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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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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