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Various Artists: Freedom of the City 2005
by John Eyles
An eagerly anticipated annual release, the Freedom of the City CD is an essential complement to the live festival, providing the opportunity to check recalled perceptions against objective evidence and to fill in unavoidable gaps, but mostly--whether or not one was there--to catch some great music. Largely for financial reasons, the 2005 London festival was a scaled down version, running only for one day rather than the three days of recent years, and shifting venue to the Red Rose Club ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Impulsive! Revolutionary Jazz Reworked
by Troy Collins
As a musical form that skirts the line between popular entertainment and highbrow art, jazz has always found itself embroiled in aesthetic controversy. As such, it has inevitably had its share of run-ins with those who would see fit to keep it “pure." But jazz is not a pure art form, it's one of the most refreshingly impure art forms imaginable. Parasitic adaptability is what has enabled it to persevere in the face of many challenges, economic, technological and societal.
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Higher Ground: Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert
by Ernest Barteldes
On September 17, 2005, Jazz at Lincoln Center brought together an ensemble of musicians responding to Wynton Marsalis' call to stage a benefit for victims of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The document of that event is this CD, in which well-known mainstream stars share the stage with more obscure names, performing modern and traditional jazz, folk, gospel, zydeco and other genres--a mix that pretty much embodies the spirit of the city that Marsalis calls “the true American melting pot on ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Impulsive! Revolutionary Jazz Reworked
by David A. Cobb
The problem with remixes--and electronic music in general--is repetition. More often than not, a particular song may have so much going on, especially if it's jazz, that artists who attempt remixes stick with a minimalist approach that ends up rehashing the same beats, the same phrases, and the same samples to the end.
Impulsive!, for the most part, is no exception. Despite its all-star lineup--on both sides of the board--many of the songs lose their hook halfway through. The worst ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Rembetika: Songs Of The Greek Underground 1925-1947
by Chris May
Flamenco, fado and tango are firm fixtures on the world music jukebox, but their close cultural equivalent, Greek rembetika, is overdue on the playlist. In Greece itself, roots artists and audiences are rediscovering the tradition in a big way, and a new generation of singers and instrumentalists is emerging to take the music forward. The rest of the world is sure to pick up on the unruly magic sooner or later.
Rembetika began on the margins of society--specifically in illegal ...
Continue ReadingImpulsive! Revolutionary Jazz Reworked
by Michael McCaw
Various Artists Impulsive! Revolutionary Jazz Reworked Impulse! 2005
Remix projects in general have more than their fair share of naysayers. And where often the crux of their arguments center around the issue of taking an established piece of art and adding unneeded elements or simply implying these projects are only available because of materialistic gains; there is the often overlooked fact that these reconstructions or remixes are created out of respect for the originals ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Soupsongs Live: The Music of Robert Wyatt
by John Kelman
Canterbury-associated singer/songwriter Robert Wyatt's recorded output, since an accident that left him paralysed from the waist down in the mid-1970s shut down his ability to play the conventional drum kit, is hardly what anyone would call jazz by any standard definition. But it's important to recognize that, while he was always the more song-oriented member of the classic Soft Machine line-up of the late-1960s and early-1970s, he was as jazz-informed as the rest of the group. His first solo album, ...
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