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Espoo Big Band: Blood Red
by Jack Bowers
If the music on Blood Red, the eleventh album by Finland's world-class Espoo Big Band, sounds more Middle Eastern than Scandinavian, there's a reason for that. It was inspired, writes composer/arranger Mikko Hassinen, by 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's book, My Name Is Red, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul. The music “doesn't describe or explain the story or the characters," Hassinen writes. “Rather, it is a reflection of the different feelings evoked by the novel," and its lyric influences are largely ...
read moreEspoo Big Band: Espoo Suite
by Jack Bowers
Almost forty years after its inception in 1980, Finland's world-class Espoo Big Band and composer / arranger Marzi Nyman have recorded an often brash and always impressive salute to their home base, the appropriately named Espoo Suite. “This is my attempt to describe [the city]," Nyman writes, “through free-associative composing." The word “free" aptly expresses Nyman's approach to the task, as the music he espouses, even as it nods to a traditional rhythmic and melodic core, is explicitly free-wheeling and ...
read moreSväng: Hauptbahnhof
by Anthony Shaw
From the outset, Sväng's eighth album Hauptbahnhof evokes a bygone age of often gilded life, leisured strolls, and acoustic instrumentation. Or is it just the evocative sound of their four harmonicas that immediately conjures marching men, wartime truces and so forth? In any case this album of idiosyncratic tunes, and one song, does more than its best to show that four professionals with their combined harmonic range of over six octaves, can take the harmonica anywhere on the musical spectrum. ...
read moreNenad Vasilic Trio: Wet Paint
by Nenad Georgievski
Wet Paint or “fresh paint" symbolizes the formation of the new band or the trio led by soulful bassist, producer and composer Nenad Vasilic who continues to build on the variety steam generated from his previous releases. Here he explores the trio format accompanied by pianist/keyboardist Bojan Z, who finds himself in the role of a sideman. Actually, Bojan Z has lent his talent on Vasilic's album Seven where he was a guest on just two tracks. At one time, ...
read moreNenad Vasilic: The Art of the Balkan Bass
by Nenad Georgievski
Solo playing routinely interrogates virtually every assumption one can have about music and its function. It is also the most demanding discipline in improvised music. Here, none of the well known clichés apply: there are no “dialogues," no “sparring" or contention with a partner, no call and response. So far, there has been a plethora of pianists, keyboardists, guitarists, violinists, harpists who have the wherewithal to accompany themselves, either harmonically and/or rhythmically, and to play countermelodies or contrasting lines. Sometimes ...
read moreNenad Vasilic: Seven
by Nenad Georgievski
In the long, well-intended history of aligning the spontaneity of jazz with sounds, rhythms and harmonies of various folk musics, the predicament lies in finding the linkages between two disparate idioms without sacrificing mutual integrity. Bassist and composer Nenad Vasilić tackles this issue in a very distinct way as he successfully marries the festive folk sounds of his native Nish (southern Serbia) with the jazz music to which he has devoted his life.A resident of Vienna, Vasilić is ...
read moreThe Green Violinist: More Thrill & Never Ending Blessings
by Glenn Astarita
This Belgian progressive-rock outfit's debut frames its moniker on the title of artist Marc Chagall's The Green Violinist. Lead vocalist Vincent Dufresne derived inspiration from the painting after wading through some personal issues in 2003. The artist states that upon hearing the Canadian punk/post-rock band Silver Mount Zion's “13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round the Side of Your Bed," coupled with his initial viewing of the Chagall piece, ..."created a moment of pure delight." Otherwise, many of these works are built ...
read moreCarmen Souza: Protegid
by Chris M. Slawecki
One often hears the expression, “It's all over the map." But it's rarely used been more truthfully or appropriately than when applied to Protegid, the third album by vocalist Carmen Souza, born in Lisbon, of Cape Verdean descent, and now residing in London. Singing in a colorful, eclectic Portuguese-based Creole, Souza illuminates, stretches, and snaps back the elastic connections between Latin, African and Arabic music, American jazz and the music of Cape Verde.Souza conclusively proves that the “world ...
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