Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch

Absolutely one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. Mingus recognized it, and some say that he pushed even further than Coltrane, I'd say "why bother debating?". This is another one of those who would have changed everything if he had not died young, but he did.

Arthur Verocai - Arthur Verocai

there is only one word to describe this album: TIMELESS. yes i said it. TIMELESS. a 1972 album that was so ahead of its time that it was never given its moment to shine as one of the greatest albums of the 70s. not until he was rediscovered by music historians and was invited to LA in 2009 to do a concert of the full album. this man made a fusion between contemporary brazilian harmony, strings, electric pianos, acoustic guitars, electronic instruments, male and female singers to create a wide musical palette that is still regarded as one of the biggest achievements of the 20th century. he gave his heart and soul to create and record this album but nobody cared about it at the time of its release, so Arthur got depressed, he quit making symphonic arrangement and started making commercial jingles for tv to make money.

please donwload this album and witness the beauty of music.

sylvia

The Bad Plus - Suspicious Activity?

Hands down, one of the best recordings ever. The maximum expression of The Bad Plus (and I include Tchad Blake). This is one of the albums that keeps me interested in music. Enjoy.

Esto no es un link ni pal carajo

The Bad Plus - Give

The sophomore album shows how this "jazz" trio (in essence, not so much in the popular term) has grown together and established a signature sound, a large credit goes to Tchad Blake (producer and engineer). In my opinion, by the time Give came out, The Bad Plus had already established themselves as the "revitalizors" of the jazz world, always sending a clear message of what they want to do with music; with covers of Ornette Coleman's "Street Woman", The Pixies' "Velouria", and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".

The Bad Plus - These are the Vistas

The breakthrough first album from the trio that changed the game up for jazz musicians. Not only are they incredibly well trained musicians, but they make it a point to show their take on major influences with covers from Aphex twin's "flim", Blondie's "heart of glass", and Nirvana's "Smells like teen spirit" ( I would have much preferred "Lounge act", but it is what it is).

Ornette Coleman said there's something special that happens when these guys play together, and I agree.

Triosk meets Jan Jelinek - 1+3+1

The Australian electronic/jazz trio's debut album (2003). Jan Jelinek is a german electronic musician mostly associated with glitches and sampling. The electronic and jazz elements seem somewhat separate on this album, like jazz musicians experimenting within the borders of jazz form with electronic sounds in the background, as opposed to the integration demonstrated in the following albums, this is mostly due to the free drumming technique which was developed after this album. Moment Returns (2004) was released just one year later and already showcased a lot of progress in the concept of time and composition .

This album showcases good musicians interested in evolving and expanding their sound palette, it's a great step in the growth of these musicians, as demonstrated in the following albums.

Triosk meets Jan Jelinek - 1+3+1

Triosk - The Headlight Serenade

the third and final album of a great trio with a unique sound that makes any moment an epic moment.

do it!

Triosk - Moment Returns

Triosk was from Sydney, Australia. Born 2001, died 2007. This trio comes from two musical persperctives, jazz and electronic music (not trance or house, but as in sampling, resampling, and digital signal processing, etc.) and they were definitely good at both. Moment Returns is their second album.

This album has intense textures and fades in and out of beats that can actually be followed, most of the samples aren't in sync or quantized, add to that Laurence Pike's (drummer) ability to play without a time signature (perhaps inspired by Ornette Coleman's free jazz movement) and you've got no back beat to hold on to, it's great. On the other hand, songs like Love Chariot, Two Twelve are heavily rooted in the beat, balancing it out nicely.

Sit back, dim the lights, listen.

Triosk - Moment Returns

Madlib - Shades Of Blue

this is a classic. i was wondering why this hasn't been uploaded to the chasm lovers union. one of Madlib`s finest works, remixing many classic tunes from the Blue Note Records catalog in their "funky blue note" era. it`s something that any ear can digest with ease. Blue Note gave all the master tracks to Madlib and gave him permission to do whatever he wanted to do, so obviously he went all beat-tastik on this shit and it was freaking worth it. Blue Note released this album in their label, something that no hip hop producer was ever offered. viva le Madlib. viva le beats.


stepping into tomorrow.

Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino/Har-You Percussion Group

Two somewhat underappreciated gems from the Upper-Manhattan and Bronx latin music scene of the 60's and 70's.

Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino - Concepts in Unity

"Varied fusion of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican motifs by a collection of musical visionaries. Their sound is not at all limited to any one style; it jumps from traditional Cuban rhythms to Tejano accordion tunes to experimental rumba."

Har-You Percussion Group - The Har-You Percussion Group

"The Har-You Percussion Group's self-titled album stands as a testament to how exciting and profound music education can be for kids. Imagine creating this album as your homework assignment. That's just what these eleven 16- to 19-year-old boys did under the guidance of Jamaican-born percussionist Montegro Joe. Latin, Cuban, jazz, and blues influences combine to create their boogie-down melting pot of rhythm that keeps the feet moving. Tracks like "Welcome to the Party" and "Feed Me Good" are exciting dance numbers. In contrast, "Oua-Train" is an impressive tribute to Coltrane featuring Nelson Sanamiago on alto sax. This is a rare album where music informs its powerful sounds."

Marc Ribot - Asmodeus: Book of Angels Vol. 7 (2007)

Been gone for about a month...
Time to start posting music more frequently.

This is a great album by Marc Ribot based on Zorn's Masada songbook. Raw and abrasive, Ribot blazes with his overdriven guitar.

i am the iron(ic) man

Buddy Emmons with Lenny Breau - Minors Aloud

Holy shit. This is one hell of a record.
Heres a little bit of Emmons on steel guitar:

And heres Lenny "I was born with a guitar in my hand" Breau

For Realz.

The Nels Cline Singers

It's been a while mah boys!! I've been busy as fuck but soon enough I'll be posting music on a more regular basis.

If you don't know who Nels Cline is, then here's some info. REALLY amazing guitarist and musician who's also got a thing for Fender Jazzmasters. He's the lead guitarist of the band Wilco, plus he's known for collaborating with a lot of people and has got a solo project of his own. His 2009 release "Coward" is really good! The Nels Cline Singers are a free jazz trio led by Nels Cline, following his work in the Nels Cline Trio. Despite it's name, there's no singing in the actual music. :) I encourage my fellow bloggers (I'm looking at you Ozstriker!) to post some more of his stuff. I'll try and upload more of his music later this week. Hopefully, I'll also post some Banyan which also features Nels Cline and the Minutemen's Mike Watt.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Nels Cline (born in Los Angeles in 1956) is an American guitarist and composer. He began to play guitar at age 12 when his twin brother, Alex Cline took up the drums. Cline is not classically trained. This gives him a unique avant-garde style that many other jazz guitarists fail to match, due to their probable conventional training. He is noted for his apt use of effects pedals and looping devices, which enhances his style and gives his approach to guitar and music a distinct sound.

Cline is known for his improvisational work and for the diversity of his musical projects. He has played with jazz musicians Charlie Haden, Gregg Bendian, Wadada Leo Smith, Tim Berne, Vinny Golia and the late bassist Eric von Essen, a longtime musical companion in the L.A. jazz group Quartet Music.

Cline has also performed and recorded with punk rock hero Mike Watt in his touring bands The Crew of the Flying Saucer and The Black Gang, as well as with members of Sonic Youth and country music legend Willie Nelson, and in the jazz/punk/improv band Banyan with Watt and ex-Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins. He frequently participates in jazz projects with his twin brother, Alex, however their first actual duo together was in Culver City, California, during their 50th birthday show.

Nels’s first appearance on an album was on Vinny Golia’s 1978 record, Openhearted, and his first work as a bandleader was 1988’s Angelica. In the late 1980s, Cline formed the Nels Cline Trio, which featured his guitar playing complemented by Mark London Sims at bass and Michael Preussner at drums. The trio released several 7 inch demos and one album, before replacing Sims with Bob Mair at bass. This new trio released three albums before splitting up, featuring some of Cline’s most melodic works, before he ventured into a freer and more minimalist territory in the decade to come. Shortly before the end of the trio, Nels recorded two albums, In-Store, and Pillow Wand, with Sonic Youth frontman and guitarist, Thurston Moore. In 1999, Cline paired up with jazz drummer Gregg Bendian to record a modern rendition of John Coltrane’s 1967 album, Interstellar Space. On Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John Coltrane, Bendian and Cline boldly interpret Coltrane’s already obscure piece using their musical backgrounds and talents, and create an album whose music is written by Coltrane, but whose sound is distinctly associated with musicians who perform it. Cline’s current outfit is the improv/free jazz ensemble The Nels Cline Singers, with which he has recorded two albums, Instumentals and The Giant Pin, his most recent work as a leader. The Nels Cline Singers are currently signed with Cryptogramophone Records.

Cline has performed on over 100 albums in the jazz, pop, rock, country, and experimental music genres. He continues to expand his audience as a member of the Grammy-winning rock band Wilco, which he joined in early 2004. He was later featured in the cover story of Guitar Player Magazine for his newfound collaboration with the band."



RIGHT OUHSAAHDE MAH DO-OH!

Don Pullen - Warriors

For Chokabert, who loves his work. One of the greatest pianists ever.

"Don Pullen developed an extended technique for the piano and a strikingly individual style, post-bop and modern, but retaining a strong feeling for the blues. He produced acknowledged masterworks of jazz in a range of formats and styles, crossing and mixing genres long before this became almost commonplace. By chance, unfortunately for his future commercial success if not for his musical development, his first contact on arriving on the New York scene was with the free players of the 1960s, with whom he recorded. It was some years later before his abilities in more straight ahead jazz playing, as well as free, were revealed to a larger audience. The variety in his music made him difficult to pigeonhole, but he always displayed a vitality that at first hearing could shock but would always engross and delight his audience.

Although Don was able to play the piano in almost any style, (the attribute that had made him so important to the wide-ranging music of Mingus) and sometimes gave the impression that there were two pianists at the keyboard, he caused most astonishment by his ability to place extremely precise singing runs or glissandi over heavy chords, reminiscent of traditional blues, while never losing contact with the melodic line. His technique for creating these runs, where he seemed to roll his right hand over and over along the keys, received much comment from critics, was studied by pianists, and heavily filmed and investigated, but could never be totally explained, even by Don who had developed it. His piano technique can be seen on the DVDs 'Mingus At Montreux 1975' and on 'Roots Salutes The Saxophones'. But it is better not to concentrate too much on his technique, especially now that he is gone from among us, and to pay attention to his depth of feeling and the intensity of improvisations, whether these were suggested by the song itself or engendered by the moment. It is easy to forget that those who come to love his music from his records may be totally unaware of his playing method. Even at his concerts, only a minority of the audience would be fully able to see his hands moving along the keyboard and be aware of exactly how he revealed the emotional outpourings of his soul." - All About Jazz

Get it

Cecil Taylor - Conquistador!

More implacable Cecil-ness for the bearded folkie in you.

"More so than with any label, the greatest recordings on Blue Note, those that pull rank on the merely great and that we can most comfortably say will belong to all ages, seem to prove a burden for many listeners to embrace, no matter how enthralled they are by the sounds of Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Blue Train —the label's signature sounds, really. Consider Out To Lunch! and Point of Departure, often dismissed as acquired tastes, or worse, noise, and flouted as inspired nonsense—such chivalrous chicanery!—irrespective of the idea that applying whatever principles—"drawbacks" of shape and form—might lead one to this critique could likewise have at Finnegans Wake. And so too with Cecil Taylor and Conquistador!, another warranted entry in the Rudy Van Gelder series, with a bonus cut of "With (Exit)."

Odd as it may sound, if you are new to Taylor's music, and before proceeding to the Caf' Montmartre sessions, you're perhaps best off starting with this record, an avant-garde jazz walkabout of sorts, or at least a Cecil Taylor walkabout; here we can bear witness to the qualities, in different ideas, forms, themes and styles, that characterize an entire body of work—archetypes of interaction and by-play, suggestion and statement, however indirect, and then subversion of whatever feeling, emotion, idea, had been conjured up in the first place, and thus we continue on with the journey.

For the seasoned listener, the principal value of this release is naturally having it available again, and, more importantly, the alternate take of what was the original album's second and final track—side B for the vinyl lovers. Two minutes shorter, this "new" version of "With (Exit)" is even more disturbing and, frankly, invasive, than the official take, with Taylor creating textures that pulse and recoil, frantically trapped in one dark alley of a nightmare, and turning, alone, down another. Speaking analogously, it is though the happy version of "Dedication"—once titled "Cadaver"—had been chosen to close Point of Departure —instead of the proper requiem—or that we have discovered the lost soundtrack to Dementia, such is the gap between these two takes.

In terms of Conquistador! as a whole, note the by-play of Taylor and altoist Jimmy Lyons, foil and compatriot both, depending upon the composition, or the movements within the composition; and, let it be said, that along with Armstrong and Hines, Dolphy and Little, Coleman and Cherry, theirs is a partnership that seems so inevitably wrought and well-suited, one can scarcely imagine the sound of the one without hearing the sound of the other—that is, until spinning Jazz Advance or Burnt Offering."- Colin Fleming

Git

Tony Williams' Lifetime - Lifetime: A Collection

Raul asked for some Holdsworth features, and we start with this comp. Be warned: this is far from the Lifetime's best work (which will be uploaded later on) but still better than 90% of the tepid fuzak that was being released at the time, including Pastorius-era Weather Report (sorry Jaco nuthuggers). So here it is.

"This collection, a combination of the two releases Believe It and Million Dollar Legs, features what was known as The "New" Tony Williams Lifetime. Long gone were the original members of the trailblazing group: John McLaughlin, Larry Young, and eventually Jack Bruce. But it was six years later, and Tony was still pushing the concept. Many of his fusion contemporaries were already finding the commercial success that Williams was still searching for. For the most part, Tony was trying too hard to please, and it showed. The two "New" Lifetime records were uneven at best. Parts of Million Dollar Legs are simply unlistenable. But Williams's immense talent and the contributions of the young and exciting guitarist Allan Holdsworth provided a few outstanding performances, among them "Red Alert." Composed by bassist Newton, "Red Alert" is anxious and compelling. In unison, Newton and Holdsworth open with urgent low-register lines. The players step into a higher register and then back again. Williams's insistent pounding is like a rapid heartbeat. Pasqua's electric piano serves as a bit of a salve, as he is not asked to be as demonstrative as his band mates. Meanwhile, Holdsworth lets loose with synthesizer runs. Of course, he was not playing synthesizer! Holdsworth was still in the early stages of his illustrious career, but you could hear in his solos that he was going to be different. "Red Alert" is both a demanding tune for the player and a warning to the listener. Be prepared to be knocked over." - Walter Kolosky

Get it

Allan Holdsworth @ Inter Metro 2/19/2009

First of all I want to invite my fellow chasm filler. bloggers to post any material featuring this artist. Ozstriker I'm talking to you!

Allan Holdworth will be giving a class next Wednesday February 18th at 2:30 pm and will be playing live at the Inter Metro's theatre Thursday February 19th at 8:00pm.

"Allan Holdsworth (born August 6, 1946) is a British guitarist and composer. He has played many different styles of music over a period of four decades, but is now best known for his work within the jazz fusion genre.
Holdsworth's first recording was with the band Igginbottom on their lone release, Igginbottom's Wrench, in 1969 (which was later reissued under the group name of "Allan Holdsworth & Friends"). In the early 1970s, he joined Tempest, upon which the albums Tempest (1973) and Living in Fear (1974) were released during his brief time spent with the band.
Following this, Holdsworth worked with various popular jazz fusion groups and artists, including Gong, Soft Machine, The New Tony Williams Lifetime, Jean-Luc Ponty and, later in the decade, the progressive rock band UK."

Howard Shore & Ornette Coleman - Naked Lunch OST (1992)

Sweet mother fucking josef! Is this shit what you think it is? You bet your fucking ass it is bitch! If you're a fan of David Cronenberg's adaptation of the book, then this is for you. Magic shrooms are highly recommended with this one.

"Canadian-born composer Howard Shore breathes life into David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs's surrealist vision with dark symphonic passages and keening alto saxophone improvisations provided by jazz legend Ornette Coleman ."

mugwump

bugpowder

Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz To Come (1959)

I've come out of my premature retirement mah bois! This one's for my boy Howard Roark. Highly influential album by the master Ornette Coleman. This guy's one of the most important jazz figures of all time, not only pioneering in the free jazz movement but also improvisation. Without a doubt, one of the most important and greatest albums of all time.

"The Shape of Jazz to Come was one of the first avant-garde jazz albums ever recorded. It was recorded in 1959 by Coleman's piano-less quartet. The album was considered shocking at the time, because it had no recognizable chord structure and included simultaneous improvisation by the performers in a much freer style than previously in jazz.
Coleman's major breakthrough was to leave out chord-playing instruments. Each selection contains a brief melody, much like the tune of a typical jazz song, then several minutes of free improvisation, followed by a repetition of the main theme; while this resembles the conventional head-solo-head structure of bebop, it abandons the use of chord structures.
The album was a breakthrough work, in that it helped establish the avant-garde & free jazz movement. Later avant-garde jazz was often very different from this, but the work laid the foundation for the format in which nearly all later avant-garde and free jazz would be played."

Link

The Lounge Lizards - The Lounge Lizards (1981)

More from these guys. This is what I listen to when I'm demented.

Demented