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Charlie Ballantine: East by Midwest
by Dan McClenaghan
A bracing guitar/bass/drums trio outing from guitarist Charlie Ballantine, East By Midwest, sounds as if it was recorded in a large, high-ceilinged warehouse with a cement floor, that floor buffed into the next dimension to a high polish, this giving the music a beautiful resonance. Retro? Think Link Wray or Dick Dale and The Deltones. Modernistic? Think John Abercrombie on some of his early ECM Records efforts. Or Neil Young and Crazy Horse Ballantine and his cohorts--drummer Dan ...
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 ReadingMiguel Zenón: Golden City
by Alberto Bazzurro
La musica contenuta in questo album trae spunto da una commissione ricevuta da Miguel Zenón per la composizione di una suite basata sulla storia di San Francisco e della Bay Area, evidenziando in particolare i contributi offerti da parte delle comunità giapponese, cinese, messicana e, ovviamente, afroamericana. Ne è nata così questa Golden City, presentata in anteprima al San Francisco Jazz Center nel 2022 e incisa poi a fine novembre dell'anno seguente. Per l'occasione Zenón (portoricano, lo ricordiamo) ...
Continue ReadingMiguel Zenon: Golden City
by Dan McClenaghan
The alto saxophone rose to jazz prominence in the 1940s, under the influence of Charlie Parker and the birth of bebop. Important players such as Art Pepper, Lee Konitz and Ornette Coleman took the horn in their own directions, crafting distinctive alto saxophone voices. Moving ahead to the new millennium, no alto saxophonist has entered the tradition with more style and panache than Miguel Zenon. His Alma Aldentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (Marsalis Music, 2011), Tipico (Miel Music, 2017) and ...
Continue ReadingMatt Mitchell: Zealous Angles
by Troy Dostert
Among 2024's contenders for the most tireless and ambitious pianists in creative music, one has to put Matt Mitchell near the top of the list. When he is not working as a sideman alongside other pathbreaking musicians like Miles Okazaki, Ches Smith, Darius Jones or Kim Cass, he is busy crafting his own idiosyncratic compositions and assembling the uniquely capable ensembles required to bring them into being. Earlier standout efforts included 2017's A Pouting Grimace (Pi Recordings) and 2019's Phalanx ...
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