We’ve long had a love-hate relationship with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, loving many of his releases while finding his tone irritating to the point of distraction. After championing some of his early work (Afric Pepperbird, Witchi-Tai-To, the career-defining, one-of-a-kind Dis) we suffered mixed feelings towards what followed, even when it included great musicians…

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The implication of three, staggered releases in Medeski, Martin and Wood’s title-and-concept-sharing Radiolarians series is that the second will be an improvement on the first and that the third will be best of all. Of course, this assumption is false; no such claim is made or warranted. And the Radiolarians process–developing material…

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The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his…

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The Rabbit was slow to come to Jon Hassell’s Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. The music certainly caught the attention of our floppy ears on first preview. But it was months past the February (’09) release date when we finally gave it serious airing–I’m…

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Disfarmer is Bill Frisell’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of 26 short, impressionistic pieces inspired by the photos of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), an Arkansas photographer who captured both place and time in his starkly-lit portraits.  Disfarmer’s revealing black-and-white portraits of country and small-town folk, posed without background, are perfectly reflected…

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There’s a strong temptation to turn descriptions of Arve Henriksen’s Cartography into a litany of map and topography images. They’d be apt. But this strange, haunting collection of aural effects and audible vision quests is more about the journey than its path. A mélange of synthesized sounds, samples, organic percussion, spoken word…

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Radiolarians III is out and I haven’t even finished with II? These guys are killing me.

No, really. They always have, ever since Boston’s Accurate Records sent me a copy of Notes From the Underground back in the early ‘90s. The coming together of groove and free improvisational directions—with the emphasis on the…

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Jazz-fusion, jazz-funk, jazz-rock…we’ve never been quite sure how to define the music that plugged in around 1969 with Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and burned out some five years later when “jazz” pretty much left the hyphenate and all the other components—the things that hybridized it—began to short-circuit in…

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Not so long ago—if 40 years is not so long—a group of friends and I would gather for a solemn once-or-twice-a-year ritual. There was no given date for the event. Instead it was spurred by unusual circumstances, say the bombing of Cambodia or the acquisition of really good drugs. Duly…

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Those princes of jazz, Ravi Coltrane and Branford Marsalis, spring from different lineages and represent differing heritages. Yet despite their pedigrees, they’re a breed apart. Both were born in the tumultuous ‘60s, both have struggled with their musical identities and in the intervening years have arrived at a place where…

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