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Cortex: Avant-Garde Party Music
ByAvant-Garde Party Music is the quartet's fifth release and it follows last year's critical success Live In New York (Clean Feed. 2016). Keeping with its title, the music is a celebration, a soirée, and a jamboree. The obvious connect-the-dots here is to Ornette Coleman's early quartet with Don Cherry. The music also evokes the energy of Charlie Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, back in the old post-war American Blue Zone days. It starts with the vitality of Nilssen's drumming. His muscular attack on "(if you were) Mac Davis" ignites Alberts' tenor to blow Peter Brötzmann-like notes into the vortex of the piece before the music jump-switches to locomotive rocker. The party Cortex throws has nothing though to do with mayhem. The compositions, all by Johansson, are exacting and precise. "Grinder" opens with a good-natured theme before popping the cork of energy music where both saxophone and trumpet excise jazz demons. Same modus operandi for (of course ) "Chaos." The insistence of the music yields to an orderly disorder, things disentangle only to be combed out in the end. To be a party band the quartet is mandated to bring the happiness. Indeed they do. Blue zone bohemians.
Track Listing
Grinder; Chaos; Waltz; (if You Where) Mac Davis; Disturbance; Obverse/Reverse; Perception; Off Course.
Personnel
Cortex
band / ensemble / orchestraThomas Johansson: trumpet; Kristoffer Berre Alberts: saxophones; Ola Høyer: bass; Gard Nilssen: drums.
Album information
Title: Avant-Garde Party Music | Year Released: 2017 | Record Label: Clean Feed Records
Comments
About Cortex
Instrument: Band / ensemble / orchestra
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