Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Black Music Disaster: Black Music Disaster

3

Black Music Disaster: Black Music Disaster

By

View read count
Black Music Disaster: Black Music Disaster
The intriguingly titled Black Music Disaster is part of Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, which for over a decade has documented numerous cross-stylistic collaborations between artists from different genres. This live concert recording, taped in February 2010 at London's Cafe Oto, features a virtual indie summit meeting, presenting renowned avant-garde jazz pianist Matthew Shipp playing Farfisa organ, Spiritualized's founding singer/songwriter J Spaceman and Spring Heel Jack co-founder John Coxon on electric guitars, as well as esteemed drummer Steve Noble.

Jokingly named in reference to a negative review of a recent concert by Anthony Braxton, William Parker and Cecil Taylor, Black Music Disaster is anything but. Their audacious self-titled debut consists of a single uninterrupted 38 minute improvisation that ebbs and flows between subtle shifts in mood, rarely settling into anything less than sweltering. Shipp's phantasmagoric organ opens the session, its ominous cinematic swells setting the stage for a bracing otherworldly excursion that rarely returns to terra firma. Noble's sporadic drum fills subsequently introduce droning waves of feedback from Spaceman and Coxon's distorted tremolo guitars that merely hint at the sonic maelstrom to come.

The remainder of the date vacillates between dynamic extremes; driving backbeats, psychedelic fretwork and hypnotic organ vamps alternate with brief rubato interludes awash in pithy kaleidoscopic detail. As testimony to the participants' skills—not only as keen improvisers, but as attentive listeners—the proceedings avoid drifting into chaos despite the high level of amplification and feedback, with numerous examples of focused interplay to be heard. There are no individual solos to speak of however as the quartet embraces a freewheeling collective spirit, subtly inspired by earlier travelers of the spaceways, including Sun Ra, Sonny Sharrock and especially, Tony Williams' Lifetime with Larry Young.

Established in 2000, Thirsty Ear's Blues Series strived to change the face of modern jazz, but for every successful collaboration starring hip-hop heavyweights like Antipop Consortium, DJ Spooky and Mike Ladd, there were ample examples of mismatched pairings with DJs and producers whose concepts weren't quite as refined. Occupying the nebulous middle ground between jazz and rock, Black Music Disaster makes amends for the label's prior indulgences, presenting an uncompromising record from a compatible group of artists making compelling music that transcends categorization.

Track Listing

Black Music Disaster.

Personnel

Matthew Shipp: Farfisa organ; J Spaceman: electric guitar; Steve Noble: drums; John Coxon: electric guitar.

Album information

Title: Black Music Disaster | Year Released: 2012 | Record Label: Thirsty Ear Recordings

Tags

Comments


PREVIOUS / NEXT




Support All About Jazz

Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

More

Eternal Moments
Yoko Yates
From "The Hellhole"
Marshall Crenshaw
Tramonto
John Taylor

Popular

Old Home/New Home
The Brian Martin Big Band
My Ideal
Sam Dillon
Ecliptic
Shifa شفاء - Rachel Musson, Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders
Lado B Brazilian Project 2
Catina DeLuna & Otmaro Ruíz

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.