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Heroes Are Gang Leaders: Artificial Happiness Button
by Mark Corroto
We can be pretty sure that in heaven the champion poet is heard saying, “I'm Gil Scott Heron and I approve of this message." The same can be said of the late Amiri Baraka whom the art, poetry and music troupe Heroes Are Gang Leaders was created to honor with their first release in 2014. What ...
Daniel Carter / Matthew Shipp / William Parker / Gerald Cleaver: Welcome Adventure! Vol. 1
by Karl Ackermann
When multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, bassist William Parker and pianist Matthew Shipp met for an esoteric evening of discussion and music at Tufts University in 2017, the net result was Seraphic Light (AUM Fidelity, 2018). That three-part improvised program was one of the best free improvisation albums of the year. On Welcome Adventure! Vol. 1, the trio ...
Keith Oxman: Two Cigarettes In the Dark
by Jack Bowers
What's a sure way to make a pretty good tenor saxophone-led quartet even better? Simple. Invite a second tenor and make sure his name is Houston Person. That's what Denver-based Keith Oxman has done to further enhance his quartet's splendid new album, Two Cigarettes in the Dark, sharing the front line with Person on six of ...
Ian Carey Quintet + 1: Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite
by Dan McClenaghan
Trumpeter Ian Carey's Fire In My Head: The Anxiety Suite opens on a somber note, not with the sense of agitation that the album title suggests. The initial moments of the tune, “Signs And Symptoms," Part 1 of the suite, may initially be addressing the fatigue common to the malady, before his Carey's Quintet + 1 ...
Jeff Rupert/George Garzone: The Ripple
by Jim Worsley
The Ripple refers to the infectious, warm, intimate, yet big sound developed by the great Lester Young, starting in the late 1930s. While Young pioneered improvisational creativity, Stan Getz later took the baton (well, it was actually a saxophone) and further expanded his idol's stylish approach with new and creatively open-ended visions. Young and Getz collectively ...
Saadet Türköz, Elliott Sharp: Kumuska
by Angelo Leonardi
La relazione musicale tra la cantante turco-kazaka e il chitarrista statunitense, iniziata un ventennio fa nel quintetto che registrò Marmara Sea (Intakt 1999) ritorna con una collaborazione a due, non meno singolare e affascinante della precedente. L'universo vocale di Saadet, carico di suoni ancestrali e profonde connessioni col folklore dell'Asia centrale, trova in Sharp il partner ...
Blackmantis: Devil's Flower
by Chris May
Might there be a better time to sit down and listen to an album whose title evokes poet Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, has track titles such as “Lament" and “Dead Leaf" and a PR pitch that talks about the “darker electronic side" of its composer's music, and comes with sleeve art redolent of a ...
Drew Schlesinger & David Torn: Summer Synthesis 1978
by Mark Sullivan
In the summer of 1978 synthesist/keyboardist Drew Schlesinger had assembled a small studio in his apartment in Ithaca, NY and was composing electronic music. When he heard that local guitarist David Torn (then playing in the Zobo Funn Band) had acquired an ARP Avatar guitar synthesizer--one of the first of its kind--he approached him and asked ...
Denise Mangiardi: Brown Book
by Jerome Wilson
Denise Mangiardi dwells in two musical worlds, as both a jazz singer and an accomplished classical composer. She puts all her talents to good use on this CD, singing a collection of self-written ballads, folk songs and torch songs, over her own haunting arrangements. Mangiardi's moving string-writing appears on the two brief “Soundscape" instrumentals ...
Ivo Perelman / Matthew Shipp: Live in Nuremberg
by John Sharpe
Even after countless encounters, Brazilian-born, NYC-based saxophonist Ivo Perelman and American pianist Matthew Shipp still find abundant inspiration in each other's company. Unlike the shorter cuts on most of their studio sessions, Live In Nuremburg presents an intense but rewarding unbroken 55-minute concert, with a four-minute encore, captured in crystal-clear fidelity, in the titular German city. ...
