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Dave Sewelson, Aruan Ortiz, Neil Charles & Rich Brown
by Maurice Hogue
Check out the final track and you'll hear why Toronto's Rich Brown is hailed as one of the finest electric bassists on the planet. His new solo album, Nyaeba, is filled with over-the-moon technique and electronic wizardry. English bassist Neil Charles' debut, Dark Days , is fueled by the words of James Baldwin, while guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi continues to explore his fascination with the compositions of Tim Berne. Another solo exploration comes from pianist Aruan Ortiz, continuing to dig deep ...
Continue ReadingSteve Coleman and Five Elements: PolyTropos / Of Many Turns
by Troy Dostert
Perpetually churning rhythms, telepathic detours, unexpected juxtapositions: these are the stock-in-trade of Steve Coleman's Five Elements. And once again the intrepid alto saxophonist's inimitable approach surfaces on PolyTropos / Of Many Turns, a generous, two-disc helping of music that manages to be both intricately complex and fundamentally accessible at the same time. With two live dates captured in France in March of 2024, one can easily appreciate the infectious energy Coleman's group can generate, with rhythmic and melodic permutations galore, ...
Continue ReadingPluto Juice: Pluto Juice
by Glenn Astarita
The EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) was popularized in the 1980s by the late sax great Michael Brecker, and allegedly is a difficult instrument to learn because the buttons are touch sensitive and its sound bank possesses the characteristics of multiple woodwind instruments. Moreover, the EWI contains a controller and a sound module and is not simply an electronic sax device. But highly regarded saxophonist Dayna Stephens seems to have surmounted any hurdles and conveys a rather all-inclusive scope on this ...
Continue ReadingLara Solnicki: The One And The Other
by Alberto Bazzurro
Questo è il terzo album, dopo Whose Shadow?, del 2014, e A Meadow in December del 2011, a nome della cantante canadese (di Toronto) Lara Solnicki, presenza tutto sommato piuttosto anomala nel variegato panorama delle jazz singers per svariati motivi, che cerchiamo di sintetizzare. Anzitutto lei canta e dice (si definisce cantante-compositrice-poetessa), ma non su un terreno contemporaneo-aleatorio-concreto, come si potrebbe immaginare, bensì lungo brani perfettamente predefiniti, per attraversare i quali si affida alle cure di gruppi numerosi (ieri un ...
Continue ReadingLara Solnicki: The One And The Other
by Jerome Wilson
Lara Solnicki is a Canadian poet, composer and singer who combines all her talents strikingly on this album, marrying her words to a dense fabric of free-flowing jazz and improvisation. Solnicki bends her voice well to the requirements of each composition. On the singsong rhythm of “The Embrace," she sounds sensitive but slightly detached against falling piano and electronic whispers, while, on the cinematic construction of “Bit Her Sweet Christopher Street," her voice climbs through a busy tangle ...
Continue ReadingLara Solnicki: The One And The Other
by C. Michael Bailey
Among feelings are nervousness and anxiety. While synonymous in any thesaurus, the two words differ in the same way that thankfulness and gratitude differ, that is, in focus. Nervousness and thankfulness often have no focus, no definite object creating them. Anxiety and gratitude are those feelings, those reactions to the specific. Something clearly gives rise to them. With regards to anxiety and disquiet, Canadian vocalist and composer Lara Solnicki uses “free jazz" and poetry as the stimulus for generating a ...
Continue ReadingErnesto Cervini: Tetrahedron
by C. Michael Bailey
Matthew Zapruder, in his book Why Poetry (HarperCollins, 2017), draws an informative parallel between reading poetry and listening to classical music: ...the act of treating poetry like a difficult activity one needs to master can easily perpetrate ... mistaken, and pervasive, ideas about poetry that make it hard to read in the first place. Like classical music, poetry has an unfortunate reputation for requiring special training and education to appreciate.... This same reasoning applies to jazz, ...
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