Jazz em Agosto’s thirtieth edition added a few more performances than usual, but stuck to what it’s done so well for so long. The festival is presented by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, sponsor of a symphony, a concert hall, a major museum, and a modern art gallery, all in one large park in central Lisbon.Continue reading “Jazz em Agosto, 30th edition.”
Genre Archives
Suoni per il Popolo, 13th Edition.
Long-running festivals conserve freshness by avoiding stale recipes based on previous successes. Montreal’s Suoni per il Popolo retains the same inviting aroma as the nearby twenty-four-hour bagel factories. With 150 sets of music, film, and workshops spread over eighteen days of nonstop activity, borders between genres dissolve and unpredictable combinations coalesce. Guest curators Ken Vandermark,Continue reading “Suoni per il Popolo, 13th Edition.”
Teun Verbruggen & Arve Henriksen. Black Swan; The Bureau of Atomic Tourism. Second Law of Thermodynamics.
These two recent CDs give a strong picture of the breadth of Belgian percussionist Teun Verbruggen’s playing, showcasing a duo in studio and a live performance as part of a sextet. Verbruggen’s duet with the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen was done completely through correspondence. Verbruggen recorded a series of tracks of drums and percussion andContinue reading “Teun Verbruggen & Arve Henriksen. Black Swan; The Bureau of Atomic Tourism. Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
Bruno Heinen Sextet. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Tierkreis.
Tierkreis (German for zodiac) is Stockhausen’s most accessible, most adapted, and likely best-known work. It may also be the most symmetrical, its twelve movements conforming to the zodiac’s twelve signs, each melody based on a twelve-tone row, the pieces arranged in the sequence of the chromatic scale. The original sound source ensures the piece’s celebrity:Continue reading “Bruno Heinen Sextet. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Tierkreis.”
Drumheller. Sometimes Machine.
Supergroup is both an apt and a ridiculous descriptor for Drumheller, which comprises some of Toronto’s most celebrated experimental and jazz musicians—Nick Fraser, Eric Chenaux (now a Parisian), Brodie West, Rob Clutton, and Doug Tielli—each member teeming with personality and talent as both a player and composer. While ostensibly fulfilling “supergroup” criteria, their slightly introvertedContinue reading “Drumheller. Sometimes Machine.”
Anthony Braxton. Echo Echo Mirror House.
At the 2011 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton led a septet in his Composition No. 347+. That “+” in a Braxton title will usually be followed by a series of numbers indicating interpolated compositions, but in No. 347, one of the first works in a series called EchoContinue reading “Anthony Braxton. Echo Echo Mirror House.”
Giorgio Magnanensi in the Sonic Playground
Admirers of Giorgio Magnanensi—composer, conductor, teacher, and the artistic director of Vancouver New Music Society—tend to be lavish in their praise of him. “Giorgio is singularly the best conductor of modern music, period,” says composer and Capilano University jazz instructor Bradshaw Pack. Vancouver music critic Alex Varty calls him “one of the most outgoing, provocative,Continue reading “Giorgio Magnanensi in the Sonic Playground”
Yang Jing and Christy Doran. No. 9.
One of the more striking recent developments in improvised music has been the entry of several musicians trained in Chinese traditional music. There’s Min Xiaofen, a pipa player and singer residing in New York, who worked with the late Derek Bailey (the usually adversarial guitarist sounded just like a pipa for the occasion) and JohnContinue reading “Yang Jing and Christy Doran. No. 9.”
John Butcher. Winter Gardens.
John Butcher is one of the world’s most resourceful solo improvisers, a musician who has extended his saxophones in uncanny ways, creating waves of complex continuous sound with overtones arising and disappearing to the accompaniment of sudden percussive explosions. This LP contains four solos from 2011, two acoustic pieces, from a London church, and twoContinue reading “John Butcher. Winter Gardens.”
Colin Stetson’s Sound Story
Stories in which the protagonist blossoms, finds themselves, or rediscovers their roots appear everywhere. Their ubiquity makes it awfully tempting to replicate this narrative when telling the story of a solo artist who has arrived at a uniquely focused sound world. Yet sometimes it’s more powerful, and more in line with reality, to illuminate theContinue reading “Colin Stetson’s Sound Story”