fusion
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With nearly everyone transitioning into late summer, my mind (and ears) lately come back to Yoko Kanno’s music. It’s not Yoko’s out-there jazz for Cowboy Bebop nor her cyberdelic contemporary work on anime like Macross Plus. No, it’s Yoko Kanno’s little-heralded, windswept, breezy, Balearic soundtracks for Koei’s 大航海時代 (aka Uncharted Waters) video game series.
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How does one describe Ken Muramatsu’s music? If I can compare it to anything, it’s to enjoying an apéritif on a hot summer day. Filed under the “ambient”, “jazz”, or “New Age” banner, it’s his music that never completely traffics in any of those spaces. It’s deeper, much easier, listening. Like a good Alvarinho or…
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I don’t know about you but for me certain albums are colored by memory. Whenever I put on Ricardo Fabini’s Cidade De Cristal it brings me back to a certain difficult time I had to go through. On those days where I felt a bit aimless, a bit withdrawn, all over the place – yet…
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Sometimes there isn’t any time better than the right time to share something. And in my case, it’s now or never, for East Pulse’s Asian Mirage, a fascinating curio or one-shot release by Japanese jazz flutist Toshiaki Yokota and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Chito Kawachi, who we’ll get around to later.
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My apologies to all those readers expecting a well-researched entry about Mélange’s Passion To Poison. It appears I might fail in myriad ways today. I say that because just like many of you, I too can get easily sidetracked when exploring certain rabbit holes. And in today’s case, it’s the way we or others feel…
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Who knows where the time goes? Because, apparently, lately it’s me. Through some fated collusion of circumstance and consequence, both personal and external, I’ve spent most of my day tied to a phone, tied to things out of my control. With the holidays – at least in America – upon us, what precious moments I…
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Jazz. Why even bother? At least, that’s what I ask myself when I choose to share something from that realm. Of all musical rorschach tests, it is Jazz, I feel, that seems to feature prominently as the one. Does one highlight its technical proficiency (and thereby, turn off a large part of the readership)? Does…
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Warning: today’s post might be mercifully concise. Not so recently, while scouring through my digital album collection, I spotted this interesting release buried deep in my recovered hard drive – Koono’s Senegal. At first, I wondered, was this something I found while on an African music kick? Firing up my laptop I heard something a…
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Traveling. That’s all I can think about now. I won’t bore you with too much autobiography but life has been quite stressful lately. So, when I put on music – or when I share music – I want it to take me (or us) somewhere. And lately, its cardinal points have taken me to the…
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Recently, while dabbling in the world of wine reviews, I’ve been ruminating on a term that I believe would be well-adapted for use in the music criticism realm: QPR. “QPR”, or quality-to-price-ratio, is a term used by wine aficionados to denote how much bang for your buck inexpensive wines can provide. While it’s awfully rich…
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic