Source: CT Now.

Before listening to drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey‘s music, check your expectations. Pulseless, drone-based passages stretch on for minutes, with shifting piano harmonies above. Spontaneous and notated passages continuously interact, directed by Sorey from the podium or behind the kit, where he will play with sticks or with his bare hands.

On “Verisimilitude,” his latest album (to be released on Aug. 4) with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini, Sorey adds electronically manipulated textures and extended percussion techniques to an ever-growing bag of sonic resources.

Sorey is a new hire at Middletown’s Wesleyan University, where he’ll replace creative music master Anthony Braxton. His latest septet, Koan II — trombonist Ben Gerstein, trumpeter Stephen Haynes, guitarist Todd Neufield and three bass players: Mark Helias, Joe Morris and Carl Testa — performs at Real Art Ways in Hartford on July 29 at 7:30 p.m. Sorey talked at length about his new role and recent musical directions.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Dead Cross is no ordinary punk band. For one thing, they’re fronted by Faith No More’s Mike Patton, who’s in top form as a vocal gymnast, spitting, squealing, harmonizing, and heaving his way through the band’s concise, intense debut album.

Supplying the quartet’s barrage of grinding bass and guitar riffs are Justin Pearson (of The Locust and Retox) and Mike Crain (also of Retox) who execute several frantic time changes per track as they sprint in tandem towards the record’s finish line.

Capping this off is the drumming prowess of none other than ex-Slayer skin-pounder Dave Lombardo. Returning to his hardcore roots, but with the added experience of knowing how to, “weed out the bullshit and focus on what’s important,” Lombardo’s peerless beats feel more urgent, brutal, and intricate than ever.

Source: Atavist.com.

I lived in New York and would go to concerts every week. John Cage would go to a lot of concerts too, and I would see him there. One day at the intermission of a concert, Cage was sitting by himself and I asked him if there were any new recordings coming out. He said, “Oh, well, these musicians were playing these new works of mine very beautifully, but no one seems to want to record them.” I just said, “Maybe I can do it.” He replied, “Oh, that would be marvelous,” and gave me his phone number. A few months later I called him and said, “John, I think I can do this now.” That’s how Mode Records started in 1984.

Source: For Guitar Players Only.

Many know Nels Cline these days as lead guitarist for Wilco since 2004, playing on the group’s last five studio albums and enlivening its shows with his adventurous, sometimes idiosyncratic but always fascinating array of improvisations. The 61-year-old California native’s career was well-established before joining Wilco, however. Learning to play music alongside his twin brother, Alex, Cline boasts a lengthy resume in rock, jazz and, by his own acknowledgement, noise, including collaborations with Banyan, Thurston Moore, Mike Watt and Julian Lage, memberships in BLOC, the JAH Band and the Geraldine Fibbers, and his own Nels Cline Trio and Nels Cline Singers, which includes his wife Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto. He’s also had a fertile solo career that includes his latest release, the conceptual 2016 set Lovers. The now Brooklyn-based Cline is almost always working on something, and, not surprisingly, it’s almost always something worth talking about…

Source: Red Bull Radio.

Wadada Leo Smith is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser whose studies of African, Japanese, European, American and Indonesian music, and invention of the systemic music language Ankhrasmation, have made him one of the most celebrated trumpeters living today. Starting out in marching bands and R&B groups as a teenager in his native Mississippi, he moved on to playing in the Delta blues and improvisational traditions, styles that he developed in the US military band program in the early 1960s. He studied ethnomusicology at the Sherwood School of Music and at Wesleyan University in the ’70s; a noted academic, he teaches at various universities and worked as the director of the African-American Improvisational Music program at CalArts, among other titles. Smith has spent decades developing his trumpet and flugelhorn techniques, and has studied instruments like the atenteben, the Ghanaian bamboo flute. As well as releasing over 40 albums as a band leader since the ‘70s, Smith’s multi-faceted approach to jazz has drawn collaborations with artists like Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Vijay Iyer and Henry Kaiser. A practicing Muslim, Smith draws on philosophy, spirituality and a worldly knowledge of music to create his art.