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Aviva Endean: cinder: ember: ashes
by Glenn Astarita
Aviva Endean's debut album for the Norwegian label SOFA is heady and gleams with interesting abstracts. In addition to her improvisational acumen, she is a shaper of sound. Endean toggles between various clarinet types on each track. With asynchronous minimalist parts and microtonal aspects, she also executes darkly weaving passages, iterated with an alien dichotomy. This ...
Macuco Quintet: Friendly Signs
by Don Phipps
The Macuco Quartet's joyful and exuberant Friendly Signs suggests a Brazilian seaside or urban landscape where daylight tropical breezes and palm trees sway over a harbor and waves lap gently along a shore lively with music and dancing. Joel Springer, the composer of all but one of the album's 11 tunes, keeps things on ...
Patchwork Jazz Orchestra: The Adventures of Mr Pottercakes
by Roger Farbey
Maybe the quickest way to sum-up Patchwork Jazz Orchestra's The Adventures Of Mr Pottercakes would be to appropriate the title of The Who's 1971 compilation album, Meaty Beaty Big And Bouncy. For that is exactly what it is and quite a bit more besides. From the very start of the opening title track, there's a reminder ...
Lucian Ban & Alex Simu: Free Fall
by Glenn Astarita
Inspired by legendary clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre's small group recordings, Romanians Lucian Ban (piano) and Alex Simu (clarinet) recorded these luminous duets at The French Cultural Institute in Bucharest, as they personalize the aura of Giuffre's comingling of chamber and modern jazz with sojourns into experimentalism. It's a gorgeous endeavor, executed with tender harmonic content, ...
David Torn/Tim Berne/Ches Smith: Sun Of Goldfinger
by Dan McClenaghan
Sometimes a recording comes with a “play it loud" recommendation. Let's give one of those to Sun Of Goldfinger, from guitarist David Torn, alto saxophonist Tim Berne and percussionist Ches Smith. Torn, a self-described “texturalist/guitarist," has been associated with ECM Records since the '80s, with Cloud About Mercury (1987)--a disc the label is reissuing ...
Tibor Prettschnöder: The Largo And The Lame
by Mark Corroto
By now it is generally accepted that there is such a category as Germanic free improvisation. One separate from the Peter Brötzmann, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Günter Sommer, Peter Kowald, Manfred Schoof, Gerd Dudek, Albert Mangelsdorff, etc, etc. school of free jazz that machine-gunned its way into the European scene of the late 1960s. These new rebels ...
Ashley Wilson: Paint The Sky
by Andrew J. Sammut
Ashley Wilson's debut recording features the vocalist and songwriter singing eleven original tunes, incorporating a range of genres and mining a lot of her own experiences. “Once In A While" starts the album with a flirty tune about fighting and then making up, set to a rising and chromatically falling theme. Bitter chords amidst the country ...
Sun Ra: God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be
by Karl Ackermann
Herman Poole Blount, contrary to some urban myths, didn't claim to be born on the planet Saturn but had purportedly been transported there--and back--in his teens. A life shrouded in mystery, it isn't entirely clear when Blount became Sun Ra but it's estimated to be in the early 1940s when he was active on the Chicago ...
Jason Palmer: Rhyme And Reason
by Mark Corroto
You may wish you had paid more attention in your high school chemistry class, because listening to Rhyme And Reason by trumpeter Jason Palmer calls to mind the description of the nucleus of an atom. Spinning and spinning, various protons and neutrons are both attracted and held off by each other. Same can be said of ...
Tony Monaco: The Definition of Insanity
by Nicholas F. Mondello
The popular quote referenced in this CD's title has been attributed to many--most frequently to Albert Einstein. With this fine offering, organ virtuoso Tony Monaco steers clear of Sisyphean do-overs and delivers eleven diverse and well-performed tracks. “Cars Trucks Buses" by Phish's Page McConnell kicks the session off with a hefty, “short'nin' bread" ...
![Full Moon [Feat. New York Voices, Mark Egan]](https://s3.amazonaws.com/allaboutjazz/coverart/large/a07a6f1d5edcd6c801f0e1c3b527da37.jpg)
