Home » Jazz Articles » Miles Okazaki
Jazz Articles about Miles Okazaki
Tutto Monk: l'omaggio di Miles Okazaki
by Giuseppe Segala
Monk con la chitarra? Perché no. Si era posto la stessa sferica domanda Elliott Sharp pochi anni fa, registrando in solo con l'acustica l'album Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk! per l'etichetta Clean Feed. Si trattava di una scelta di cinque brani, elaborati con il criterio della lunga divagazione e riflessione geniale. Inoltre, il discorso era stato affrontato con altre strumentazioni aggiunte alla sei corde: ci aveva pensato tra gli altri il grande Paul Motian, prima affidando il compito a Bill Frisell ...
Continue ReadingMiles Okazaki: Work: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk
by Mark Corroto
The best way to embark upon Miles Okazaki's six-volume Work: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk is the same manner you might approach Herman Melville's American masterpiece Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Like Moby-Dick with its 135 chapters (and epilogue), Work is a Brobdingnagian accomplishment. Okazaki performs the complete Thelonious Monk songbook. 70 tunes in total. The accomplishment here is not the 4 hours and 44 minutes of music, but Okazaki's dedication to the Monk oeuvre. The only other ...
Continue ReadingMiles Okazaki: Trickster
by Hrayr Attarian
There is nothing deceptive about guitarist Miles Okazaki's Trickster. It is simply an elegantly crafted work that engages with its narrative quality and its darkly hued, intriguing texture. On his fourth release as a leader the New York based Okazaki leads a quartet that consists of two of his bandmates from altoist Steve Coleman's Five Elements, bassist Anthony Tidd and drummer Sean Rickman. Dynamic pianist Craig Taborn rounds up the group. Okazaki and Taborn open the album on ...
Continue ReadingMiles Okazaki: Trickster
by Nicola Negri
Semplicità e immediatezza sono spesso gli elementi principali di un progetto ben riuscito. Altre volte, la complessità della ricerca teorica più rigorosa serve a illustrare una precisa visione musicale. I dischi che riescono a coniugare in maniera convincente questi aspetti sono rari, e Trickster è uno di questi. Il chitarrista Miles Okazaki, membro stabile dei Five Elements di Steve Coleman, ha reclutato per questo progetto il bassista Anthony Tidd e il batterista Sean Rickman, altri due veterani dei ...
Continue ReadingMiles Okazaki: Trickster
by Glenn Astarita
Guitarist Miles Okazaki (Steve Coleman, Dan Weiss) is a meticulous artist and visionary partly due to his thorny and geometrically inclined theme-building practices. With ECM recording artist Craig Taborn sharing the frontline, the guitarist often makes complex storylines sound effortless by design, paralleled by the quartet's symmetrical pulses and deterministic gait. The band also gels to odd-metered bump and grind motifs and linear progressions amid succinctly stated unison lines. According to Okazaki, “The Calendar" ..." is a song ...
Continue ReadingMiles Okazaki: Cleaning the Mirror
by Daniel Lehner
In the backyard of his home in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, guitarist Miles Okazaki has spent time constructing a multifaceted backyard/garden filled with overhanging plants, stone walkways and a wooden pavilion surrounding a table and benches. The slats of the pavilion's floor seem to have been crafted merely for aesthetic purposes, but there's another process at work: the proportions of the ground structure are 144 in. x 89 in., which are, respectively, the 12th and 13th integer of the Fibonacci sequence ...
Continue ReadingMiles Okazaki: Figurations
by Raul d'Gama Rose
Guitarist Miles Okazaki's Figurations is a fascinating document of how musical invention takes place on the spur of the moment. It is not a mad conglomeration of notes that come out in jagged clusters, but a mellifluous harmolodic excursion by four spectacular musicians as they begin to create music on each of their instruments, with their own ideas flowing organically, yet directed by the composer, Okazaki, who defines how the melody should sound by stating its antecedents and basic idea. ...
Continue Reading
