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Matt Moran Trio: Return Trip
by Jerome Wilson
Vibraphonist Matt Moran has carved out a varied musical career for himself. Among other things, he is the leader of the party band Slavic Soul Party! and a member of John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet. He also leads the atmospheric jazz trio on this CD with Gary Versace on Hammond organ and Tom Rainey on drums. This band rewrites the notion of what an organ trio can sound like. Where a similar group with this instrumentation might be extroverted ...
Continue ReadingBrian Shankar Adler: Fourth Dimension
by Troy Dostert
A percussionist with fierce rhythmic dynamism and a multiplicity of ideas, Brian Shankar Adler has steadily assembled a formidable body of work over the last several years, despite being relatively under-recognized. Much of this music has been released incrementally, through digitally downloaded EPs, perhaps attenuating its impact. But Adler should receive much more visibility with Fourth Dimension, a full-length album that pulls together the best of his work since 2015, and it offers a strong portrait of one of the ...
Continue ReadingSlavic Soul Party: Live at Barbes: Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite
by Chris M. Slawecki
In the late 1990s, visionary percussionist Matt Moran founded Slavic Soul Party, a brass band designed to stretch the boundaries between Eastern and Western European traditional music until those boundaries snap. More than two decades and twenty members later, “New York's Official #1 Brass Band for BalkanSoulGypsyFunk" fully realizes this vision by performing one of Duke Ellington's most famous Billy Strayhorn collaborations: 1963's The Far East Suite, around which Ellington organized a global tour schedule through the Middle East, South ...
Continue ReadingSlavic Soul Party: Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite
by Angelo Leonardi
Nel jazz contemporaneo la reinterpretazione delle opere passate avviene in due modi diversi. Da un lato c'è chi privilegia la riproposizione fedele dell'originale, partendo da una prospettiva a grandi linee accademica (Wynton Marsalis) fino alla riproduzione letterale di ogni aspetto melodico, timbrico e ritmico (come ha fatto il gruppo Mostly Other People Do The Killing con Kind of Blue). Dall'altro abbiamo la reinterpretazione personale, che può conservare in tutto o in parte l'identità dell'originale oppure creare qualcosa di diverso.
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