Home » Search Center » Results: Clifford Allen
Results for "Clifford Allen"
Joe McPhee: New York, NY, 1971 and Pieces of Light
by Clifford Allen
What makes Joe McPhee's music so special is something that you may not consciously register at first--it moves differently from the music of his contemporaries. It's slower, polychromatic, concentrated and thick, and its dynamics are deeply subtle. In the liner notes to his album Oleo (Hat Hut, 1982), McPhee discusses the concept of lateral thinking and ...
Paul Rutherford: A Musician's Impulse
by Clifford Allen
An architect of free improvisation on the trombone, Englishman Paul Rutherford was, along with German Albert Mangelsdorff, one of the first to fully develop the potential of multiphonics on the instrument. Renowned as a soloist, his work with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, drummer Tony Oxley, and his own Iskra ensembles was a catalyst of what has ...
Transit & Bad Guys: Two Piano-less Quartets
by Clifford Allen
Since Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry gave the piano-less quartet such an unfettered sense of freedom and possibility way back in 1958, there have been countless permutations of the format, in varying degrees of adherence to the original blueprint. Even Charles Mingus had plenty to say with the line-up in 1961, with Eric Dolphy, Ted Curson ...
Encore: Michael Gregory (Jackson)
by Clifford Allen
In the world of creative improvisation, there is an adage that being true to one's art and one's instrument doesn't necessarily beget monetary or commercial success, but rather a place in the history books and the esteem of one's peers, a decidedly sure place in the nebula of the sonic air current. But what of those ...
Joe Morris: Beautiful Existence and Rob Brown: Radiant Pools
by Clifford Allen
Improvised music is based on conviction, the belief in the “rightness of what one is playing, a sort of forward-moving directive of sound hinging in part on the ability of one's work to stand equally with the entire history of music (to paraphrase art critic Michael Fried). But improvisation, though certainly a defining action, is also ...
Dizzy Reece: From In to Out
by Clifford Allen
Born January 5, 1931, in Kingston, Jamaica, trumpeter Alphonso Son “Dizzy" Reece moved to England in 1948 to continue his jazz studies, as his countrymen alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and tenor man Ken Terroade would also do. Following some time in Paris, Reece recorded with Ronnie Scott, Victor Feldman and Tubby Hayes for the Tempo and ...
Francois Tusques et le Nouveau Jazz Francais
by Clifford Allen
It is somewhat ironic that, as much as European jazz and free improvisation are nestled squarely within the canon of contemporary music--one has to look only at the worldwide recognition of figures like Germany's Peter Brötzmann, England's Evan Parker, or Holland's Misha Mengelberg and their respective integral scenes--the country with the closest ties to vanguard American ...
Dizzy Reece
by Clifford Allen
To grasp the art and life's work of trumpeter-composer-philosopher (not necessarily in that order) Alphonso Son “Dizzy Reece, a short biographical sketch and recording data, though not thrown completely out the window in terms of relevance, are only relevant insofar as one gets an idea of the artist as a whole. Facts of his birthplace (Kingston, ...
Minnesota Sur Seine 2005: Intercommunal Music on the Mississippi
by Clifford Allen
Index Introduction Opening Night / Day Two Day Three Day Four Days Five-Six-Seven Days Eight-Nine Finale Introduction Despite the status of New York and Chicago as cultural capitals of America and the world, not to mention each city's firmly-cemented place in ...
Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe
by Clifford Allen
Mike Heffley Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz Yale University Press ISBN: 0300106939 400 pages 2005 While improvised music in Europe has certainly had a storied history, despite being decidedly more “condensed" temporally than its American counterpart, this history is something ...
