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Trio Beyond: Saudades
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
This energetic November 2004 London concert was billed as “Lifetime and Beyond: Celebrating Tony Williams." The trio's instrumentation--organ, electric guitar, drums--mirrors the late drummer's seminal jazz-rock Lifetime outfit, but its name emphasizes what lies beyond. Lifetime is not forgotten in the process, of course. Each of two long sets ends with a number from the trio's ...
Marc Mommaas: Balance
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Marc Mommaas with Nikolaj Hess Balance Sunnyside Records 2006 In classical music, people distinguish between “program music, which is “about something, and “absolute music, which is not. Someone has probably worked out what would be meant by a jazz version of “absolute music : I suspect it would ...
Ray Nance: Body and Soul
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Ray Nance recorded Body and Soul, his first album as a leader, in May 1969, almost thirty years after he took over Cootie Williams' trumpet chair in the Duke Ellington orchestra, but only about two years after Billy Strayhorn's death in May 1967, and mere days after Coleman Hawkins' in May 1969. Nance performed “Take the ...
Grismore / Scea Group: Well Behaved Fish
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
The third Accurate release co-led by guitarist Steve Grismore and reedist Paul Scea is tight, tough, exuberant and funky. Their quintet applies the head-solos-head format imaginatively to ten originals and a cover of Ornette Coleman's “Dancing in Your Head (which perhaps takes its child-like wonder a little too much at face value), helped by the fact ...
Extra Golden: Ok-Oyot System
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Otieno Jagwasi is the quintessential benga musician. Born in Kenya's western Luo-speaking Nyanza Province, the cradle of the local style, he was a child prodigy on the fiddle-like orutu, which, when transposed to electric guitar, became the substrate of benga. He played with Circle K, a band that split off from benga godfather D.O. Misiani's Shirati ...
Assif Tsahar / Tatsuya Nakatani / KJLA String 4tet: Solitude
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Solitude, a set of fairly free jazz by multi-reeds player Assif Tsahar, unobtrusive percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and string quartet, is surprisingly easy to listen to, but difficult to assess. Each time a group creates a performance like this, they're attempting to create a language from whole cloth. Free jazz is demanding because it's teaching us a ...
Ralph Towner: Time Line
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
In an essay about Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges asserted that great writers create their precursors. Guitarist Ralph Towner makes no secret about the influence of pianist Bill Evans on his musical style. He places “My Man's Gone Now at the end of this new solo recital, raising expectations of an Evans-like record. (Evans didn't compose the ...
Electropolis: Electropolis
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Consider two views of technology. 1950s science fiction celebrates the first: new materials, space travel and super computers will rationalize the organization of society, it says, and deliver us from want and suffering. The second is embodied by the tireless tinkering of early twentieth-century inventor George Washington Carver, who developed 300 uses for the peanut. We've ...
Conference Call: Live at the Outpost Performance Space
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
This November, 2003 Albuquerque date by Conference Call manages to produce (very satisfying) new variations on an old formula. The quartet, which sits comfortably somewhere between the hard outer edges of the mainstream and free improvisation, includes multiple reeds player Gebhard Ullmann and the leaders of the Fonda/Stevens Group. The drummer's chair has been subject to ...
Babatunde Olatunji: Circle of Drums
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Percussionist Babatunde Olatunji was born in a Yoruba-speaking fishing village in Nigeria in 1927 and succumbed to diabetes in Salinas, California in 2003. Why might Circle of Drums, a previously-unreleased 1993 recording, be of interest? In part because, if the prize for First World Music Record can be definitively awarded (and it probably cannot) a serious ...
