Aros
…tured classical music her whole life and was seeking more freedom, so we tried to combine form and structure with improvisation. Rather than having one long solo, everybody may have little sections where they improvise on a strict chord sequence within the rhythmic structure, as if the improvisation is a continuation of their part. I’d been interest…
Ditty Blei
…this type of material when I lived in Brooklyn and Chris [Speed] and the others had just started to be fascinated by Balkan music. For some reason I was fascinated by having meters change all the time, bar by bar, which is very different from folk music where the odd meters are consistent throughout the piece. I wanted the music to “limp” a bit (wh…
Last Century
…mple, about that code Justin keeps harping on? “This idea [pareidolia] relates back to my fascination with harmonic synonyms (and melodic, as they are one and the same, really…) and how one can extrapolate musical signifiers so that they no longer resemble the original icon. It comes back to jazz, in a way, in that jazz players learn the ‘changes’ t…
The Sixth Jump
…erarchy of cycles, it is very free, very intuitive – they come to complete at an equal level my ‘flexible rigor’ so to speak. The timbres create other cycles, subterranean cycles, the effect obtained is mysterious.” In this trio Biayenda uses two snare drums and two gourds, and an ankle shaker like the ones used by the drummers in his group Les Tamb…
Polarities
…tarting point but one that necessarily needs their input. [The tunes] need life and vibe and interpretation breathed into them by the collaborators that I rely on so heavily.” To my ear, that collaboration produces a mercurial, hard-to-pin-down, highly internalized synthesis of many strands of jazz history and influences from outside the music (for…
Green-Wood
…is way up from sound effects and music editor to resident composer while leading jazz combos around town and occasional tours. Between 1994 and 2002 he produced and released three CDs on his own label, recording them at high-end LA studios and garnering considerable critical praise in the process (All Music Guide called him “one of the brightest lig…
The Bay Window
…essiaen, Ligeti), African music…. As Hubert Dupont says, “[When] I moved to Paris I was expecting a serious meeting, strong musical connection, a group story, and it happened. We stayed together a year in the south of France, developing collectively our compositional tools, our improvising technique…. The sound and atmospheres of the band are still…
Ghost of Electricity
…ith his 11-piece chamber group Ensemble Diglossia, a work combining composed and improvised music with early archival recordings (circa 1890). “Schott’s pointillism and suspenseful restraint suggest what might have been if the electric guitar had existed when Schoenberg composed Pierrot Lunaire.” (Joe Gore, Guitar Player) Born in Eureka, Trevor Dunn…
The Loan
…nd exploring musical borders for several years now in his compositions and playing. With The Loan he and the Commuters have put together a tuneful, rhythmically diverse, and richly textured set of his original music. Propelled by Seido Salifoski’s virtuosic dumbek and Kenny Wollesen’s solid groove, the band shifts easily between the Afro-Celtic 9/8…
Think Like the Waves
…s well. It’s not trying to be clever or complex. If it is complex that comes out of the need to express the melody more richly. In their music and improvisation, tonality is being stretched to its furthest point while still being tonal. Music like that, and by composers like Berg, Webern and Bartok, is what I’ve been particularly interested in.” “…
