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Jon Irabagon: Server Farm
by Vincenzo Roggero
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 ...
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by John Sharpe
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 ...
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by Dan McClenaghan
"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 ...
Continue ReadingJon Irabagon: Server Farm
by Mike Jurkovic
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 ...
Continue ReadingSilkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation
by Katchie Cartwright
Rhiannon Giddens is not afraid of big projects. American Railroad, the album, is part of a larger work, subtitled A Musical Journey of Reclamation, which Giddens initiated with the widely acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble, a diverse international collective of performers, improvisers and composers created by Yo Yo Ma. American Railroad digs into the building of America's transcontinental railway system, focusing on voices that have been missing from public narratives: voices of the laborers on whose backs the hard work fell, of ...
Continue ReadingMazz Swift: The 10000 Things: PRAISE SONGS for the iRiligious
by Gareth Thompson
The writer and critic Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) spoke of free jazz in terms of an essential and spiritual Blackness. Further, he described a return to collective improvisation as the “all-force put together." More vitally he suggested that free jazz reinforced the valuable memories of a people while at the same time creating new forms. This reasoning and sense of the “all-force" might apply to Juilliard-trained violinist Mazz Swift, who blends old praise and protest songs, electronica and mindfulness into their ...
Continue ReadingIngrid Laubrock: The Last Quiet Place
by Jerome Wilson
Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock always seems to search out new instrumental configurations for her music. This time out, she and her musical and life partner, drummer Tom Rainey, collaborate with a quartet of accomplished string players, guitarist Brandon Seabrook, violinist Mazz Swift, cellist Tomeka Reid, and bassist Michael Formanek. Together they create stimulating music which can be many things. At different times it sounds formal, urgent, placid, and violent. “Afterglow" and “Anticipation" explore some of the classical possibilities of ...
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