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About Lou Grassi
Lou Grassi: Live at The Guelph Festival, The Dope and The Ghost (Live in Vienna) & Shapes and Shadows
by Marc Medwin
Marshall Allen/Lou Grassi Live at The Guelph Festival Cadence Jazz 2007 The Nu Band The Dope and The Ghost (Live in Vienna) Not Two 2007 Martin Speicher/Georg Wolf/Lou Grassi Shapes and Shadows Clean Feed 2007
Lou Grassi is one of the few drummers ...
Continue Reading...Marshall Allen / Lou Grassi: Live At The Guelph Festival
by Budd Kopman
Marshall Allen and Lou Grassi make quite a duo. On Live At The Guelph Festival, they play unprepared and unrehearsed music which, due to their skill, has a remarkable degree of coherence. Admittedly, this is free or avant-garde jazz, requiring coherence to be understood within that framework. Allen is currently leading the Sun Ra Arkestra, after both Sun Ra (1993) and John Gilmore (1995) died, while Grassi has become something of the house percussionist at the CIMP ...
Continue Reading...The Nu Band: The Dope And The Ghost
by Mark Corroto
Not easily pigeonholed, the music of The Nu Band negotiates the boundaries of free-bop, improvisation, chamber, and traditional jazz with bias toward none. That cannot be said of the band's politics. Giving no quarter to the current Bush administration, they take our 'king' to task from the opening notes of the disc's centerpiece--"BushWhacked.
Saxophonist Mark Whitecage originally recorded BushWhacked: A Spoken Opera (Acoustics ELE, 2005), a Dubya denunciation with his Bi-Coastal Orchestra, a band he leads with ...
Continue Reading...Martin Speicher - Georg Wolf - Lou Grassi: Shapes and Shadows
by AAJ Italy Staff
“Please, Confirm!“, il lungo brano iniziale, possiede la lucida e geometrica architettura del classico trio di Ornette Coleman e la visionarietà espressiva del primo Ayler, e determina le coordinate entro le quali si muove l’intero Shapes and Shadows. Il disco licenziato dal trio Speicher/Wolf/Grassi è fedele al credo della libera improvvisazione e, inutile a dirsi, basa gran parte della propria forza attrattiva sull’interplay serrato e telepatico dei musicisti e sulla natura selvaggia delle improvvisazioni. Senza dimenticare la capacità di sorprendere ...
Continue Reading...Lou Grassi's PoBand: Infinite POtential
by AAJ Italy Staff
Questa band ha ormai superato i dieci anni di attivita' e ha purtroppo anche cambiato personale a causa della scomparsa del grande contrabbassista Wilbur Morris, qui sostituito da Adam Lane. Su una serie di incisioni per la CIMP si sono alternati degli ospiti importanti, tutti sassofonisti: Marshall Allen, Joseph Jarman e John Tchicai. Dopo anni di silenzio la band si è di nuovo ricostituita con il ritorno dall'Europa del trombettista Herb Robertson e con il trombonista Dave Taylor al posto ...
Continue Reading...Lou Grassi's Po Band: Infinite POtential
by Robert Iannapollo
Drummer-for-all-seasons Lou Grassi can do it all. But when left to his own devices with his PO band, he seems to prefer sessions that are mostly improvised. Grassi's latest PO Band project, Infinite POtential (the group's sixth release), finds Grassi and company going back to free improvisation as their MO, with a couple of new members--bassist Adam Lane and bass trombonist David Taylor, both no strangers to the band's methodology. Add two band veterans, trumpeter Herb Robertson and clarinetist Perry ...
Continue Reading...Lou Grassi Quartet: Avanti Galoppi
by Germein Linares
With over thirty years of dedication to jazz, drummer Lou Grassi should be better known. In the netherworld of jazz, though, and its even darker region of free jazz, no one seems capable of escaping obscurity, a sort of reverse vampire state. Avanti Galoppi brings Grassi closer to the light, closer to the recognition he deserves via the album's seven engaging tunes. Employing the skilled services of Herb Robertson on trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn, Rob Brown on alto saxophone, and ...
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