Jazz Articles about Elson Nascimento

About Elson Nascimento

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Lights on a Satellite

Read "Lights on a Satellite" reviewed by Joshua Weiner

by Joshua Weiner
November 26, 2024

As befits a being whose life encompassed much of the Solar System, from his origins on Saturn to his long earthly sojourn that ended in 1993, Sun Ra composed, played and recorded an astronomical panoply of musical styles across six decades. Lights On A Satellite, a new double album released by Germany's In+Out Records, presents a varied program that serves as a dual tribute to both Ra and Marshall Allen, the recent centenarian who has directed the Sun Ra Arkestra ...

Liner Notes

Sun Ra at Inter-Media Arts, 1991

by Howard Mandel
March 25, 2023

On April 10, 1991, the night of this concert at Inter-Media Art Center in Huntington, Long Island, Sun Ra was near the apogee of his earthly transit. Having led his transformative iterations of his Arkestra around the globe for an unlikely if not unimaginable four decades, the visionary composer, keyboardist, conceptualist and cosmologist was, even though in recovery from a stroke, at the peak of his powers, two years from breaking free of his local orbit entirely. He ...

Album Review

Tyler Mitchell: Dancing Shadows

Read "Dancing Shadows" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
January 26, 2022

There's a buzz to Dancing Shadows that is akin to the first time one stumbled upon a late 1950s to late 1960s Blue Note, Riverside, Verve, Impulse! or Prestige recording and time just stopped and the music took you places you were eager to go whether you knew where you were going or not. You stared at the cover, the wall, into the new, opening world. It may well have been your first mind-altering experience without, (or in conjunction with) ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Swirling

Read "Swirling" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
January 2, 2021

Though Sun Ra departed Earth in 1993, his music has continued to thrive, first under the stewardship of John Gilmore and, since 1995, by the remarkable Marshall Allen who turned 96 in May 2020. A live Arkestra show still contains many of the elements that have been present since the 1950s and '60s--color, pageantry and music boasting the entire history of jazz. There have also been some extraordinary continuities in the personnel of the band, with several members present since ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Swirling

by Chris May
November 8, 2020

Saturn moved into the ascendant in October 2020 when the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen released its first studio album in over twenty years. Swirling presents new arrangements of both well-known and more obscure Ra tunes, played by a fifteen-piece lineup which includes band veterans and relative newcomers. It is a welcome addition to the Arkestra's near seventy-year catalogue. When Ra passed in 1993, tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, an on-off band ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Seductive Fantasy

Read "Seductive Fantasy" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
July 8, 2020

It seems entirely fitting that “Seductive Fantasy," the single from the Sun Ra Arkestra's first studio album in twenty years, should be a reworking of an old song, one that dates back over forty years to On Jupiter (El Saturn, 1979). With Sun Ra it was ever thus; old is new and new is old. The original “Seductive Fantasy" was a sprawling, seventeen-minute affair that morphed from loose groove and extended soloing into increasingly abstract, and almost arrhythmic terrain. Significantly ...