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Reviews

Musique Machine Reviews

From Musique Machine:

Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words – Lost In Reflections
Swedish underground has been spitting some of the most un-subduable sonic creatures in recent years, and it has been doing that in a way that is both eclectic and revealing a sense of union, some sort of “swedishdom”. Even if they differ purely in terms of sound, there is a common approach when it comes to aesthetics and overall intuition towards music. From warm, floating drones to the most vicious no-fi punk rock, from DIY psychedelic to the most tortured and haunted harsh noise projects, Sweden has been spreading all its sonic diseases with no remorse.

Cave – Psychic Psummer
With Psychic Psummer Chicago’s Cave make a very buoyant, colourful, groovy & memorable mixture of : Krautrock loopy-ness, funky bass lines, jazzed & warming synth & organ lines, and the odd nudge of playful punk via a twist of new wave spark.

Werewolf Jerusalem – Nang Nak
Nang Nak find’s Richard Ramirez Werewolf Jerusalem project offering up three slices of rewarding, shifting textured static noise investigations & harsh wall noise scapes. With the third track being a collaboration between Ramirez & HWN project White Plague which features Sam Stoxen & Angie Ridgeway.

Pillowdiver – Sleeping Pills
Sleeping Pills offers up nine wonderfullly focused & often emotional felt guitar based tracks of: post-rock ambience, emotive blues tinged guitar scapes & harmonic yet melancholy tinged drifts. This is the first release from this German based project that centres around guitarist & mood-maker René Margraff.

Peter J Woods – Fairweather Mask
Fairweather Mask is a pained, violence streaked, often grimly atmospheric & brooding mix of: power electronics, noise matter, industrial seeth & drift, unsettled slo-mo string swoons & edgy cinematics that take in keyboard brooding, grey ambience drift.

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Performances Reviews

By Any Means brings chemistry and history to the Newport jazz festival

The Boston Globe reviews the supergroup By Any Means Necessary.

The trio of alto saxophonist Charles Gayle, bassist William Parker, and drummer Rashied Ali play with a potency and urgency that can make your hairs stand on end. They also just happened to have made one of the greatest albums in free jazz, a 1993 date called “Touchin’ on Trane,’’ a collection of tunes inspired by, rather than composed by, John Coltrane. (For contractual reasons, the album was released under the artists’ individual names rather than by By Any Means.) In 2008, more than 20 years after it formed, By Any Means finally released a proper album, a superb two-CD set called “Live at Crescendo’’ that was recorded at a club in Sweden.

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General

RIP George Russell

From Jazzwise Magazine:

The composer George Russell, best known for his 1953 music theory The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization died yesterday aged 86. He had been unwell for some time and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. His ideas were at the time seen as some of the first major contributions by a jazz musician in the field of music theory.

In the 1960s he moved to Scandinavia and taught in Sweden and in Denmark and thanks to Swedish radio was able to record his compositions and undertake new commissions. He worked with Don Cherry and a young Jan Garbarek and then on his return to the States joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory. Later in the 1980s and 90s he formed and toured his Anglo-American group the Living Time Orchestra which featured Andy Sheppard among the soloists. His albums include the classic 1961 Riverside album Ezz-Thetics.

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Performances

DC’s Nordic Jazz 09 Lineup Announced

From Black Plastic Bag:

Sunday, June 14 at 6 pm
Concert at the Embassy of Finland
Karikko (Finland)
Bjørn Solli Quartet (Norway)

Tuesday, June 16 at 6.30 pm
Concert on House of Sweden rooftop
Jonas Kullhammar Quartet (Sweden)
Karikko (Finland)
Søren Kjærgaard Trio (Denmark)

Wednesday, June 17 at 6.30 pm
Concert on House of Sweden Rooftop
The Sunna Gunnlaugs Quartet (Iceland)
Nils Petter Molvær & Arve Henriksen (Norway)
Jonas Kullhammar Quartet (Sweden)

Where: Embassy of Finland, 3301 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20008 (June 14) and Embassy of Sweden, House of Sweden, 2900 K Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20007 (June 16 and 17)

When: June 14 at 6 pm, June 16 at 6.30 pm and June 17 at 6.30 pm
Tickets: Presale tickets only from ticketweb or 866 666 8932.
$25 per night; $50 for all three nights. (No ticket sales at the door.)

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Performances

Christian Pincock in Albuquerque

From the Spectre Series:

Christian Pincock performs improvised and composed music on valve trombone and a computer-based instrument of his own creation with MAX/MSP. Using a keyboard controller and a system of sensors attached to his trombone he is able to control sampled sounds and integrate them expressively and musically. His work is both dynamic and subtle, drawing from diverse styles such as improvised experimental music, contemporary classical, avant-garde jazz, noise, and electronica.

He has performed internationally in events such as the 9th, 10th and 11th Soundpainting Think-tank in Woodstock, Sweden, and France, the Music Omi International Arts Residency in 2007, the Banff Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music in Banff, Canada in 2006, as well as venues such as The Stone (NYC), Roulette (NYC), Le Petit Faucheux (Tours, FR).

http://www.christianpincock.net/

When: Thursday, April 23, 7:00 PM
Where: ARTS Lab Digital Media Garage. 131 Pine Street NE, Albuquerque
Map: http://artslab.unm.edu/where.html
How much: $5-10 suggested donation goes to the artists.

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Performances

ISSUE Project Room Event

From NY’s ISSUE Project Room, some shows this week:

04/15 @ 8pm – henry grimes and brandon ross present leo lindberg
LEO LINDBERG: In 2OO3, when Leo Lindberg was a nine-year-old Swedish bass player, he wrote Henry Grimes a letter after reading in a jazz magazine that Henry had returned to the music world after many years away: “Stockholm, Sweden 21.7.03 Hallo Henry! My name is Leo Lindberg and I am 9 years old. I listen to jazz music all the time […]

04/16 @ 8pm – Kate Valk & Andrew Schneider
Kate Valk began working with The Wooster Group in 1979 and since then has co-composed and performed in all of the Group’s productions. Valk has also worked on and been featured in all of The Wooster Group’s radio, film, and video projects. Valk founded and directs The Wooster Group’s in-school partnership with Dr. Sun Yat […]

04/17 @ 8pm – LAWRENCE D. “BUTCH” MORRIS
LAWRENCE D. “BUTCH“ MORRIS CONDUCTS A CHORUS OF POETS AND STRING ENSEMBLE AT ISSUE PROJECT ROOM SHOWS AT 8PM & 9PM. CHORUS OF POETS: Yasha Bilan, Mark Gerring, Chavisa Woods Nora McCarthy, Justin Carter Alex Bilu, Helga Davis David Devoe STRING ENSEMBLE: Nicole Federici, Jason kao Hwang – viola Shawn McGloin, Jane Wang – bass Skye Steele, Charlie Burnham – violin Greg Heffernan, Alisa Horn – cello WITH TEXT BY ALLAN […]

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Interviews

Peter Brotzmann Tentet Interviewed

At least, half of the Tentet are represented in this 2005 interview.

There may not be a more creative group of artists anywhere within the boundaries of any art form than those within the Peter Brotzmann Tentet. These are individuals that comprehensively understand their responsibility to art and it is only through this level of integrity and creativity that art can, and will continue to move forward. Thus, it is completely mystifying and disheartening that this group of brilliant artists from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Chicago and New York remain relatively unknown outside of avant garde circles. They have created their own dimensions of sound, their own sonority of power and intensity, with shapes of silence that collide and separate at varying levels of speed and measurements of time. They have not introduced a new language as much as they invent new universes within fields of time and space through intellect, passion and importantly, attitude.

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Reviews

Free Jazz Blog Reviews

From Free Jazz:

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Michael Bisio, George Muscatello, Dean Sharp – Collar City Createology ****

Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Bengt Berger & Kjell Westling – Spelar, Live In Stockholm 1977 (Country & Eastern, 1977, re-issue 2008) ***½

Monday, February 2, 2009
Matthew Shipp – Harmonic Disorder (Thirsty Ear, 2009) ****

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