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Melanie Dyer
Marshall Allen's Ghost Horizons: Live in Philadelphia
by Mark Corroto
In 2025, the Collegium Cardinalium, or College of Cardinals--a body formed in the Middle Ages--convened a conclave in Rome to elect a new Pope for the Catholic Church. Nearly five centuries before the inception of such conclaves, Tibetan Buddhists established their own process of succession by searching for the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, often discovered in the form of a child. These spiritual traditions of succession are vital for preserving the identity, rituals and philosophies of their institutions. Each ...
Continue ReadingMichael Bisio: NuMBq
by Mark Corroto
Michael Bisio borrows the phrase “and now for something completely different" from Monty Python's Flying Circus to describe his new quartet, NuMBq. Joining the bassist is longtime collaborator Jay Rosen on drums, along with two musicians traditionally rooted in classical music: violist Melanie Dyer and English horn player Marianne Osiel. With NuMBq, Bisio blurs the line between chamber music and jazz--but let's not confine this session to the Third Stream category. Early jazz-classical hybrids, such as Charlie Parker ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra Arkestra: Living Sky
by Stefano Merighi
Mentre la Enterplanetary Koncepts continua a sfornare inediti della Sun Ra Arkestra, il roccioso Marshall Allen--che va per i 100 il prossimo anno...-riesce a concepire di tanto in tanto nuove produzioni. Dopo l'apprezzato Swirling, ecco Living Sky, inciso a Philadelphia nel 2021, ancora sotto lo choc del COVID. E appare proprio come una seduta di musica dolcemente terapeutica questa raccolta di brani tenui, riposanti, deliziosi. Il gruppo raduna 19 elementi, che sotto la guida di Allen imbastiscono una ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky
by Mark Corroto
In 2022, Sun Ra has been gone nearly thirty years, but thanks to maestro Marshall Allen his Arkestra has survived. Allen had been a member of Sun Ra's band since the late 1950s and it has been under Allen's leadership since 1995. Fans that have enjoyed the Arkestra in concert certainly hoped for the band to record and it wasn't until the splendid Swirling (Strut) was released in 2020 that wish was fulfilled. The Marshall Allen-led the Arkestra's second offering, ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky
by Chris May
When Sun Ra aficionado and Omni Sound Records founder Ahmet Ulug reached out to Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen to commission a new album from the band, he gave Allen a tight brief. Ulug said that he wanted something: “Spiritual and hypnotic... down tempo, melodic and grooving... Music that is accessible and healing." Even though the crisis the world endured in 2020 and 2021 called out for such music, Ulug's directions to the veteran sonic-warrior may seem ...
Continue ReadingWeFreeStrings: Love In The Form Of Sacred Outrage
by Mark Corroto
History does repeat itself, violist Melanie Dyer draws from the same well of inspiration as Max Roach's We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite (Candid, 1961). Maybe better put, history reveals Martin Luther King's arc of the moral universe has only bent a few degrees in the past sixty years. With Love In The Form Of Sacred Outrage, the ensemble WeFreeStrings follows up their debut Fulfillment (self released, 2018). Dyer, a classically trained violist, found inspiration in the music ...
Continue ReadingWilliam Parker: Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World
by Karl Ackermann
If multi-instrumentalist/composer William Parker's ten-CD Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World suggests a cohesive, high concept plan, it is something more. The beautifully packaged clamshell box set is comprised of mutually exclusive projects—one dating back ten years—with some common themes. There is an overall dedication of the music to “all people of the world who are searching for freedom...." Pandemic downtime resulted in Parker's accumulating enough material for many of these albums. Viewed as a whole, ...
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