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Ethnographies of Jazz

What is jazz? Being or a becoming, tree or a sandstorm—Arian argues for the latter, presenting his readers ethnographies and not taxonomies of this universal, human enterprise in the column Ethnographies of Jazz.

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An Urban Myth: Chris Potter Circuits Quartet feat. Craig Taborn at Porto's Casa da Música

Read "An Urban Myth: Chris Potter Circuits Quartet feat. Craig Taborn at Porto's Casa da Música" reviewed by Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah


Circuits the Record, Circuits the Quartet.The record Circuits (Edition, 2019) makes use of production as a means to architecturally bring to bay today's average, one may say alienated jazz listener, the “grooveland" referenced by Potter merely an excuse and hardly the verdict in this trial. It is a covered walk 'round new-fashioned, urban currents—skintight, monasterial and modern. The quartet Circuits, on the other end, operates in a fully separate way. It does not negate the currents, even if ...

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Elder Ones, "From Untruth," and a Threat Called New York: An Essay

Read "Elder Ones, "From Untruth," and a Threat Called New York: An Essay" reviewed by Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah


If what we witness today; rabid expansion of capital and with it, growing class difference, and a renewed interest in Marx; if these were testimony to one thing, it would be Derrida's spook of a wager from his seminal Specters de Marx. Indeed, neo-liberal/conservative sham thinkers such as Fukuyama today find shelter no longer in Hegel, or Nietzsche, whose thorny crown has been casually re-abducted by the Right and moralist “blockheads," e.g. Peterson, but of all in Marx, this time ...

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Those from the Norte: pLoo at Café Casa da Música

Read "Those from the Norte: pLoo at Café Casa da Música" reviewed by Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah


Jazz and its many conformations rarely denote the multiplicity of sub-genres as such. Paulo Alexandre Pereira da Costa's pLoo attests this sharply enough to warrant its listeners a view entire and aggregate, and in the same extent, select and irregular, of jazz and its current praxis in Northern Portugal. The quintet, made up of wind and string players led by Costa on drums, is capable of derailing tableaus so obscurely, as in “Bêbado das onze" and “Pong," that tracing them ...

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Provenance, Mal de mer, Duration: Evan Parker and Peter Evans at Solilóquios in Porto

Read "Provenance, Mal de mer, Duration: Evan Parker and Peter Evans at Solilóquios in Porto" reviewed by Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah


Provenance Evan Parker needs little introduction. To the listener and to the critic, clearly, but above all to the formation of musical matter. The rudiments of his making are well obscured twenty seconds in after he enkindles the first note. He plays the saxophone durably--static, in deathlike stillness. It is easy, in fact, to mistake his enterprise with that of the snake charmer. After all, he speaks of “the great masters" when questioned about the more rigorous, disciplined composers of ...


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