Tag: improvisation
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Hefty, rough-hewn cuboids of harmony
The river of jazz once had the appearance of a mighty current with many tributaries, but now it more resembles a great delta, where it meets a number of other broad waterways at the point of their issue to the ocean. The past of this river is populated with many…
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Darts & Arrows – Altamira (avant-jazz)
Avant-garde music (and other art) is animated by a narrative of self-definition – it is the privileged marginal, the self-marking other, whose exteriority to the mainstream is established by virtue of the trailblazer’s enhanced legitimacy, rather than its exclusion from the established sites of legitimacy. But one person’s avant-garde, obviously,…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
‘Let it be known’, begins the declamation with which Damon Locks opens the first of these two live sets: the immense complexity of the knowing we are invited to share soon becomes apparent. I come across a huge variety of music, much of it extremely creative, inventive, accomplished and unconventional,…
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Review Of The Year 2014: 20 Albums
My views on end-of-year roundups in general are quite aggressive, and can be read at greater length in the introduction to last year’s selection, here. Suffice it to say that I think anyone claiming to know which are the best few albums released in any given year is seriously delusional;…
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The Grip – Celebrate (jazz)
This band make a sound with a great big gaping hole right through the middle of it. Conceptually, jazz has been (among other things) about the relationship between single lines and harmony, for a considerable number of decades – perhaps this became an overriding concern with the advent of be-bop,…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Richard Pinhas and Yoshida Tatsuya are legendary figures in the French and Japanese experimental rock scenes, respectively. ‘Experimental’ is a term that implies a bit of diversity, and the projects they’ve been involved with have covered quite a range of approaches, so there is nothing predictable about this record, and…
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Sons of Kemet – Burn (avant-jazz)
I often start my reviews by talking in general terms about the schtick of the artist or release; creative practice, methodology, how I theorise the music, what my critical approach will be and so forth. However, there’s equally often not that much to say. A lot of good music comes…
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Review Of The Year 2013: 12 Albums
This is the fourth consecutive time I’ve written a review of the year’s albums, which is slightly scary, as I’m under the impression that writing about music is something that I’ve only just started doing. Still, as senility begins to work its erosional magic on the brain, the years do…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
We’ve all seen some pretty rough justice in the wake of global capitalism’s recent crises, but Greece has suffered worse than any other part of the developed world. The Figures Of Enormous Grey And The Patterns Of Fraud appears to be a response to these circumstances, although it’s too complex…
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Steve Lawson and Daniel Berkman – Finger Painting (improvisation)
Steve Lawson has spent much of his career exploring the front edge of musical and technological possibility, in terms of the sounds that one bass player can make, the ways that musical recordings can be constructed, the ways that musicians can talk to listeners, and the ways that recordings can…
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Jez Carr, Simon Little & Mike Haughton – Foreground Music, Vol. I (jazz)
All that Simon Little, who seems to be the member of this trio with principal responsibility for promoting Foreground Music, Vol. I, has to say about this music on his Bandcamp page is that ‘[i]n November 2012, three musicians came together to play freely improvised music and recorded everything.’ Freedom,…
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Review Of The Year 2012, Part 1: 12 Albums
It’s that time of year again, the nights drawing in, the pointless over-consumption going into overdrive, and the music bloggers arranging releases into spurious hierarchies of how hip they think they make them look. Well, let me issue the same caveats I always do: I don’t claim that these are…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
As far as I know Dialect are no longer an active collective, although its members continue to release razor sharp and uncompromisingly independent hip-hop on their own account; they have released a lot of great music, and are clearly a mainstay of hip-hop in the Northeast, and this is the…
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Mere – Mere (dark-ambient improvisation)
Improvisation is a complex matter, and often a contentious one: some degree of musical freedom is usually identified with it, to the extent that freedom is sometimes regarded as its defining characteristic, its essence, or indeed as the thing itself. Thus some more partisan free improvisers would not really regard…
Oliver Arditi 