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Steve Lacy: Clinkers
by Robert Spencer
In an interview in Cadence magazine not too long ago, Steve Lacy spoke about the Sixties in highly unusual and unexpected terms, as a period when the baby was often thrown out with the bathwater as musicians threw out set forms and experimented. Lacy himself was, of course, one of the foremost experimenters. Although his sound ...
Hedger/Kohlhase/McBride/Newton: KONK
by Robert Spencer
In contrast to his work with the Charlie Kohlhase Quintet, Charlie Kohlhase seems to work more on the freer side of things on this KONK disc. In the liner notes trumpeter Keith Hedger says that KONK began “in 1993 as a band that could play pieces by its favorite composers, improvise freely, and generally just have ...
Steve Lacy Three: N.Y. Capers & Quirks
by Robert Spencer
The Steve Lacy Trio with Jean-Jacques Avenel and John Betsch has been touring around the country for a few years now, purveying a stylish cool that contrasts interestingly with the trio on this disc: Lacy with bassist Ronnie Boykins and drummer Dennis Charles. This disc, recorded in 1979, captures Lacy during a freer, more fiery period. ...
Evan Parker: The Two Seasons
by Robert Spencer
Evan Parker seems to be coming out with a new recording every month, and they're all good. His improvising is, as it always has been, highly individual and immediately recognizable, but each new disc brings new possibilities and new rewards. This one is a double disc buy a trio that is not Parker/Guy/Lytton. Instead, John Edwards ...
The Jazzic Trio: Freedom of Choice
by Robert Spencer
Master pianist Michael Jefry Stevens is accompanied this time out by cellist Karen Valeur and acoustic guitarist Jon Sebastian Hemmersam. Valeur, a classically trained musician, had never improvised before, but she sounds utterly at home on this set of eleven previously-composed and improvised pieces. In her company Stevens tends to favor modern classical gestures, giving this ...
Iskra 1903: Chapter One 1970-1972
by Robert Spencer
Iskra 1903, named after a newspaper founded by Lenin, has had several incarnations. This one, as befits a disc entitled Chapter One, was the first: Paul Rutherford (trombone and piano), Derek Bailey (guitar), and Barry Guy (double bass). The first revelation is that Rutherford plays piano, and that he's a worthwhile improviser on that instrument. The ...
Charles Gayle
by Robert Spencer
Charles Gayle blew down with hurricane force--the pun is too obvious--out of jny: Buffalo. He drifted in and out of the first great free jazz scenes of the Sixties, playing with Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and other trailblazers. But he says now that his sound then was even more fiery and forceful than it is now, ...
Art Pepper
by Robert Spencer
It's all in his remarkable autobiography, Straight Life. Art Pepper was a junkie. First and foremost. He spent long stretches in prison, had innumerable wild adventures, and used drugs to the end of his life. He spent years devoted entirely to scoring the next dose. But in and through it all, he somehow managed to become ...
Charles Gayle: Ancient of Days
by Robert Spencer
Charles Gayle is the ultimate power tenor man. Most of his recordings, notably Repent, Consecration, and More Live at the Knitting Factory are vats of molten lead, music to go through the wall headfirst. He's a master of the altissimo register of the tenor, and of the screams and cries that, he says, come straight out ...
Joe McPhee: Tenor & Fallen Angels
by Robert Spencer
Joe McPhee is one of the pioneers of solo reed playing. While Coleman Hawkins and Eric Dolphy played occasional solo pieces, Anthony Braxton was the first musician to dedicate an entire album, For Alto, to solo reed explorations. Perhaps even more importantly, he was the first to develop a sonic vocabulary specifically dedicated to solo reed ...
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