fusion
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I’ll be completely honest. Lately, it’s been getting harder to carve out time to write for this blog. After a long moment in time, I’ve finally found a degree of it to do other things that vie just as much for my attention. Yet, I still feel the need to share things with you. Maybe…
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Albums as unique as Lucio Battisti’s Anima Latina are rarely the product of one person’s/band single vision. It’s easy to forget how little by little Lucio was baiting his audience — mostly Italian and rarely big outside of mainland Europe — into letting him explore places his own influences had gone before. He did all…
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This might sound like yet that same old story: Noted folkloric or jazz muso discovers drum machines, synths, and samplers, proceeds to turn into both a sweeping statement unlike anything else in their oeuvre/pisses old fans off. I can play Madlibs with my write-up for Joan Bibiloni’s For A Future Smile and substitute Lisboa-native Júlio…
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Don’t stop, can’t stop, the dance. Something else to fill your expanding Balearic canon: Randy Tico’s Earth Dance. Not quite jazz, world beat, tribal, or New Age, in 1990, in the dead heat of summer, Randy released on the aptly named Higher Octave Music record label a burner of a New Age album that put…
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As long as there is summer and people still want to hear/read about another Hajime Mizoguchi album, I’ll be more than happy to ride on that feeling. Continuing on a very long retrospective on Hajime’s work, see prior posts for his prior work, today we land on another of his wonderfully summer-esque albums — A…
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A leftfield reimagining of vaunted Afro-Cuban jazz classics, in a new school “futuristic” Japanese Pop style, shouldn’t sound so interesting as it does in Today’s Latin Project. Launched on the demise of one famous group (The Tokyo Cuban Boys) and the rise of one important, new musical voice, Yasuaki Shimizu, you’d expect something titled Today’s…
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When we last left now Dr. Mitsuru Sawamura, it was 1989 and he had released a wonderful unclassifiable bit of Japanese New Age Jazz on Wacoal’s Newsic label (home of Yoshio Ojima, Motohiko Hamase, and Yoshiaki Ochi). Now, I want us to go back a few years, when he debuted as a solo artist, as…
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It’s not often you encounter the work of a percussionist who is as wildly as inventive as one can be, yet can be prone to veering off where (he should know better) that none should follow, such is Brian Slawson’s Distant Drums which gets an unequivocal recommendation from me. Mr. Slawson is much like your…
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Far be it from me to write anything definitive on the work/life of the late, great Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, but let me take a stab to write about a sleeper favorite of mine. Naná Vasconcelos’ Rain Dance wasn’t released on any formative label like ECM, or released with any audacious artist like Milton Nascimento,…
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Uman, pronounced (YOO-mahn), was a unique group. Vacillating from many visions — world music, ambient, jazz, and many uncategorizable things — this French sibling duo has never been a group to easily pigeonhole. Chaleur Humaine, their debut, I think, is a perfectly birthed idea of what they can do. Chaleur Humaine exists in that gray…
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental folk-rock fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic