jazz

Sly and Robbie: Language Barrier (1985)

2017/05/10

I’m looking at the liner notes to Sly & Robbie’s Language Barrier right now. Performances by Afrika Bambaataa, Bernie Worrell, Mikey Chung, Manu Dibango, Wally Badarou, Herbie Hancock (!), Bob Dylan (!?!?), and production by Bill Laswell…I keep asking myself why in the world did this not make a dent in anyone’s memory? By the looks of their…
Yoshio Suzuki: Touch of Rain (1986)

2017/03/27

Yoshio Suzuki writes in a way that breaks up my style of writing. You see, I have a ritual I go through when I write for FOND/SOUND. Normally, I put on the album I feel inspired to write about and try to write my post in the allotted time that album runs through. I do so,…
Mix: 3. What Do You Do When It’s Spring?

2017/03/20

In a way, rebirth is exactly what my third mix is about. Taking cues from various feelings springtime evokes, I wanted to compile a set of songs that moved in concert with the season. By themselves, each song has a faint musical seed that germinates and blooms into a much more pronounced, powerful direction. However, taken as part of a whole, despite…
Sławomir Kulpowicz ft. Czesław Niemen: Samarpan (1987)

2017/03/10

A true giant of Polish Pop music comes out of the wilderness to join up with a Polish Jazz giant who purposely went into its wilderness to create a masterpiece of Coltrane-influenced Spiritual Jazz…one influenced by the Coltrane we tend to forget. You see, Samarpan has all the touchstones of one Turiyasangitananda Alice Coltrane.
Michel Legrand: Brian’s Song (Themes & Variations) (1972)

2017/02/15

ho knows what’s going on in the air? Something in it is stirring me to share this wonderful compilation of music brimming with ideas that seem so gauche in our time. It seems like the sweeping, uber romantic, and grandiose music of Parisian Michel Legrand only gets fleeting kudos whenever someone speaks of French music in general, and film…
Toshi Tsuchitori: Breath (1980)

2017/01/16

f someone’s in touch with the music of the cosmos it’s Kagawan Toshi Tsuchitori. The music I’m sharing from his 1980 release, Breath, gives us a peek at what would set him off on his life-long journey to create music that harkens back to Japan’s prehistoric time. Now known primarily as a percussionist, Breath is the rare…
Krzysztof Ścierański: Krzysztof Ścierański (1984)

2016/12/07

I‘m dipping into that huge well that is Polish Jazz. After listening to “Bialy Garbus” it’s not hard to understand why. Bass-player and hard rock session man extraordinaire, Krzysztof Ścierański takes machines that can bend sonic time and space — the Ibanez HD1000 Delay/Harmonizer and Roland Echo/Chorus— and discovers that there are ways out of Jaco Pastorius-doldrums, into…
Yoshio Suzuki: Morning Picture (1984)

2016/11/15

A promise tendered is a debt owed. I hinted at more music from Music Interior and here’s my first share. Let’s begin our brief sojourn discovering the albums released by Music Interior with Yoshio Suzuki’s meditative Morning Picture. Who was Yoshio Suzuki? On this album he wasn’t quite the musician he was known to be. Three…
Various Artists: Sounds From the Interior (The Music Interior Sampler) (1985)

2016/11/14

It’s not often you get a peek at something legitimately different. Released in 1985, on Canadian record label Attic, Sounds from the Interior (The Music Interior Sampler) seems to mimic the iconic New Age Windham Hill Record Samplers of the ’80s. We all know the drill now. Frame a compelling nature scene on a stark white album…
Orchestra of the Eighth Day: Music for the End (1982)

2016/11/11

In these dark and foreboding times, it’s important to latch on to things that provide hope. Maybe that’s why the music of Poland has seemed so striking to me lately. The vast majority — at least the majority which remains unheard and “out-there” — of this music was the product of unimaginable restraints. Before the rise of Glasnost and Perestroika,…