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Abdullah Ibrahim is back with his long time awaited Piano Solo album!
Senzo is nothing less than a masterpiece. It is particularly the relaxed anchoring of the spontaneously captured moment in eternity that makes this recording stand out from the masses of piano albums that are currently flooding the market.
Abdullah Ibrahim: Senzo
The name Abdullah Ibrahim is as inextricably linked with jazz history as those of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, or Don Cherry. The pianist has collaborated closely with all of these musicians, but his life history is a unique story that is directly connected to global developments during the twentieth century.
Abdullah Ibrahim's sound has nearly staggering clarity. What the jazz connoisseur perceives as a maximum of musical reduction to the essence of expression is for the listener unfamiliar with jazz simply disarmingly beautiful music.
"East Of The Aegean" is nothing less than the quest of one of the great fighters of the twentieth century to make peace with himself. A big album with small songs full of love and anticipated memories.
Mikis Theodorakis: East Of The Aegean
After his oratorios, liturgies, symphonies, sumptuous soundtracks, and large-scale song cycles, the last thing one would expect from Mikis Theodorakis now is a quiet album that only relies on the melodious whispering of cello and piano. A sound that seems to emanate more from the subconscious than from reality.
He himself describes the cycle as an ode to lyricism, a musical obeisance to literary themes. Even more, however, the twenty-one miniatures are thoughtful reflections on his own existence. They are like postcards or an artist's notebook full of sketches with candid impressions of the Greek coast. For a fleeting moment, antiquity and the present join hands to form a continuum that extends far beyond mortal lives. In Henning Schmiedt and Jens Naumilkat, Theodorakis has found two musicians who are ideally suited for a sensitive interpretation of this song cycle.On East Of The Aegean, they balance with uncanny certainty within the musical imagination of a man who was imprisoned because of his songs before they were even born.
Trombonist Nils Wogram is a man of creative balance. With groups like Nostalgia and Root 70 but also in other constellations, he was constantly finding new fulcrums between past and present, looking back and looking forward. The particular charm of his musical adventure has always been that he gets by without any program or didactic approaches. So it is too on the new Root 70 album.
Nils Wogram & Root 70: On 52nd 1/4 Street
"Root 70 on 52nd ¼ Street" is a concept album by a band that really operates in a concept-free space. Even if the band has set itself a conceptual framework this time, they do not beat the listener over the head with their conceptual cudgel. The pieces are passed on with an unprogrammatic legerity. You can get lost in the melodic power of the themes, in the interaction of the musicians and the soloists, without having to waste even a single thought on the superstructure. A coherent and powerful jazz album, made in and for the new millennium, with a conceptual surplus value that offers a cornucopia of options for the future.
Barbara Buchholz has managed to produce a unique album in which you sometimes even forget you are listening to a theremin. She paints an image of an ocean of sounds in which you can drift around forever. You see the stylistic banks, but you will never reach them. The current of this music follows its very own laws, which have not been recorded in any musical atlas or illustrated reference book. Barbara Buchholz has done an inestimable service to the theremin with the unambitious simplicity of her aesthetic. That alone would make this CD a milestone, even if it did not also offer such wonderful music.
Barbara Buchholz: Moonstruck
The theremin is enjoying growing popularity, and Berlin-based Barbara Buchholz is one of the world’s top virtuosos of this instrument: the magic kit that came to us from Russia at the beginning of the previ-ous century. It is the only instrument that is played without being touched and the grandfather of all electronic instruments. It is the tremulous-sounding superweapon featured on the soundtracks of count-less horror films. On her internationally celebrated debut album, Russia with Love, Barbara Buchholz took stock of this unusual instrument’s capabilities. On her new CD, Moonstruck, she places it in an entirely new context.
Exponents of classical and jazz have tried repeatedly to find a logical connection between the two musical directions. Rarely successfully so, since usually things go in one direction or the other, and thus become uninteresting for the adherents of the other side. Guitarist Joel Harrison, of all people, appears to have found the magic formula. On his new album The Wheel, he is not searching for the shortest path to synthesis of two principles of sound but rather emphasizing certain aspects of classical and jazz in order to find new levels of density and interpenetration.
Joel Harrison: The Wheel
The Wheel is something round. A piece of music that is by no means revolutionary in terms of its basic elements. Harrison is light years away from being in the avant-garde. But on well-trodden paths he manages to make his way to new galaxies. That makes his music not only exciting and visionary but also agreeable and listenable in almost any stage of life.
On his latest offering, an ambitious orchestral project entitled Revolutions, Beard revisits some of his older compositions with the Netherlands-based Metropole Orchestra, under the direction of conductor-arranger Vince Mendoza. These greatly expanded renditions of pieces reaffirm the depth of Beard’s compositonal prowess. And while he does reveal certain influences along the way -- a touch of Aaron Copland, a bit of Burt Bacharach and a healthy dose of Joe Zawinul with occasional flashes of Igor Stravinksy -- there is an undeniable individualism to his compositions, each of which travels in its own unique orbit.
Jim Beard: Revolutions (Hybrid CD/SACD)
As a sideman, keyboardist Jim Beard has racked up an impressive list of credits from touring and recording with the likes of Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, John Scofield, Mike Stern, Bill Evans, Bob Berg, Victor Bailey and the Brecker Brothers. But it is as a leader in his own right that the Philadelphia native and Indiana University graduate has distinguished himself as a gifted arranger, accomplished composer, in-demand producer and clever conceptualist.”
Increasingly, European jazz is defined by piano trios. Alongside all the Esbjörn Svenssons and Marcin Wasilewskis, rising piano trios have a harder and harder time finding their own niche. Not so Anja Mohr, a young pianist from Hamburg. When she formed her trio with Willi Hanne and Andreas Edelmann in late 2004, she had no idea a piano trio boom lay just ahead. She simply let her own intuition drive her and didn’t let it deter her when new trio albums began flooding the market daily.
Anja Mohr Trio: Abend
You don’t have to spend a lot of time getting into the music before you discover a special approach to the concept of the piano trio here. It is not just the fact that Anja Mohr combines physical power and spiritual dreaminess in a unique way. The seductive power of her piano playing derives from a lack. A lack of respect for and roots in jazz tradition, which opens new paths for her. Although the pianist is anything but a revolutionary, jazz seems to rein-vent itself in her playing. She tells stories with such naturalness it is as if she were opening a large barn door in the middle of winter to reveal a meadow of brilliantly colored flowers.
Fourscore is four young German jazz musicians, and yet they have no use for labels like Young German Jazz or the Next Generation. Fourscore can live with people liking them or not, sharing their view of jazz or not. Because they have a story to tell.
FourScore: Add To Friends
Without offending connoisseurs of traditional notions of jazz, the four musicians are putting down new rails. Their album sounds like the beginning of a journey whose point of departure is known precisely. They offer orien-tation by permit familiar and well-loved things. A delicate mesh of then and now, here and there makes it impossi-ble to pigeonhole them clearly, despite all the connections to tradition. The almost symbiotic unisoni of guitar and saxophone, the gentle funk grooves of bassist Heiko Jung and drummer Nevyan Lenkov, the instinctive solos, the renunciation of all musical ballast, and the self-confident understatement in the band’s whole look betray an ap-proach to basic values of jazz that could hardly be more relaxed.
INTUITION RELEASE WINS A GRAMMY® AWARD
Joe Zawinul’s “In A Silent Way” (from INT 3450 2 "Brown Street") wins Best Instrumental Arrangement (Arranger: Vince Mendoza)
February 10, 2008 — Joe Zawinul’s Brown Street, was honored with a GRAMMY® Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS). The 50th Annual GRAMMY® Awards Ceremony was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 10, 2008.
Keyboardist/composer/bandleader Joe Zawinul, who rose to fame as one of the creators of jazz fusion, died on September 11, 2007. Zawinul’s final album, Brown Street (INT 3450 2), was released in North America on February 27, 2007 via INTUITION´s US Licensee Heads UP. The two-disc set captured Zawinul, a few of his longtime friends and collaborators, and the 15-piece WDR Big Band in an electrifying live performance. Recorded in October 2005 at Zawinul’s own Birdland Club in Vienna, Brown Street showcased Zawinul, Syndicate drummer Nathaniel Townsley, Weather Report and Syndicate bassist Victor Bailey and Weather Report drummer/percussionist Alex Acuna in expanded, orchestral renditions of some of the finest Zawinul compositions from the highly influential Weather Report oeuvre.
Nils Wogram's musical personality unites the carefree jazz visionary and the transfigured romantic. In Nostalgia he can persuasively bring these two sides together in harmony. Nostalgia - for Wogram, pianist and organist Florian Ross, and drummer Dejan Terzic it also means a fine sense of irony and refraction.
Nils Wogram's Nostalgia: Affinity
“Affinity” swings like hell. As entertaining as the nine pieces on the CD may be, the patina of shared memory is also mixed with the projections of an individual listener, and the three happy nostalgics break daringly and ruthlessly with every expectation. The music is full of unexpected details and twists that can suddenly set the whole course moving in another direction. The future begins yesterday. “Affinity” is a persuasive affirmation of this view.
The Jazz Big Band Graz is one of those large jazz formations that brought a fresh breeze to the big band landscape a few months before the turn of the millennium. On their new CD they simply call themselves JBBG. The logo symbolizes a new beginning in the virtual age and yet continuity on the basis of modern big band history.
JBBG: Electric Poetry & Lo-Fi Cookies
With "Electric Poetry & Lo-Fi Cookies", JBBG has achieved far more than an exciting varied album that jazz fans can call jazz and jazz haters can just call satisfying music. Heinrich von Kalnein and Horst-Michael Schaffer have redrawn the map of European music with their formation. Central Europe once again has an innovative focus on the big band. "Electric Poetry & Lo-Fi Cookies" is nothing less than a hinge of musical history on which a door to the future opens.
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