Archaisms I is a document showcasing the maiden voyage duo performance of two veteran composer-performers, Tyshawn Sorey and Adam Rudolph. The duo engage with one another with the elan and subtle nuances of near age siblings throughout the 45-minute improvised set taken from a 2021 event at Zurcher Gallery. Neither performer is new to duo
One can scarcely think of another performer, composer or conceptualist that is as consistently diverse, expansive and experienced as pedal steel guitarist, Susan Alcorn. Her latest recording, as well as her fifth feature for Relative Pitch, is entitled Canto and evinces this brilliant quality of her work perhaps more than any of her albums to
The world needs people like Dave Treut. A powerful presence as a multi-instrumentalist/composer, he creates resolutely eccentric music that shows a sincere appreciation of life and its many absurdities. Treut (often credited as D.Treut) is a larger-than-life character and a force of positivity, and this all comes shining through in his music. But to date,
New England has long been a breeding ground for avant-garde jazz and other creative music, but it seems like right now the region – especially Connecticut – is having its moment in the spotlight of skronk. The local collective behind the record label firstname lastname has been busily releasing music throughout 2022; Dancing is the
I listened to “ghostly.ridiculous” the night before getting my first COVID vaccine shot. It was – somehow – the perfect situation to take in this album. The title is an apt summation of the unsettling reality of both this work and the absurd, spectral nature of the 2020s so far. ghostly.ridiculous is a (mostly) solo
Minimal packaging design on a CD can mean one of two things. It could grace a demo or a bootleg – something unfinished, low in quality, not ready for public release. Alternatively it can be an artistic statement – that the music speaks for itself and doesn’t need much framing to enhance its own powerful
Chordless saxophone trio has always been one of my favorite band formats as both a player and listener. Compared to piano trio or quartet, there’s a great deal of clarity, flexibility, and equality between the players, allowing for subtle as well as dramatic shifts in energy and texture to be made on a dime. The
Alfred 23 Harth, also known as A23H, German multimedia artist, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist musician, and composer, recently released a duo album 55 Quintets with Korean trumpeter Choi Sun Bae (originally included in Ballet Music, but very few persons have this CDr). Soon after extending his work radius from Germany to South Korea, A23H made collage
The difficulty of approaching music with words was aptly put by Henry Threadgill in the following: “The process of talking about and defining music literally is one of monumental proportion. Yet this tradition does have a long and uneven history and many precedents. To me this proportion is like trying to define apples with pears,
Otomo Yoshihide has been well-known as an avant-garde turntablist, and often compared with Christian Marclay, pioneer of disruptive turntablism in the New York downtown scene of the 1980s. However, Otomo’s expressive focus was much different from Marclay’s, and he has already changed his main instrument from turntable to guitar. Often aggressive, Otomo’s guitar possesses a
