Myra Melford Interview

December 15, 2009 — Mike

From At Length:

Myra Melford is one of the most exciting musicians working in any genre, and though she’s most frequently associated with the more avant garde circles of jazz, sometimes it seems as if she’s working in every genre. Drawing from influences as diverse as the blues of her native Chicago and the North Indian harmonium music she studied as a Fulbright Scholar in 2000, her music defies even the bravest attempts at categorization.

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Free Jazz Blog Reviews

December 15, 2009 — Mike
Der Saxophonist Joe McPhee beim Konzert mit de...
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From Free Jazz:

MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2009
Joe McPhee, Peter Brötzmann, Ken Kessler, Michael Zerang – The Damage Is Done (Not Two, 2009) ****

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009
Scoolptures – Materiale Umano (Leo Records, 2009) ****½

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2009
Tongs – Jazz With The Megaphone? (Long Song Records, 2009) ***½

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Newsbits

December 15, 2009 — Mike

Washington City Paper reviews Magma’s latest.

Workbench Recordings has a new release from E. Ryan Goodman.

Dusted provides an argument against year-end lists.

Steve Lehman provides current trends in classical music from an improviser’s point of view.

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Ensemble ACJW – Classical Players Let Their Hair Down at Le Poisson Rouge

December 15, 2009 — Mike

From NYTimes.com:

“ACJW Gets Extreme: The Mix Tape” was the wry title of the concert on Sunday night by the Ensemble ACJW at Le Poisson Rouge, the Greenwich Village nightclub for contemporary music. Extreme is a relative term. In the context of their classical training, the select young musicians of this ensemble — all participants in the Academy, a training program run by Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education — really were cutting loose.

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Musique Machine Reviews

December 15, 2009 — Mike

From Musique Machine:

Bodies Floating In the Bay – The Glimmer Of Darkness
Bodies Floating In the Bay may sound like the name of another straight-up Gallio influence slice of HNW, and through there are elements of walled noise here this is a much more complex & detailed beast that’s difficult to put into one noise bracket or genre.

Alo Girl – Unsane
Unsane is the first official full length sonic offering from Italian Harsh noise project Alo Girl  which is all the work of  Cristiano Renzoni; runner of the Urashima label & the other half of Richard Ramirez’s An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter.

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For Gyan Riley, labels don’t apply

December 15, 2009 — Mike

From the San Francisco Examiner:

The son of composer Terry Riley — whose seminal minimalist composition of 1964, “In C,” influenced the course of both classical and rock music — Gyan grew up in a household filled with a wide variety of sounds.

Surrounded by his father’s Indian music, contemporary classical music, ragtime, blues and jazz, Gyan — who plays solo Tuesday and with his band at Yoshi’s next week — initially moved in a classical direction, studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As a result, when he later formed a jazz trio to play many of his own compositions, Gyan’s cohorts found themselves facing not your typical jazz charts but far more complex, written-out music that reflects a grounding in complex Western classical forms.

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