photo from philadelphiaweekly.com by S. Victor Aaron One of Frank Zappa’s latter day live documents is called Make A Jazz Noise Here. Anyone who’s followed Zappa knows that while Zappa rarely really played jazz as we tend to think of jazz, a lot of his music adopted the exacting, open-endedRead More

by Mark Saleski The music of jazz composer/pianist Matthew Shipp isn’t fairly described as “avant garde,” mostly because to a great many people, that categorization can be read as “I don’t understand this music, can we please leave now?” This wouldn’t be fair to Shipp because over the course ofRead More

photo: Natascha Rockwin by S. Victor Aaron According to Wikipedia, a gutbucket is “a stringed instrument used in American folk music that uses a metal washtub as a resonator.” There is even a “gutbucket blues” style of music that was played by those jug bands of long ago. And soRead More

Photo by Myles Boisen by S. Victor Aaron Imagine a conversation with three other people where topic…a theme if you will…is selected and all four of you are to converse on that topic at certain points in time. And then at other times, a random topic is chosen, but everyoneRead More

by Mark Saleski The area of electro-acoustic music encompasses so many different sounds and constructions that the label itself is nearly meaningless. As the name implies, it is music created with both acoustic and electronic instruments. On my list of favorites are the Anthony Braxton/Richard Teitelbaum collaboration featuring synthesizers andRead More

Each of the year’s four Satoko Fujii records made our Best Of 2010 List. by Pico With the more accessible types of jazz out of the way in Part 3 and Part 4, this Best of 2010 series concludes with the least accessible stuff, the experimental and avant garde stuffRead More

As delectable as Stars Have Shapes by the Exploding Star Orchestra has been, I still can’t forget Rob Mazurek’s other 2010 project, Boca Negra, performed by only him and percussionist, vibrist and mbira player Chad Taylor. Together, they make up the Chicago Underground Duo, which you can think of asRead More

Dirty Baby wasn’t Nels Cline’s first 2010 release and Initiate wasn’t even the first Nels Cline Singers 2010 release. That came on March 1, when the Singers got together with the free jazz saxophone quartet Rova to collaborate on an album recorded in 2008, The Celestial Septet. Though both bandsRead More

by S. Victor Aaron I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing West Coast jazz from East Coast jazz by ear. I mean. I know it’s supposed to be a more smoothed-out “cooler” variant of the vigorous, sometimes jarring jazz that comes out of NYC and I know that guys likeRead More

by S. Victor Aaron After all the whack jazz winners I’ve heard from Engine Studios, I’ve come to expect nothing but excellence whenever I pop in a CD from that label for the first time, and I’ve yet to be disappointed. Label head and producer Steven Walcott signs up creative,Read More