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Jon Rose: The People's Music
by Nic Jones
The People's Music is a wild surrealist fantasy that traces a rhythmic counterpoint in sound between the playing of a musical instrument, namely the violin, and the mass production of that instrument, according to the liner notes. What we have is in fact the musical element of a multimedia piece involving an interactive video installation, and ...
Sean Noonan/Aram Bajakian: CHiPS
by Nic Jones
So is this the kind of thing produced by skinny kids who spend far too much time in their bedrooms? The insert photo of guitarist Aram Bajakian presents us with whatever the opposite of a jock might be, and the music reveals him to be an accomplished guitarist who has happily heeded the advice of Bill ...
DJ Wally: Nothing Stays The Same
by Nic Jones
Here's a thing. In gathering together a group of players who prefer to look forwards, DJ Wally has gone and made a record that actually sounds like it was made in the present day, rather than any time in the last forty odd years, and whilst there's no seismic shift of the magnitude that bebop was, ...
David Lee Myers: Arcane Device - Engines Of Myth
by Nic Jones
Once you get beyond any preoccupation with methodology, this music has passing resemblances to the work of both Morton Subotnick and Richard Teitelbaum. Indeed, what's particularly pertinent is the latter's duo music with Anthony Braxton, where Braxton's singularly human presence makes for more organic music than what's to be found here. In fact, this particular collection ...
The Soft Machine Turns You On
by Nic Jones
Any 'golden age' is always questionable, but in the period 1967-71 the British band Soft Machine are reckoned to have enjoyed such an age, and releases on the Cuneiform and Hux labels make the case. The band was built around keyboard player Mike Ratledge, bassist Hugh Hopper, and drummer/vocalist Robert Wyatt. Reed player Elton Dean was ...
Horace Parlan & Oscar Peterson: Keys To The City
by Nic Jones
Like any other instrument, the piano reflects the personality of the musician playing it. This truism applies to both Horace Parlan and Oscar Peterson, and the contrast between their respective styles is not wanting in starkness. Both players are virtuosos, though Parlan's virtuosity is of a radically different order to Peterson's. Where Parlan brings echoes of ...
Joe Harriott: Free Form and Abstract
by Nic Jones
A certain view of jazz history has us believe that responsibility for the evolution of the music lies exclusively in American hands. This is both too deterministic and a slight upon the music's power to move and to influence. As early as the late 1930s European players were making innovations of their own at the same ...
Project O: Now As Then
by Nic Jones
Without denigrating trumpeter Ingrid Jensen's efforts in any way, it's organist Gary Versace's playing that makes all the difference on this date. If his work has any echoes at all, then they're of Larry Young, as opposed to Jimmy Smith, and in this respect, such is the deftness of his touch, Versace shares his approach to ...
Jim Ryan's Forward Energy: The Concept
by Nic Jones
For all the energy here the group is as in thrall to its own role models as the latest adherents to Miles Davis's pre-fusion quintet of the mid-to late 1960s. In revisiting what's essentially Albert Ayler's music – wasn't this once known amongst marketing types as “ecstatic jazz" for all of five minutes? – Jim Ryan's ...
Deidre Rodman: Simple Stories
by Nic Jones
What's in a title? In the case of Simple Stories both everything and nothing, and repeated listenings fail to overcome the elusive quality of the music. Also, if there's some kind of underlying concept here, then that also remains equally elusive and – yes – secret. Part of the problem may lie in the lack of ...
