Jazz Articles about Gutbucket

Gutbucket: Cascades and Collisions

by Gordon Marshall
June 21, 2011

Over its 12-year career, Gutbucket has resituated its various musical parts like the pieces of a Rubik's cube. The elements of that cube, the sonic strains, have remained similar--an amalgam of fuzz rock, jumpy jazz, post-serial classicism--but its panoply of shifting color has been redeployed in unique ways on each of the Brooklyn-based quartet's five CDs, starting with an emphasis on improvisation but gradually incorporating greater degrees of composing. It is not that it never arrives at ...

Gutbucket: A Modest Proposal

by Glenn Astarita
September 7, 2009

This multitasking quartet offers a sense of newness to the jazz realm by crossing borders and taking an aggressive, raucous and well-rehearsed stance. In theory, the band should capture the attention of the young and thoroughly hip, along with the adventurous music aficionados who yearn for a sense of musical excitement.

Gutbucket rocks the house as it aligns avant-garde metrics with snazzy jazz, and jazz-rock, while also integrating hardcore rock with an in-your-face mode of attack. Ty Citerman's ...

Gutbucket: Sludge Test

by Abe Pollack
May 26, 2006

The members of Gutbucket have never been satisfied with the moniker “jazz quartet," nor have they wanted to fit in with stereotypical rockers. Their sound, if it had to be categorized, should be filed under noir-jazz, or maybe klez-rock, but most likely squawk-thrash. This ambiguity shines in their third full-length album, Sludge Test. The record has moments of guitar-driven speed metal followed by abrupt changes to odd-meter funk beats, while Ken Thomson's signature raspy tone conjures up ...

Gutbucket: Sludge Test

by John Kelman
March 25, 2006

Ken Thomson, who manages the contemporary classical-focused Cantaloupe Music label, lives a double life playing saxophone for Gutbucket, a quartet whose influences primarily come from jazz and rock. That might seem oddly out of place, but Cantaloupe's output has been surprisingly diverse. Recent releases range from Alarm Will Sound's refreshing reinterpretation of Aphex Twin on Acoustica (2005) to various Bang on a Can projects, including a new look at minimalist Phillip Glass' 5ths (2004) and a Burmese collaboration, Meets Kyaw ...

Gutbucket: Sludge Test

by Mark Corroto
February 6, 2006

Gutbucket might be the possessed grandchildren of bandleader Spike Jones, except that in the three CDs they have produced, I've yet to hear a gunshot. This modernized version of the blender band has been done before by groups such as Naked City, Blood Duster, and Mr. Bungle, but not nearly as well. Like Spike Jones, this quartet is dead set on entertainment. Maybe they are more a modern Raymond Scott or Carl Stalling soundtrack to Ozzy Osbourne's life. ...

Gutbucket at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater

by Andrew Durkin
May 24, 2005

Gutbucket Barnsdall Gallery Theater Los Angeles, CA April 18, 2005

Someone recently hipped me to Joel Dorn's comment that “You haven't heard Monk until you've seen him. I must admit that I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to the sound / vision distinction. Although I love live jazz, I have always tried to “tune out (so to speak) the visual information of a live performance. There is a level of concentration ...

Gutbucket: Dry Humping the American Dream

by John Kelman
June 24, 2004

With a name like Gutbucket and an album title like Dry Humping the American Dream , one might expect a certain amount of irreverence--and one would be right. Gutbucket is nothing if not counter-culture, but for all their anarchist leanings they are actually a group of talented players who have chosen to combine rapidly-changing movement form reminiscent of early Zorn with a punk attitude. But don't let their chaotic, occasionally head-banging style fool you--these players are influenced as much by ...