Tag: Avant-garde jazz

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General

Firehouse 12, One-Stop Jazz Hub, Prospers in New Haven

The Times raves about Firehouse 12:

JULIAN LAGE, a fastidious young guitarist, waited for the applause to subside before bantering with his audience at Firehouse 12 last Friday night. He and his band were playing songs from “Sounding Point” (Emarcy), his brand-new debut; the next piece, he said, had to do with exploring sound in a physical space, responding to the feeling of a room. And, he added, “there’s really no better room than Firehouse 12.”

That comment didn’t come across as ingratiating, because Mr. Lage seemed genuinely impressed. He isn’t alone: since opening four years ago Firehouse 12, a stylishly repurposed 1905 firehouse in the Ninth Square neighborhood here, has earned a reputation as the pre-eminent spot for improvised music in the region. It has also won acclaim as a state-of-the-art recording studio and for housing a record label with a focus on artists more aggressively experimental than Mr. Lage. On the whole the operation, which includes a separate bar downstairs, suggests a model of sustainable activity for a field as transparently noncommercial as avant-garde jazz.

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Free Music

Good Stuff from Free Albums Galore

Free Albums Galore offers several new AMN-approved listings.

Eugene Lee – Meditations
Genre: Avant-Garde, Jazz

Eugene Lee has proven he is a talented artist in the avant-garde circles with his last free online album titled Srivbanacore but this time he’s doing something that is a bit different. On Meditations, he is entering an area that has been explored by such jazz legends as John Coltrane and Tony Scott but rather than simply creating music for meditation, Lee is probing what goes on during the act, the deep and serene calm but also the busy traffic of thought that always emerge in the practitioner as he learns this skill. With the exception of “Nightmare” this is a solo endeavor using some electronic enhancement and overlays. It is a tour de force of saxophone virtuosity yet becomes more than fancy playing. Being a daily meditator myself, I really sense Lee has succeeded in his goal. “Candles” is a beautiful array of slow melodic lines while “Conscience” and “Locus” deftly displays that turbulence in the mind that is always there. “Immortality” is a haunting three minutes of echoes and drones. “Nightmare” is the odd man out, a quartet number with pianist Ben Stepner, bassist Robin Betton and Brent Raskind on drums. It gives you a peek at what Lee is normally up to and it is a marvelous bit of ensemble playing but still sounds a bit out of place here. This album may be an experiment but it is a fairly successful one.

Squadra Omega – two albums
Genre: Rock, Avant-Garde, Improvisation, Psychedelia

Squadra Omega is an Italian psychedelic free-form jam band that knows how to bend your ears. From the first onslaught of sax, guitars and drums on Tenebroso I was spellbound. The 20 minute single track album was recorded in one live take with an intensity that few artists can keep going for that duration. This is a free improvisation spree complete with all the mistakes and risks that make this form of live art so…well…alive. The tracks starts in full throttle and continues with an almost shamanic dedication, a full volume free jazz chant. It is The Grateful Dead, Sun Ra and Coltrane all rolled together in one night of all joy and dread abandoned. If you haven’t guessed, I love this album. This is some of the best free improvisation you will find in avant jazz and rock. This gem of a live session is brought to you by The Clinical Archives net label and is available in 320kbps MP3 format.

Rennes Le Chateau from the Vuoto net label didn’t send me waxing poetically like the former album did but it did verify my first perception that Squadra Omega is an unique and exceptional ensemble of musicians. Like Tenebroso It is a 20 minute long free-form jam that keeps your interest throughout. There’s a lot of 70s jam rock influence in this album but I find the way these artists interact and mix their influences together totally 21st century. There are traces of The Dead, electronic sampling, mid-east tonalities, free jazz, and even the ghost of Link Wray’s guitar in this jam and all of it makes sense in some musically chaotic definition of normality. I’m hooked on this band. Rennes Le Chateau is available in 320kbps MP3.

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General

Making avant-garde jazz in a mostly killing climate

Moppa Elliott of Mostly Other People Do the Killing is interviewed.

The record business is a sinkhole no matter which way you turn.

But in this troubled economy, Moppa Elliott chose an especially tough path: playing in an avant-garde bop band named Mostly Other People Do the Killing, and starting his own tiny jazz label, Hot Cup.

Elliott, 30, a bassist/composer born in Factoryville, says, “Look, we’re just a couple of over-schooled jazz guys who want to play. The problem is that most jazz is not only boring and bad, but irrelevant.”

The mission of MOPDtK: Make valid 21st-century jazz that his label will release. That’s a big load with a long haul.

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General

The Velvet Lounge is still a great place for jazz

Fred Anderson
Image by Seth Tisue via Flickr

The legendary Velvet Lounge in Chicago is still kicking.

When the Velvet Lounge opened two-and-a-half years ago in a new location—on East Cermak Road—some listeners wondered whether the place would survive for very long.

Certainly the newly built, freshly painted room wouldn’t carry quite the mystique of the charmingly dilapidated old venue on South Indiana Avenue. Nor could Velvet owner and tenor saxophone master Fred Anderson be sure that audiences would follow him to the new spot, even if it was just a couple of blocks away from the old one.

Yet as 2009 begins, the rejuvenated Velvet Lounge remains integral to new music in Chicago, and not only when Anderson takes the stage to unfurl his characteristically magisterial lines. Several nights a week, jazz masters and emerging artists, Chicago icons and visiting virtuosos make the Velvet ground zero for avant-garde jazz in Chicago.

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AMN Picks General

AMN Picks of the Week

Here is where I post, at a frequency of about once a week, a list of the new music that has caught my attention that week. All of the releases listed below I’ve heard for the first time this week and come recommended.

Alex Maguire Sextet – Brewed in Belgium (2008, jazz)
Paul Lansky – Alphabet Book (2002, modern classical / acousmatic)
Francois Carrier – Kala (2008, free jazz)
Charles Dodge – Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental (1994, modern classical / acousmatic)
Kalte – The Lanthanide Series (2008, electronic)
Harris Eisenstadt – Guewel (2008, free jazz)
Daniel Levin – Fuhuffah (2008, free jazz)
Jeff Gauthier / Goatette – House of Return (2008, avant-jazz)

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AMN Picks General

AMN Picks of the Week

Sun Ra at New England Conservatory, February 2...
Image via Wikipedia

Here is where I post, at a frequency of about once a week, a list of the new music that has caught my attention that week. All of the releases listed below I’ve heard for the first time this week and come recommended.

Francois Carrier – Great Love (2008, free jazz)
Francois Carrier – Far North (2008, free jazz)
Vladimir Bozar n Ze Sheraf Orkestar – Universal Sprache (2008, avant rock)
John Zorn – Filmworks XXI: Belle de Nature / The New Rijksmuseum (2008, soundtrack)
Megaphone Man – Live From Berlin (2008, jazz)
The Flatlands Collective – Gnomade (2006, free jazz)
Steve Roach – Landmass (2008, electronic / ambient)
Sun Ra – Strange Strings (1967, avant jazz)

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