Source: GQ.

Today, exactly 50 years will have passed since the death of John Coltrane, one of the most groundbreaking and technically gifted jazz musicians ever. Over the course of his four decades on earth, Coltrane lived and breathed to create jazz saturated with dissonance and arrhythmia and tenacity—raw jazz, powerful jazz, jazz hundreds of stories tall.

To commemorate the half century that has passed since Coltrane’s death, many will revisit his most famous songs (“My Favorite Things,” “In a Sentimental Mood”) and records (Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, Blue Train). However, too few will reflect upon Coltrane’s most tenacious and inaccessible album, Interstellar Space, which was released posthumously and is, in many ways, Coltrane’s most influential record, its echoes still heard today in everything from electronic music to some of the world’s biggest hip-hop acts.

Source: Premier Guitar.

There are rules, and then there are exceptions to those rules. In the musical universe, Bill Laswell has cultivated an extraordinary body of work that pretty much breaks the mold.

Whether producing seminal albums like Public Image Ltd’s Album and Mötorhead’s Orgasmatron (both from 1986) or playing bass in bands like the intensely abrasive trio Painkiller, he’s spent most of his career defying convention. For his recent release on his M.O.D. Technologies imprint, The Drawing Center, he teams up with trumpeter Dave Douglas and drummer Hideo Yamaki and delves deeply into a boundless sonic experiment titled “The Science of Imaginary Solutions.” The 45-minute, single-track instrumental was recorded live at New York City venue the Drawing Center in August 2016 and affirms Laswell’s relentless pursuit of momentary creative expression. Not only is The Drawing Center a live record, it’s an improvisatory one. Laswell and his mates didn’t know what they were going to play when they showed up at the gig. They simply dove into the moment, trusted their instincts, and delivered an absolutely blistering set of music that defies categorization.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

We credit Brian Eno with coining the term “ambient music” and opening experimental music to a mainstream audience—but it was largely the work of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, aka Cluster—that prompted Eno to do so. The recordings these two young composers made together helped define a set of stylistic benchmarks that outlined “krautrock”—German experimental rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s—as a genre.

Though it’s most often associated with a shortlist of groups in more traditional psychedelic and prog-leaning directions, or is used as a rather crude umbrella for any German music of the sort (Can, Popol Vuh, and so forth), krautrock may be best understood as early German prog. Though they recorded one of the genre’s foundational staples with 1974’s landmark Zuckerzeit, Cluster exhibited characteristics that positioned them as a stylistic outlier to that basic archetype. (It’s notable that the musicians labeled “krautrock” have never particularly embraced the label.)

Source: The New York Times.

The jazz pianist Craig Taborn often goes to museums for inspiration, carrying a notebook to record ideas for compositions and song titles. He also sometimes performs at museums, becoming a sort of art object himself. This is a complicated situation for Taborn, who is very private. His mother, Marjorie Taborn, remembers seeing him at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, where he played a recital to a full house at the debut of his solo album “Avenging Angel.” After the show, she was chatting with his friend Tim Berne, a saxophonist, while her son signed copies of his album, smiling graciously and patiently fielding questions. She and Berne looked at each other, because they each knew how much effort this required from Taborn. “Look at Craig,” Taborn’s mother recalls telling Berne, “he’s getting everything he never wanted, all the attention he’d never seek.”