Jazz Articles about Powerhouse Sound

Powerhouse Sound: Oslo / Chicago: Breaks

by Troy Collins
March 13, 2007

This debut album by Ken Vandermark's aptly coined Powerhouse Sound arrives with a visceral one-two punch. More primal than his previous forays into rock and popular music forms, the ensemble rivals even his seminal quartet recordings from the early 1990s.

Vandermark conceived Powerhouse Sound in the summer of 2005 to explore composition focusing on the bass, rather than writing from the proverbial “top down." Inspired by the rhythms of James Brown, the dub experiments of Lee Perry, and ...