From Jazz Shaped, Mark Hloub looks back at the band’s 10 years and forward to their Kickstarter project.
With days to go on their quest to raise enough funds to record, produce and promote their 10th anniversary record, I caught up with ‘Led Bib‘s’ drummer and founding member Mark Holub to discuss the new album, photo shoots and the band that has shaped the last ten years of his life.
From Washington City Paper, and interview with Nicole Mitchell in anticipation of her performance at the Kennedy Center in D.C. this weekend.
Mitchell is a particularly interesting choice. A former AACM president, she is also one of the most prolific of its members, with several different ensembles that each move in a different direction. Ice Crystals, a quartet project whose main thrust is to explore the textural mix of flute and vibraphone (in this case with vibist Jason Adasiewicz), is one of her more traditional jazz aspects. She spoke to Washington City Paper about the balance of that style with her others, the inspiration for the band’s name, and the increasing scope of Kennedy Center jazz.
From Gapers Block, a preview of tonight’s Lampo show:
This Saturday, Lampo welcomes John Bischoff, a composer of computer-generated (and manipulated) music and found of pioneering computer-based music groups The League of Automatic Music Composers and The Hub, at the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House (4 W. Burton Pl.) at 8pm. The League of Automatic Music Composers featured its primary performers (Bischoff, Horton, Tim Perkis, David Behrman, and others) working with KIM-1 computers, just a circuit board and some cobbled-together parts (including a cassette storage drive and a hexadecimal keypad to program in the 6502 assembly language) to push the devices to their limits – not a hard thing to do in a machine with 1K of RAM.
Wadada Leo Smith (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From The Checkout, an interview with Wadada on Ten Freedom Summers.
JJ: What gave you the inclination to start this thing?
WLS: Well, Leroy Jenkins was the…. um…. protagonist that said “Look”, well… I’ll say it this way. Our connection was very strong all the time. All through his life. We did lots of things together, like go for walks. I come to New York, we go for walks. We have food, sat out in the park and talked, things like that. Threadgill would also be part of that mix, Alvin Singleton would also be part of that mix. So in 1977 when Leroy put together a new ensemble, he had Andrew Cyrille on drums, Anthony Davis on piano, and him on violin. No bass. And he said “Smith”, you know, he always called me Smith. “Smith, how ‘bout writing a piece for me? To introduce my group?” And I did. And Medgar Evers was that piece, Ok? So on the premier, they premiered it in Italy. I was part of that festival. So I got a chance to hear the premier. And then on the premier performance in L.A., in October of 2011, Anthony Davis played the premier part and recorded it in November.
From SF Weekly, Evangelista is interviewed:
Evagelista performs his piece Taglish, exploring Filipino-American culture, at the Red Poppy Art House on Friday, along with Wong and some other jazz stalwarts. He spoke with us about the improvisational element in Filipino music, how his political family supported him in an artistic career, listening to Ornette Coleman when he was young, and his ethical responsibility to be a musician.
Español: Oren Amabrchi, músico australiano de música ambiental. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From The Quietus:
Anyone familiar with Oren Ambarchi‘s solo albums, and particularly the four he recorded for Touch between 1999 and 2007, will have become schooled in his proprietary, unconventional approach to the guitar. Following an epiphany of sorts when witnessing the unique, visionary idiosyncrasies of a Keiji Haino performance, Ambarchi ditched the drums he’d been playing on the Australian free jazz circuit to develop a six-string method he could call his own. The mesmerising results come from a similar place to Sunn O)))’s sensory ‘minimalism meets metal’ (a band with whom Ambarchi would later frequently collaborate) but with more subtle and delicate dimensions: dark bowled tones are suspended and layered to form intricate harmonic patterns that coalesce and disintegrate to produce hypnotic, transcendental experiences for the listener.
Nels Cline (Photo credit: soundfromwayout)
From All About Jazz:
Through more than 40 years of playing, he’s still awestruck by who he plays with, very humble about his guitar playing skills, mystified by the attention he receives, aware that at his core is an intense drive and need for collaboration and, through it all, is just a really nice guy.
This interview took place at the 2012 Guelph Jazz Festival, where he performed with Fred Frith, more commonly known as a guitarist but who has played bass with Naked City, as he currently does with OrkestROVA, where Cline handles the guitar chair.
Devin Hoff 3 (Photo credit: michaelz1)
From the Bleader:
In the two years bassist Devin Hoff lived in Chicago he was a fairly ubiquitous presence around town, playing in countless ad hoc configurations and forming several ongoing projects he’s remained part of since leaving for Los Angeles in 2011. In April he’ll play with one of those bands, his trio with reedist Dave Rempis and drummer Mike Reed called Days After Next Wednesday, at the Hideout—you can check out a track by the group toward the bottom of this post. That’s just part of his wide-ranging monthlong residency here, which will be helmed by Monday-night gigs at the Skylark. The core of his visit comprises four performances (including one in Milwaukee) by a relatively new band, the Devin Hoff Bastet, that includes a couple of strong colleagues (drummer Darrell Green and tenor saxophonist Howard Wiley) from his days in the Bay Area, along with Chicago alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella.
From Burning Ambulance:
Reto Mäder is a Swiss electronic/electro-acoustic musician who records under several names and in several groups, including Ural Umbo (sometimes Vral Vmbo), Sum of R, and RM74. A lot of his work has come out on the Utech label, and the music’s ominous beauty is matched by its dark, enigmatic artwork and deluxe packaging. His latest release, RM74’s Two Angles of a Triangle, is a two-CD set containing 73 minutes of music, so clearly it’s divided into two sections for aesthetic reasons, not because it would have overshot a single disc’s running time.
The music is difficult to categorize. It contains conventional instruments (piano, bass) played, recorded and mixed in unconventional ways: ultra-close miking and various methods of computer-based processing after the fact are used to warp and layer the sounds until they become abstract and atmospheric. The finished pieces sometimes recall Robert Hampson’s work with Main, other times feel kin to 20th and 21st Century avant-garde composition, and at still other times lean in the direction of the dark ambient music that has soundtracked many modern horror films and horror-themed video games.
From Pitchfork:
And no musician has impacted his vision more than his longtime hero Mike Patton. Cianfrance has been a huge fan of Patton’s many projects for more than two decades (he used to cut his student films to Mr. Bungle songs), so it’s still a bit surreal to him that Patton composed the original score for his latest feature, The Place Beyond the Pines. Starring Gosling as a troubled stunt motorcycle driver and Bradley Cooper as an anxious cop, Pines is a multi-generational meditation on masculinity and lineage. Patton’s haunting score is the glue uniting the film’s three disparate sections and many different tones. His more visceral and industrial compositions effectively rise above the grumble of Gosling’s motorcycle, but it’s the quieter moments that linger. Patton’s piano-driven score is appropriately ominous, as though it gets to glimpse the danger around the corner just a few moments before the viewer.
