the notable exception of his lush, lovely jazz orchestra Blue Note release from 2016, Lovers). His 2025 release, Consentrik Quartet, brings together some of the finest jazz musicians working ...
Continue ReadingJon Irabagon: Server Farm
by Vincenzo Roggero
Quando un agitatore musicale come Jon Irabagon, mente tra le più aperte, corrosive, imprevedibili e significative della scena jazzistica statunitense mette insieme un tentetto da paura per esplorare fatti e misfatti dell'intelligenza artificiale, curiosità e aspettative sono ai massimi livelli. E questo Server Farm le soddisfa pienamente, ennesima prova della grandezza di un musicista onnivoro in grado di esaltare ed esaltarsi in tutta la gamma di formazioni messe in campo negli ultimi quindici anni. Dal sax solo di ...
Continue ReadingJon Irabagon: Server Farm
by John Sharpe
Artificial Intelligence would have a hard job pinning down saxophonist Jon Irabagon's defining characteristics. When a player is as talented as Irabagon, who can turn his hand to almost any style, sometimes the challenge is to find a focus that stimulates. On Server Farm, Irabagon has taken the notion of AI and the ever increasing prevalence of the digital world as his casus belli. Not that he uses AI himself in composing the album, rather as the PR reveals, he ...
Continue ReadingJon Irabagon: Server Farm
by Dan McClenaghan
"The times they are a-changin.'" Bob Dylan said that in 1964. He was right. In 2025, they are still changing, perhaps most notably with the emergence of artificial intelligence. That previously slow creep--outlined so accurately in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, paired with Stanely Kubrick's movie of the same name--will build to a tipping point leading to an implosion. The takeover is inevitable. The only way to address it is through the arts. This is ...
Continue ReadingJon Irabagon: Server Farm
by Mike Jurkovic
Warning! Warning! Heads up! Spoiler alert! Server Farm has the potential to take your head to some random places. Some alarming (as all artists should be these days), Some cacophonous. Some claustrophobic. Others freeing, fleeting, fervent. Server Farm, saxophonist/composer Jon Irabagon's heatedly precise and prescient head-on clash with the threat of AI blisters the binary codes and algorithms of the connected world (which makes us all individual heads of the Hydra) both surgically and haphazardly, letting it all ...
Continue ReadingDarius Jones: Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)
by Jerome Wilson
As Darius Jones' new album shows, even the most harrowing music can serve as a form of healing, The alto saxophonist has released a trio album that draws from his attempts to deal with personal mental trauma via a daunting musical journey that begins in screams and ends with serenity. This album is the seventh volume in Jones' nine-volume Man'ish Boy series of releases. Working in a trio format with Gerald Cleaver on drums and Chris Lightcap on ...
Continue ReadingRob Brown Quartet: Oblongata
by John Sharpe
Although reedman Rob Brown has a string of small group leadership outings to his name, dating back to his first, Breath Rhyme (Silkheart) in 1990, Oblongata may be one of his finest. The 2022 studio session reunites him with some of his most enduring collaborators, the same crew responsible for From Here To Hear (Rogue Art, 2019), as well as an outstanding appearance at the 2019 Vision Festival, namely trombonist Steve Swell, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Chad Taylor.
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