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Spinifex: Beats The Plague
by Mark Corroto
Finally, a band of brothers retaliates against the coronavirus. The scientists and the anti-vax antipodes have had their day. Time for some partisan guerrilla action. Okay, maybe just a pipe dream, but these nine tracks by the Amsterdam based Spinifex deliver a much needed counterattack to this diabolical infective agent. Recorded in June of 2021, Beats The Plague is the band's seventh release. It follows Soufifex (TryTone, 2019) where the band looked East for inspiration from Sufi music. ...
Continue ReadingRoy Campbell / John Dikeman / Raoul van der Weide / Peter Jacquemyn / Klaus Kugel: When The Time Is Right
by John Sharpe
This date from 2013 presents New York City based guests trumpeter Roy Campbell and German drummer Klaus Kugel with three Amsterdam-located improvisers as part of the DoEK organization's annual Festival. Campbell, a stalwart of the NYC avant scene who died in 2014, gained early exposure with Jemeel Moondoc's Ensemble Muntu and went on to helm his own Pyramid Trio and co-lead the revered cooperative Other Dimensions In Music, among a host of other projects. He brings his fiery updating of ...
Continue ReadingMarta Warelis / Frank Rosaly / Aaron Lumley / John Dikeman: Sunday At De Ruimte
by Mark Corroto
Is it a pilgrimage or just magnetism that draws improvising artists to Amsterdam? If you've read Kevin Whitehead's book New Dutch Swing (Billboard Books, 1998), you'll understand the open atmosphere and creative jazz scene which began there in the 1960s. It was a scene sown by America's New Thing in free jazz, but also one that developed its own unique language that incorporated Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Amsterdam was also the intersection between the UK scene of Derek Bailey ...
Continue ReadingLuís Vicente / John Dikeman / William Parker / Hamid Drake: Goes Without Saying, But It's Got To Be Said
by Mark Corroto
It has been more than half a century since the oracles Albert Ayler and John Coltrane proclaimed their message of freedom to the people of earth. Please excuse the grandiosity of the above statement, but after those two giants passed, a shift in consciousness began to take hold. In the biography of William Parker Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021), Cisco Bradley relates how the passing of Ayler and Coltrane affected the young ...
Continue ReadingJohn Dikeman And The Origin Of The Species
by Mark Corroto
If we were to go searching for saxophonist John Dikeman's spirit animal, we might have to bypass beast for sapien. Let's just say his spirit animal is the father of punk, Iggy Pop. Like early music by The Stooges, Dikeman's sound makes reference to the music of both Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. It's a shame we cannot go back in time (he was born in 1983) to substitute Dikeman for saxophonist Steven Mackay on Fun House (Elektra, 1970). The ...
Continue ReadingJohn Dikeman / Luis Vicente / Hugo Antunes / Gabriel Ferrandini: Salão Brazil
by John Sharpe
Amsterdam-domiciled American saxophonist John Dikeman and Portuguese trumpeter Luis Vicente have become regular collaborators, although the only prior evidence on disc is their first meeting in Twenty One 4tet's Live At Zaal 100 (Not Two, 2016). For the limited edition LP Salão Brazil they have enlisted two of the brassman's countrymen in Belgian-based bassist Hugo Antunes (who may be familiar from some outstanding alliances with trumpeter Nate Wooley) and in demand drummer Gabriel Ferrandini from the RED Trio and Rodrigo ...
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