Jazz Articles about Matt Mitchell

About Matt Mitchell

Album Review

Quando un agitatore musicale come Jon Irabagon, mente tra le più aperte, corrosive, imprevedibili e significative della scena jazzistica statunitense mette insieme un tentetto da paura per esplorare fatti e misfatti dell'intelligenza artificiale, curiosità e aspettative sono ai massimi livelli. E questo Server Farm le soddisfa pienamente, ennesima prova della grandezza di un musicista onnivoro in grado di esaltare ed esaltarsi in tutta la gamma di formazioni messe in campo negli ultimi quindici anni. Dal sax solo di ...

Album Review

Ingrid Laubrock: Purposing The Air

Read "Purposing The Air" reviewed by Thierry De Clemensat

by Thierry De Clemensat
April 13, 2025

Purposing The Air is a recording of extreme quality, though it is undoubtedly aimed at an informed audience, one more inclined toward contemporary classical music. While some pieces carry faint echoes of jazz, listening to this album is akin to stepping into a museum to attend a recital. Each artist is striving for excellence on every level: musicality, interpretation and even theatricality. It is, without a doubt, a powerful creation. To fully grasp the artistic approach behind this ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
March 7, 2025

Artificial Intelligence would have a hard job pinning down saxophonist Jon Irabagon's defining characteristics. When a player is as talented as Irabagon, who can turn his hand to almost any style, sometimes the challenge is to find a focus that stimulates. On Server Farm, Irabagon has taken the notion of AI and the ever increasing prevalence of the digital world as his casus belli. Not that he uses AI himself in composing the album, rather as the PR reveals, he ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
February 28, 2025

"The times they are a-changin.'" Bob Dylan said that in 1964. He was right. In 2025, they are still changing, perhaps most notably with the emergence of artificial intelligence. That previously slow creep--outlined so accurately in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, paired with Stanely Kubrick's movie of the same name--will build to a tipping point leading to an implosion. The takeover is inevitable. The only way to address it is through the arts. This is ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
February 19, 2025

Warning! Warning! Heads up! Spoiler alert! Server Farm has the potential to take your head to some random places. Some alarming (as all artists should be these days), Some cacophonous. Some claustrophobic. Others freeing, fleeting, fervent. Server Farm, saxophonist/composer Jon Irabagon's heatedly precise and prescient head-on clash with the threat of AI blisters the binary codes and algorithms of the connected world (which makes us all individual heads of the Hydra) both surgically and haphazardly, letting it all ...

Liner Notes

Dustin Carlson: Air Ceremony

by Dustin Carlson
January 28, 2025

Dream-time, work-time, play-time, ceremony-time, time counted and time uncountable... Time like a desert with sinuous lines unbroken; like a forest with trees that mark space, territory, barlines; or Time like an exit ramp, a cloverleaf highway interchange with its traffic, speed shifts, and the roar of engines... The time it takes a fern to grow, an egg to dry, a bullet to fire, a shoreline to erode ... or a body to touch the ground after a leap; or a ...

Album Review

Anna Webber: simpletrio2000

Read "simpletrio2000" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
January 13, 2025

Although the name of saxophonist and flautist Anna Webber's trio with pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer John Hollenbeck might suggest something easy to understand, there is nothing straightforward about their output. Notwithstanding the title, Simpletrio2000 constitutes the band's third release (or fourth if you include the first installment of the double discIdiom (Pi, 2021)), that arrives some ten years after the outfit's eponymous debut. Like much of Webber's work, the 11 cuts here are intricately plotted, even with only three ...