Jazz Articles about Dom Minasi

Dom Minasi: The Vampire's Revenge

by Jim Santella
March 17, 2006

With an eerie program that follows from Dom Minasi's impressions of Interview with the Vampire, a novel by Anne Rice, an ensemble of improvising artists supplies heightened emotions and powerful sonic storms in empathy. The leader's guitar can be heard leading with passionate strokes as his band of creative instrumentalists stirs up a maelstrom of activity. Instrumental cries and shrieks blend with moans and groans as the ensemble travels over impressionistic ground. Carol Mennie adds wordless vocal lines to the ...

Dom Minasi: The Vampire's Revenge

by Jochem van Dijk
March 5, 2006

Dom Minasi's The Vampire's Revenge is not just a record, it's an event. 22 of New York's craftiest improvisers, scattered over groupings varying in size from two to thirteen musicians, perform ten of Minasi's adventurous and well-wrought compositions. Sometimes, as on “The Seduction" a short, returning motif alternates with free improv sections. More often, improvised and through-composed counterpoint coexist alongside each other, either peacefully, as on “Who's Your Dentist," or more belligerently in good old Mingus fashion, as on “The ...

Dom Minasi: The Vampire's Revenge

by Dan McClenaghan
March 3, 2006

With The Vampire's Revenge, guitarist Dom Minasi goes for it. This two-disc, 112-minute set takes its inspiration from a seemingly unlikely source--the vampire novels of Anne Rice--and results in one of the most ambitious and best free jazz outings of recent years. This huge undertaking includes some of the best avant guarde players on the scene--nineteen of them, not counting the core trio of Minasi, bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Jackson Krall.Dom Minasi, who put out a couple ...

Dom Minasi: Quick Response

by Nenad Georgievski
March 8, 2005

Quick Response is Dom Minasi's latest effort since last year's Time Will Tell, also on CDM Records. Supported by a group of musicians who are no strangers to playing both classic hard bop and avant stuff, Minasi is delivering an album that in a way dwells both in classic and avant-garde territories. The choice of material encompasses standards such as Cole Porter's “What is This Thing Called Love" and “Softly As in a Morning Sunrise." What is ...

Dom Minasi: Quick Response

by Terrell Kent Holmes
February 26, 2005

Guitar firebrand Dom Minasi, one of jazz's most enduring iconoclasts, has assembled a quartet of kindred spirits to help him realize his latest set of outside-the-box concepts on Quick Response. Since Minasi has released this on his own label, any potential conflicts concerning the quality, direction and style of the music contained therein have been forestalled. And armed with the security of independent production, Minasi takes this unfettered band on a drive comfortably off the main road. The ...

Dom Minasi: Quick Response

by Dan McClenaghan
November 15, 2004

Guitarist Dom Minasi's Quick Response shines up the organ combo concept and bends it into odd angles, then darts off interesting new trajectories.Minasi released two albums on Blue Note Records in the seventies before he got his fill of the music business and took a quarter century off from high profile aspirations. He came back in the new century with his own record label and a focused vision. Enter Quick Response.This new disc represents Minasi's often ...

Dom Minasi: Quick Response

by Jochem van Dijk
November 5, 2004

Dom Minasi Quick Response CDM Records 2004

Wow. Dom Minasi, the guitar meister famous (amongst others) for enthusiastically ripping to shreds various Duke tunes, made a straight-ahead record. With a Hammond B-3, no less. Or didn't he? Well, yes and no. Yes, on the surface, the tunes follow the well-trodden path of your regular bop session: on hard swinging jazz grooves you get a few standards and some ...