Results for "Art Ensemble of Chicago"

Art Ensemble Of Chicago

The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The group continues to tour and record through 2006, despite the deaths of two of the founding members. The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz's entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed "little instruments" in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; "little instruments" can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects)

Rinascita a Chicago: le gemme dell’etichetta International Anthem

by Angelo Leonardi
April 9, 2021

Non è casuale che l'etichetta indipendente più innovativa nell'attuale panorama jazzistico (e non solo) sia nata e operi a Chicago. È noto infatti che la metropoli dell'Illinois è una delle capitali del jazz, avendo svolto un ruolo centrale in tutta la storia musicale afro-americana, talvolta paritetico con quello di New York. Nel 2014 ...

James Brandon Lewis, Chad Taylor: Live In Willisau

by Vic Albani
February 25, 2021

Il set finale dell'edizione 2019 del festival di Willisau in Svizzera (uno degli appuntamenti di assoluto riferimento del jazz contemporaneo della stagione festivaliera europea) è tra quelli da ricordare. Ovvio che per far sì che questo accada i protagonisti dello stesso debbano essere “a livello" e se, come in questo caso, si chiamano James Brandon Lewis ...

Juozas Milašius / Tomas Kutavičius / Dalius Naujokaitis and Lithuanian Young Composers Orchestra: Live at Willisau, 1993

by Vitalijus Gailius
February 10, 2021

Juozas Milašius, Dalius Naujokaitis-Naujo and Tomas Kutavičius were the most provocative figures on the Lithuanian scene in the 1990s. Playing bebop or following the Ganelin Trio tradition was not the their thing back then (and it is not in 2021 either). They played passionately and intensely and beyond genre boundaries. Stories about destroyed pianos and audiences ...

Soundpath

by Victor L. Schermer
January 2, 2021

Muhal Richard Abrams (1930-2017) was a revered pianist, composer and teacher of great capability and range who, in addition to his own achievements, inspired and influenced many jazz musicians in both the mainstream and avant-garde categories. Largely self-taught as a result of a personal decision to follow his own path, and early on pursuing church music, ...

Azar Lawrence Has Paid His Dues...Two times

by Chuck Koton
October 6, 2020

Tenor and soprano saxophonist Azar Lawrence has been one of the most dynamic and spiritually-charged reed players of the post-John Coltrane generation. Lawrence forged his sound in the fires of the Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner bands in the 1970s and, for nearly five decades, he has performed and recorded with the best musicians in the ...

Muse Records: Ten Smoking Hot Albums

by Chris May
August 26, 2020

Alone among the other great jazz labels of the 1960s and 1970s—Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Atlantic—Joe Fields' Muse is rarely anthologised, written about or otherwise celebrated. Yet like its peers, Muse was prolific, releasing over 200 premium-grade albums during the 1970s, its most active decade, alone. This relative obscurity is ...

Sex & Drugs & Jazz & Jive: Top Ten Stash Records Albums

by Chris May
June 16, 2020

With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount ...

Idris Ackamoor: An Afro-Futurist Odyssey

by Chris May
June 3, 2020

In summer 2020, Idris Ackamoor will release Shaman! on Britain's Strut label. It is his third album with the post-2015 incarnation of his 1970s band, The Pyramids. It reunites Ackamoor with flautist Margaux Simmons, with whom he had co-founded The Pyramids in 1972. Ackamoor's route to Afro-Futurist jazz began in the US in ...

Afrobeat: An Alternative Top Ten

by Chris May
May 5, 2020

It would be hard if not impossible to compile an Afrobeat Top Ten which was not wholly made up of Fela Anikulapo Kuti albums. Such was Kuti's centrality in the creation and development of Afrobeat, such was the productivity of his recording career--his catalogue totals more than fifty albums, not counting reissues and compilations--and such was ...