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Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack)
by Mark Corroto
Do not expect The Criterion Collection to reissue the 1974 film Space Is The Place anytime soon. It is though, a cult classic in the truest sense of the word. Sun Ra and his Arkestra had been at the forefront of avant-garde music, developing and refining his vision since the 1950s. Today listeners are most likely ...
IzangoMa: Ngo Ma
by Chris May
The first thing that needs to be said is: this is not a jazz album. Jazz is only one of many musical traditions, most of them South African, that coalesce to form IzangoMa's debut. The percussion-rich, horn-embellished, multi-layered blend weaves together kwaito, mbaqanga, township jazz, marabi, pantsula, mbube, Jamaican nyabhingi drumming, electronica and a whole lot ...
Buselli / Wallarab Jazz Orchestra: The Gennett Suite
by Dan McClenaghan
This is where music for mass consumption--recorded music--started, in Richmond, Indiana, in the 1920s, in a piano factory by the railroad tracks in a glacier-carved gorge. Established in 1887, in the beginning Starr Pianos' bread and butter was pianos, but they branched out to selling other instruments and eventually photographs and records--their own records, recorded in ...
The Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra: The Stage Door Still Swings (And Movies Too)
by Nicholas F. Mondello
Since around 2001, noted trumpeter Mike Vax has periodically assembled an extraordinarily talented group of former members of the Stan Kenton's, Maynard Ferguson's and other elite bands and led that crew on short performance tours (and clinics) around various sections of the United States. While an alum group and not a ghost band," their repertoire is ...
The Jazz Doctors: Intensive Care / Prescriptions Filled
by Chris May
Beyond its initiates, the so-called New Thing which emerged in mainly, but not exclusively, Black US jazz in the 1960s/70s, was perceived so amorphously that prairie-wide distinctions between its practitioners went unregarded. Among the general jazz audience, the musicians were lumped together as a horde of crazed zombies who lacked all technique, and who had replaced ...
Nils Kugelmann: Stormy Beauty
by Mike Jurkovic
Anyone can be excused for making the early assumption that the vibrant elegance of Stormy Beauty is the effort of a well-travelled, veteran bassist and his trio. It is not. But it sounds as if it is. Strikingly concise, persuasive and effective, the young German bassist and composer Nils Kugelmann's debut is an eye-opening ...
Noah Howard: Quartet To At Judson Hall, Revisited
by Mark Corroto
Saxophonist Noah Howard is a musician deserving wider recognition. Born in New Orleans in 1943, like many black musicians he began playing music in the church. After a stint in the army, he settled on the West Coast where the avant-garde was progressing outside the purview of New York, which at the time was considered the ...
Gretchen Parlato, Lionel Loueke: Lean In
by Angelo Leonardi
Le collaborazioni discografiche tra la vocalist losangelina e il chitarrista del Benin iniziano nel biennio 2005/2006. Prima è venuto Gretchen Parlato, l'album debutto della cantante, e qualche mese dopo Virgin Forest (Obliqsound), il terzo lavoro di Loueke che comprendeva già Herbie Hancock. Negli anni successivi i due interpreti hanno continuato a collaborare in vari contesti privilegiando ...
Dimitri Grechi Espinoza: Love Is a Losing Game
by Neri Pollastri
Prosegue da ormai dieci anni OREB, la ricerca solitaria di Dimitri Grechi Espinoza, che con il suo sax tenore esplora le possibilità sonore di chiese, cripte e cisterne sotterranee, giocando con le eco, i riverberi e le altre particolarità acustiche che gli restituiscono in tempo reale le note del suo strumento. Dopo averla messa ...
Brian McCarthy Nonet: After|Life
by Dan McClenaghan
Saxophonist Brian McCarthy, not one to shy away from a big theme, draws inspiration from the creation of the universe to craft After|Life Science says we are all stardust, compiled ultimately in all its complexities via gravity. Given that, he opens this expansive octet offering with Nebula," referring to cosmic gasses consisting of ...


