Ken Waxman
Guelph Jazz Festival. Guelph, Ontario. September 16–20, 2015. Storytelling of the verbal and instrumental variety was an important feature of this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival. New venues such as Heritage Hall, Guelph’s first black church, and the soft-seated Guelph Little Theatre added a feeling of intimacy to the festival’s[...] Read more
Hanoi New Music Festival Ensemble 2013. Being Together. Although Hanoi is more closely associated in North American minds with 1960s Vietnam War designators like the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Hanoi Hilton, the city now has an improvised music scene, and this disc celebrates Hanoi’s first-ever New Music Festival. Being Together, a three-part[...] Read more
Anna Webber’s Percussive Mechanics. Refraction. Audaciously extending her conceptual chops, avant-jazz reedist and composer Anna Webber creates a suite, of sorts, with Refraction, bookending the program with a prelude and postlude sonically coordinated but not copied, all seven tracks on the album subtly reflecting motifs that swirl[...] Read more
Ulrich Krieger / Trio Kobayashi. Winters in the Abyss. From George Frideric Handel’s Water Music to Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s “Surf’s Up,” water and its properties have long fascinated prominent composers and been reflected in their work. In Winters in the Abyss, German-born, Los Angeles-based Ulrich Krieger has[...] Read more
Hard Rubber Orchestra. Crush. Like bears awakening refreshed after an extended hibernation, the members of Vancouver trumpeter John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Orchestra (HRO) have come forth with a rousing CD after a dozen years of silence. Although mostly devoted to Korsrud’s jazz-influenced compositions for the[...] Read more
Kris Davis. Save Your Breath. Consolidating her considerable musical gifts, Canadian-born, New York-based Kris Davis organized a uniquely constituted octet here to premiere or propogate her compositions. Confirming her range, the eight tunes are breezy and animated in spots, while looped around a dense, metal-like core.[...] Read more
c_RL. Friends. Temporarily putting aside her notated work, multi-instrumentalist Allison Cameron teams up with fellow improvisers trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud and percussionist Germaine Liu for a program of eleven instant compositions that play to each trio member’s strengths, cementing a group[...] Read more
Xavier Charles. 12 Clarinets in a Fridge. This music is less rarified and warmer sounding than the CD title indicates, as French clarinettist Xavier Charles mixes mutated reed timbres and aleatoric slabs of musique concrète to craft five highly distinctive improvisations. Despite what it might seem like, Charles—who is[...] Read more
Tilting. Holy Seven. One of the linchpins of Montreal’s Musique Actuelle potpourri, bassist Nicolas Caloia is, underneath it all, a jazz musician, and this session shows off his mastery of the idiom. With the group Tilting, he elaborates his take on jazz by utilizing the talents of fellow travellers[...] Read more
Gorilla Mask. Bite My Blues. With a program built around his rugged compositions, Canadian expatriate alto saxophonist Peter Van Huffel and his Gorilla Mask trio mine the seam of improvised music with implements forged equally from effervescent melodies reminiscent of Ornette Coleman’s electric bands and the[...] Read more
Stuart Broomer. Time and Anthony Braxton. Stuart Broomer knows Anthony Braxton. He has listened to the American composer and multi-instrumentalist’s music from the beginning, attended concerts by him since the early 1970s, written about the musician many times, and over the years interviewed Braxton on many occasions[...] Read more
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