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Content by tag "Gordon Marshall"
Lou Cohen: Opening the Door
In his cushy, classy, elegant two-story home just outside of Central Square in Cambridge, MA, Lou Cohen introduces his Symphony 5: from a laptop, jammed together fragments of elegant new music unfold, spaced out so that breath can enter in the interstices... Then the sound of roiling, rolling violins getting impacted: all is mellow and peaceful ...
read moreThe Business of 'Trane
Carlos Santana turned me on to him
in an article in Guitar Player magazine
I read at the Hingham library,
at 14: spiritual center
of his Baja brain,
and mine now,
for 35 years,
in Boston, in the rain
after a storm...
the storm--it lasted years,
Jazz and Poetry: Impacted Gems
The poetry of the Beats, the New York school and the Black Mountain school, as well as the jazz poets, all share a particularly heavy rhythmic feel and an earthy, gritty imagery that creates a kind of syncopation within itself. The scenes dance and bump up against each other, cutting and rubbing up against the beat. ...
read moreConcepts of Pain: The Stuff of the Sixties
This chapter is an excerpt from Naked Mind: On Music and Power, a work in progress by All About Jazz contributor Gordon Marshall.
It is said that the '60s ended in 1974, with Richard Nixon's resignation. On the one hand, there was nothing left to believe in. On the other, there was ...
The Rotten Apples: Beach Party at the Orchard
The Rotten Apples, “the tightest out-of-tune band in the world," had an antecedent in guitarist Keith Waters' Belmont High School band (Belmont is a town just north of Boston). Even that early evolutionary ancestor of the current band blew effortless attitude in the face of the powers that be. Waters remembers playing a party at the ...
read moreNovember (for Yoko Miwa)
On the ebony off-keys, your hands,
your head in a veil of black mist, tonic
to your turquoise evening gown.
Poised as a turtle dove on an eave,
you press an index finger on the ivory,
liberating a passel of scales zooming
down like falcons in a swarm,
Yoko Miwa: New Star in an Old Sky
Self-effacing but with healthy ambition--and genuinely glamorous--pianist Yoko Miwa is a shimmering study in contrasts. Her music is loyal to sources and roots, yet it is fresh and sexy. Everything is in balance in her work. On a most elemental level she is like a graceful hostess at a grand party, catering to the desires of ...
read moreBlack Sage (for Henry Grimes)
I have seen the stage lights play
the sly sagacity of Henry's smile:
the lightning on his lips, decades
dark with spattered starlight
coming back to his eyes.
To win words from that smile
that opens like a jackknife
drawing blood from parchment
spurting ...
Gutbucket: Cascades and Collisions
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, ...
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A Lousy Day In Harlem by Ed Palermo
