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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Enrico Rava’s New York Days is a warm, impressionistic tribute to the city that has contributed much to the Italian trumpeter’s career. With saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Stefano Bollani, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Paul Motian, Rava paints a moody, intellectual landscape that belies the soaring skyscraper vistas. This is the…

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Percussionist Bobby Previte’s Set the Alarm For Monday is a three-day weekend’s worth of moods and entanglements. Framed fore and aft in a nod-off theme that ticks at an after-hour’s pace, the center holds a clarion call for weekend warriors, a series of anthems and dance themes that alternately chill…

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In the future, nostalgia will continue to be hip. Witness Marc Ribot’s latest collective (don’t call it a “project”) Ceramic Dog. It opens with a charged version of the Doors’ “Break On Through,” finds inspiration in the decades-gone downtown New York music scene and, at different times, recalls Zappa, Lou…

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Listening through the two-CDs in Bill Frisell’s History, Mystery is much like going through the dozen panels of cartoon artist R Crumb’s “A Short History of America.” In a dozen wordless panels, Crumb takes us through an untouched pastoral setting which gives give way to a single rail line, then a…

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In his liner notes, producer-arranger Bob Belden calls this meeting of Miles Davis alumni and Indian musicians “a grand gesture at reconciliation between disparate cultures bound together by a universal truth. Music.” That word “reconciliation” is a bit off, since Indian music has influenced everyone from the Beatles to Zappa.…

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The value of the “working band”–the worth of keeping the same group of musicians together over the years –is a commonly accepted positive. The benefits of shared experience are obvious: empathy (sometimes described as “telepathy”), a foreknowledge of what a band mate will do (or how they’ll react) in a…

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