Tord Gustavsen Trio Live

He is being compared to Keith Jarret, Paul Bley and Brad Mehldau, with justice. Mark Saleski over at BlogCritics has a good writeup of this trio.  The music feels intimate, wandering in and out of melody, with intricate improvisations - pure beauty. BBC3 have a recording of a live concert more then two hours long from the 2005 London Jazz Festival, which is pure bliss. Click on the right to listen.  I remember driving down some country roads in France with the sun of a golden dusk over rolling hills, and the Köln Concert CD playing us along in perfect harmony. I have a feeling this music would feel just as good...

Listen to the concert

Stream all this Chaos!

Listen! - Jazz can now be streamed from the page. Just click the Stream! link on any page and all the MP3's on the page will start playing on Winamp, or any other player that supports the M3U palylist format.

Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts has the ability to move slowly and gracefully from chaos to melody (and sometimes back to chaos) in a fascinating and beautiful way. He is accompanied here by excellent musicians, and the disc is almost as good as hank's live gigs at the ABC Cafe in Ithaca NY in the early '90s... In the title track, look out for the Celo doing a car speeding away!

Listen to 'Little Motor People'

SEE the music of Coltrane

'Giant Steps' by John Coltrane is a BeBop classic. Whenever we listen to it we are free to paint a picture of how the music builds and disintegrates, goes out of melody and back again. Here is a beutiful flash movie by Michal Levi that paints such a picture in amazing synchronization with the musical structure. A dot starts out on a (musical) line, other lines join to form a building, then a city is formed. And just as it is there, it disintegrates into a cloud of dots. It's not that after this movie Coltrane's music will never be the same, but we have been shown another dimension to it.

WATCH 'Giant Steps Flash'

Bad Plus link fixed...

Sorry

The Bad Plus

The Bad Plus get a lot of mileage out of their introduction of new songs into what is traditionally regarded as Jazz standards, like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Blondie's "Heart of Glass". These are indeed great, but for me, their meditative 'Everywhere You Turn' is the highlight of the CD. It's circular melodic line, repetitive beat and airy piano are almost as evocative as John Cage and Philip Glass pieces. But the sound is Jazz and the rhythm is Jazz…

Listen to 'Everywhere You Turn'

Brando - Pollock - Parker

Art critic Jonathan Jones in this article in the Guardian, draws a connection between the improvisation of actor, painter and Jazz giant. Although his style of painting is so close to the spirit of Bebop, Pollock listened mostly to earlier, traditional Jazz, as attested to by the disk on the right. Ornette Coleman's 'Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation' is an amazing, powerful recording. It's a shame the cover art of the original LP which was actually a Pollock painting, was replaced on the CD with a photo of Coleman's face. This kind of thing happens on too many LP to CD transformation, by the way.

Buy Ornette Coleman's 'A Collective Improvisation'

Weber

Another old favorite, I heard this track several times on Dubi Lentz's Jazz radio show in the late eighties, and was mesmerized. I have looked for the CD with this track in it, but because I didn't know it's name, and this being before the age of Internet audio samples, it took me five years to zero in onto the right disk. On this track, Weber's bass and Jan Garbarek's sax, start out with a circular tune, with a backdrop of some of Garbarek's magical northern sounds. Ralf Humber joins in with an offbeat marching drum, and then Garbarek (to whom I will defiantly devote several entries...) starts screaming with the sax. But it is all put under control after a short while and the track ends in a subdued air of resignation.

Listen to 'Part III, IV'

Glas(s)no(s)t

This track started its life on Vinyl but as it was recorded digitally by ECM ECM and produced by Manfred Eicher, the sound on the CD is as crisp and northern sounding as all the later ECM CDs. I picked it up second hand almost 15 years ago, and it's been one of my favorites since. It's obscure - it didn't show up on most CD databases (although freeDB freeDB does have it), and definitely requires several listens for it's stark beauty to register. The music here is exactly what this blog is about - a trip from chaos and cold disharmony to melody and even warm feeling. A cello and clarinet start out with what sounds like discordant shrieking and humming, but soon the clarinet finds its melody and starts repeating it. The cello understands and joins in but by then the clarinet is already adding to the tune and repeating it faster and faster, while the drums are playing dramatically off-beat, reminiscent of a Jack DeJohnette line. Now the cello and clarinet are racing each other, going round and round - crescendo and its over! German free Jazz from the eighties like you never thought it could sound.

Listen to 'Glas(s)no(s)t'