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Bill Dixon: The Morality of Improvisation
by Clifford Allen
Followers of improvised music are very good at expanding on the personalities of artists, and that oral tradition has certainly been aided by the musicians through a sort of 'educational mythology.' To be sure, the personalities of Miles, Trane, Cecil, Mingus and Ornette are fascinating and notable, but this interest in the men and their whims ...
Terranova and The Sound of Places
by Clifford Allen
The place of the guitar in the jazz mainstream appears to be one of continual fracture, in no small part due to the fact that it is the most open to influence from outside traditional improvisational music. That is to say, rock, folk, blues, and the preponderance of hollow-body stringed instruments in many other musical cultures ...
Albert Ayler: Prophecy/Bells
by Clifford Allen
Albert Ayler Prophecy/Bells ESP-Disk 2005 Despite a rather brief period of artistic flourish (c. 1964 - c. 1967), tenor man Albert Ayler has probably, next to Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, held the most sway on the direction of improvisation from a 'thematic' or 'phrase-based' approach to that of ...
Frank Wright: The Complete ESP-Disk Recordings
by Clifford Allen
Frank Wright The Complete ESP-Disk Recordings ESP-Disk 2005 Despite the fact that avant-garde jazz has often met with the criticism that its tonalities and rhythms put it far outside the jazz (and by extension black music) tradition, it is quite true that many of the forerunners of free jazz found ...
Joe McPhee: Everything Happens For a Reason
by Clifford Allen
Joe McPhee Everything Happens For a Reason Roaratorio Records 2005 As an improviser, Joe McPhee's art has taken several interesting turns and shifts in focus that one listening to his first few recordings might not have expected. Schooled on trumpet from his youth and studying the tenor saxophone ...
Michel Portal: Meanings, Feelings and Rivers
by Clifford Allen
Born in 1935 in Bayonne, France, reedman Michel Portal has the unique position of being one of the architects of modern European jazz and having a hand in some of the most significant shifts in modern classical music. Portal, along with pianist Francois Tusques, trumpeter Bernard Vitet, drummer Charles Saudrais and tenor man Barney Wilen, embraced ...
Joe Giardullo: Weather, No Work Today & Falling Water
by Clifford Allen
Joe Giardullo Weather Not Two Recorded during Giardullo's tenure as an artist-in-residence at Warsaw's Contemporary Arts Center, Weather features Giardullo solo at Krakow's Klub Re. It is in many ways difficult to get past the precedents for a solo soprano recording; Steve Lacy's Monk-with-trills and Evan Parker's breath-defying sound sculptures are an ...
Reads with Jazz In Canada & 14 Love Poems
by Clifford Allen
Despite the fact that beat poets and their bohemian kin were entranced and influenced by jazz rhythms and improvisation (and vice versa), it seems as though the music and word idioms remained quite separate throughout the beat-heyday of the late '50s and early '60s. Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), painter and poet who stood closer to Eliot than ...
Ted Curson: Atypical Ted
by Clifford Allen
“Journeyman is often applied to those in the jazz business, but “stevedore might be more apt. After all, both individuality and slow recognition are the result of impossibly hard work, and Curson is the rule rather than the exception. Born June 3rd, 1935 in Philadelphia, Ted Curson came to music early on, playing saxophone from age ...
Jonas Kullhammar: Snake City North
by Clifford Allen
Where American jazz culture left off, Europe appears to have picked up some of the slack in a longstanding tradition of big bands. Though they're not always more economically viable on the other side of the pond, their mark on post-bebop jazz has nevertheless been undeniable. In addition to the freer organizations like Globe Unity, the ...
