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Electric Squeezebox Orchestra: The Falling Dream

by Jack Bowers
No, the San Francisco-based Electric Squeezebox Orchestra does not come with accordions attached. It does, however, come with a well-developed eye for harmony and rhythm, an inflexible group dynamic and a number of perceptive soloists, all of which serve to make the ensemble's second album, The Falling Dream, a pleasure to hear. The ...
Shipwreck 4

Label: NoBusiness Records
Released: 2016
Track listing: The Storm We See, The Sea We Saw; Counted Like Flies; When Not Night; Everything's Coming Up Rosaly; Boom; The Face Consented, At Last.
Aaron Bennett / Darren Johnston / Lisa Mezzacappa / Frank Rosaly: Shipwreck 4

by Glenn Astarita
Chicago-based session ace and solo artist, drummer Frank Rosaly aligns with San Francisco Bay Area notables for a meeting of like-minded, highly skilled improvisers. After a gig in Frisco, the musicians' scheduled time to record this quartet date. Unfortunately, Shipwreck studios was destroyed in a fire a few months after this session and the musicians decided ...
Aaron Bennett / Darren Johnston / Lisa Mezzacappa / Frank Rosaly: Shipwreck 4

by John Sharpe
Named after the Oakland studio where the disc was recorded, the Shipwreck 4 brings together three West Coast improvisers with Chicago drummer Frank Rosaly for a program of six collectively created selections. As apparent on Everybody's Somebody's Nobody (Clean Feed, 2016), his duet with guitarist Fred Frith, trumpeter Darren Johnston's work maintains a melodic core, albeit ...
Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra + Jim Baker: Perihelion

by Mark Corroto
These days, it's a luxury to have a working jazz band. It's funny to think in those terms, isn't it? Sure, that was a nice record, you think. But modern musicians, particularly jazz musician often play in multiple ensembles, in theatre productions, teach music lessons privately, and curate local music series. These things are often accomplished ...
Fred Frith / Darren Johnston: Everybody's Somebody's Nobody

by John Sharpe
Here's a West Coast entrant to the slim body of guitar/trumpet duets from iconoclastic strummer Fred Frith and trumpeter Darren Johnston. It collects 11 short cuts from two studio sessions into a three-quarter hour program. They're not averse to co-opting rhythms (Frith) or melodic figures (Johnston), meaning that what we have here can be termed the ...
Electric Squeezebox Orchestra: Cheap Rent

by Jack Bowers
Yes, the name is intriguing--but what should one expect musically from the San Francisco-based Electric Squeezebox Orchestra? Bits and pieces of a number of disparate elements, really, from straight-ahead contemporary motifs to shuffle beats and old-line swing, from down-home New Orleans rhythms to throwback grooves from the '70s and even a seductive ballad. What matters most ...
The Touch and Go Sextet Live at the Novara Jazz Festival

Label: Ninewinds
Released: 2014
Track listing: 1. Slippin' 06:44
2. Horripilation 07:45
3. Waldron 05:39
4. Delusions 12:44
5. Swift Horse 16:34
6.The Last Good Kiss/Dimond Park/Degrees of Gray 18:16
7. Endless Sin * 09:36
8. The Year of the Zinc Penny * 07:27
Touch and Go Sextet: Live at the Novara Jazz Festival

by Robert Bush
Drummer Vijay Anderson formed the Touch and Go Sextet in the Bay Area as a vehicle for performing and interpreting the works of visiting musicians, but his concurrent studies with alto sax legend Roscoe Mitchell gave him the confidence to steer this three-reed, one trumpet and double-bass ensemble into original compositions, the results of which are ...
Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack: ...Awaits Silent Tristero's Empire

by Troy Collins
...Awaits Silent Tristero's Empire is an epic four-part suite based on the fictitious songs found scattered throughout celebrated author Thomas Pynchon's early novels V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. Oboist Kyle Bruckmann conceived this post-modern musical phantasmagoria" as the first long-form composition written for Wrack, his experimental chamber jazz ensemble, employing an expanded ...