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Jazz Articles about Joshua Abrams

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Album Review

Natural Information Society: Since Time is Gravity

Read "Since Time is Gravity" reviewed by Danen Jobe


The concept of trance is one of the oldest in the world. Many older music forms embraced trance for their rituals. One is the Gnawa musical tradition originating in Kano, Nigeria and Morocco, which uses double and triple notes repeated sometimes for hours to induce a religious state while the singer sings stories of spirits. It is played on a gimbri (aka sintir or hajhuj), a three stringed instrument featuring one short and two long goat gut strings over a ...

4
Album Review

Rempis / Abrams / Ra + Jim Baker: Scylla

Read "Scylla" reviewed by Mark Corroto


Avreeayl Ra sets the tone for this entire live set as his voice and mbira open Scylla, “this is for all the survivors." According to Greek mythology Scylla was a beautiful woman who turned into a monster with four eyes and six long snaky necks with heads, each containing three rows of shark's teeth and 12 tentacle legs plus six dog's heads wrapped her waist. Recorded deep into the Covid-19 pandemic, in July 2021, at Chicago's Elastic Arts, one would ...

6
Album Review

Joshua Abrams’ Cloud Script: Cloud Script

Read "Cloud Script" reviewed by Mark Corroto


You can take bassist Joshua Abrams out of his Natural Information Society, but you can't take the Natural Information Society out of Abrams. His long- lived ensemble, which traffics in long-form psychedelic environmental music, has made a permanent imprint on just about everything Abrams does. In bands led by Nicole Mitchell, Hamid Drake, Dave Rempis, and Rob Mazurek, Abrams' acoustic bass sound is hypnotic and mesmerizing. The same can be said for this one-off Cloud Script quartet. The ...

4
Album Review

Joshua Abrams Quartet: Unknown Known

Read "Unknown Known" reviewed by John Sharpe


"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns--there are things we do not know we don't know." Strangely, Donald Rumsfeld didn't mention the unknown known: the things we don't acknowledge that we know. While the sleeve notes contain no reference to the former Secretary of State, the choice of title for the ...


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