What are you listening to and WHY might anyone be interested? (Vol. XIII)
Posted by: Richard Dane on 01 January 2017
2017 has arrived today, so time to start this thread afresh.
Last year's thread can be found here;
(1973)
Just because I fancied some more 'Stones.
Now Playing......
Ron Miles - I Am A Man
Ron Miles (cornet), Brian Blade (drums), Bill Frisell (guitar), Jason Moran (piano), and Thomas Morgan (bass)
Streaming on TIDAL....... I ordered this online and is on backorder, so back to TIDAL for another listen, very enjoyable album!
sjust posted:And moving over to a (brilliant) 4 song EP, featuring Melody Gardot: Bye Bye Blackbird.
question: is “Live in Europe” (the one with the tasty cover picture) already out somewhere in the world ? Bound to release Feb 8, here.
Nope the Live in Europe isn't out yet anywhere.
seakayaker posted:Just Finished.....
Sean Rowe - New Lore
Streamed on NAS...... One of the best of 2017!
Not allowed to use +1 anymore so….agreed!
This is the first recorded collaboration of baritone saxophone great Gerry Mulligan and the witty alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. Despite hardly any preparation for these recording sessions, the two men complement one another's playing beautifully, as both of them were highly melodic improvisers.
Now Playing
Avishai Cohen - After The Big Rain
Avishai Cohen (trumpet & FX's), Lionel Loueke (guitar & vocals), Jason Lindner (keyboards & Fender Rhodes), Omer Avital (acoustic bass), Daniel Freedman (drums & percussion), Yosvany Terry (chekere on 1, 2, 7, 8)
Streaming on TIDAL...... another 2017 release (09/30) which is right there at the top. I find it to be quite an enjoyable album......
Vinyl
Now Playing......
Valerie June - The Order of Time
Streaming on TIDAL........ Another 2017 release (03/10) and a very nice album that I thoroughly enjoy.
Review on NPR Music found here:
"As of this writing, I am sixty-one years old in chronology," the novelist Madeleine L'Engle once mused. "But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and... and... and..."
It's not entirely surprising that the author of the beloved YA fantasy A Wrinkle in Time would have had such imaginative notions of how past and present fold into each other: "If we lose any part of ourselves," she concluded, "we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away."
But it's not easy to live out that awareness. Valerie June recognizes that treating time as an immutable constant that can also be toyed with, made to telescope, eddy or unfurl in one's mind, requires a certain willfulness. She puts that esoteric wisdom to captivating use on her new album, The Order of Time, the long-awaited follow up to Pushin' Against a Stone, which introduced her singularly expansive vision of roots music to audiences across Europe and the U.S.
As a small-town Tennessee kid, she made a study of varied voices in the Church of Christ congregations her family attended, planting herself in the pew next to singers male and female, young and old, black and white – those who pushed the notes of the old a capella hymns from their nasal cavities, from the backs of their throats or from deep in their chests. By now, June's developed an inviting, inscrutable drawl that seems to encapsulate all of those possibilities, youth and agedness and everything between; on some tracks, her singing family members, and her friend Norah Jones, serve as kindred spirits. June glides between cool resilience and needling in the southern soul number "Love You Once Made." In "If And," she resists the pull of the droning horns and harmonium, before allowing herself to yield to their pulsating pattern. In "Long Lonely Road," her phrasing is as assiduous as it is easeful, serenely persevering through the protracted, humid curlicues of her hill country blues-influenced melody.
Each of those songs, written by June alone, are suffused with nostalgia or idealism that's also strikingly grounded. She gives emotional weight to the work that goes into sustaining and stabilizing domestic lives. Nowhere is that clearer than the murmured second verse of "Long and Lonely Road": "Pops earned his bread in dust / but his hard working hands fed us / Sun up to sun sink down / His body worked to the ground / Folks thought we had it made / 'cause we always kept a face / Meanwhile there's bills to pay / and the stack growing everyday."
For June, labor, longing and reverie exist side by side. "Astral Plane," whose lyrics were originally intended for Massive Attack, is a vision of turning inward to find transcendence, while "Front Door" is a melancholy meditation on the way that an entrance to intimacy can become an escape from it. Producer Matt Marinelli embellished those tracks and others with ambient flourishes that had previously only existed in June's head – cursive string passages and drifting, pearlescent mists of pedal steel, electric guitar, organ and xylophone. The result is a marvel of mindfulness. Rambling yet precise, regal yet downhome, earthy yet mystical, June's musical imagination is a world to get lost in.
Well, after a few days out of town for Christmas, I thought I would listen to this since it came in the mail while I was gone.:
But my 272 has other ideas tonight - it's having one of those shit nights that it does have, which make me want to throw it into the backyard with as much force as I can muster.
The SBT in the second system works fine. Every time. Guess I'll have to forgo the joy of Naim electronics tonight.
Now Playing.......
Amina Alaoui - Arco Iris
Amina Alaoui (vocals, daf) Saïfallah Ben Abderrazak (violin), Sofiane Negra (oud), José Luis Montón (flamenco guitar), Eduardo Miranda (mandolin) Idriss Agnel (percussion, electric guitar)
Streaming on NAS....... This is one beautiful album, Amina has voice that just draws you in to the music, and the music is beautiful.
Review on All About Jazz by John Kelman found here:
Following her outstanding performance with the cross-cultural, century-spanning ensemble of Norwegian keyboardist/composer Jon Balke's Siwan (ECM, 2009), it's no surprise that the German label has tapped into the Moroccan singer for an album of her own. But as sprawling and ambitious as Siwan was, Arco Iris is, while being no less dramatic, on a much smaller scale; its greatest strength coming from Alaoui's nuanced delivery and acute ability to unveil the hidden power in a set of music that, like Siwan, spans centuries—as far back as 11th century Seville King Al Mutimid Ibn Abbad, and as recent as 20th century Spanish songwriter, Antonio de Sousa Freitas.
Backed by an outstanding multinational quintet that, in its reliance on acoustic instruments—violin, oud, flamenco guitar, mandolin and percussion—feels utterly timeless in the 21st century, Arco Iris pays sincere reverence to Alaoui's own roots. Born in Fez, she first studied Gharnati—a musical variant originating in Al-Andalus, stemming from Moroccan and Algerian traditions—but by assimilating a variety of cultural markers both near and far, Arco Iris possesses a much broader reach, a successful attainment of Alaoui's assertion, "I am an artist of the present. I abstain from simply copying the styles of the past."
The music of another ECM artist, Tunisan oudist Anouar Brahem, provides something of a touchstone in its more contemplative moments—less The Astounding Eyes of Rita 2009), though, and more Astrakan Café (2000). Fellow Tunisian oudist, Sofiane Negra is in a considerably different context, sharing the stage with Barcelonan flamenco guitarist José Luis Montón and Brazilian-born/Portuguese-based mandolinist Eduardo Miranda, though on the collaborative tracks they're as often heard in entwining melodies, rather than dense chordal engagements. Add Tunisian violinist Saïfallah Ben Abderrazak, and "Ya Laylo Layl" becomes a cornerstone and highlight, as it moves from a soaring a capellaviolin intro, to its dynamic middle section, oud and violin coming together in unison lines an octave apart beneath Alaoui's lilting lyricism, and driven by a propulsive 5/4 pulse from percussionist Idriss Agnel (Alaoui's son), but turning more introspective for a lengthy coda where improvisation is key.
Oud and flamenco guitar conjoin on the melancholy "Fade menor," Alaoui singing plaintively of the darker side of love, while on "Moradia," Negra's opening oud solo joins haunting lines and visceral bends to create one of Arco Iris' quiet tour de forces, an instrumental track that then takes gentler form as a duet where Miranda solos with spare urgency over Montón's soft arpeggios. "Las Morillas de Jaén," a more fervent song of three Moorish girls that represents both Alaoui and Arco Iris at its most potent, even as its dynamics ebb and flow in a reading almost unrecognizable to saxophonist Jan Garbarek's version with the Hilliard Ensemble on Officium Novum (ECM, 2010).
If much of this feels of antiquity, Agnel's soft electric guitar on "Que fare" places Arco Irisfirmly in the 21st century, even as Alaoui—a singer whose greatest potential is always kept simmering just below the surface—she delivers, here and throughout this compelling recording, with equal measures grace, emotive power and phrasing filled with evocative implication.
Now Playing......
Rodney Crowell - Close Ties
Streaming On TIDAL...... another 2017 album release, which is mighty fine album..... worth your time to give a listen.
Review by Brittney McKenna on NPR MUSIC KUOW found here:
Americana has had a banner few years, to put it mildly, and the roots of its current incarnation can be traced back to Rodney Crowell. The Texas-born songwriter has collaborated with everyone from Emmylou Harris to Waylon Jennings, all while maintaining a solo career that's netted him two Grammys and an induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
It's fitting, then, that Crowell's new album Close Ties unfolds like a history lesson, both of his personal mythology and the music that shaped it. Produced by Jordan Lehning and Kim Buie, the 10-song collection considers Crowell's influences while looking to the future, each song delivered with Crowell's slight growl and poet's eye for detail.
Opener "East Houston Blues," a rollicking shuffle buoyed by acoustic slide guitar, offers a glimpse into Crowell's difficult childhood, a topic the artist has never shied away from. (In his revealing 2011 memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks, he shared, among other painful details, that at the age of 5 he broke up a fight between his parents by firing a shotgun.) He continues to reckon with his past throughout Close Ties, from the mournful, twangy dreamscape of "Reckless," to the plainspoken regret of "Forgive Me Annabelle," an affecting piano ballad that revisits past romantic indiscretions through the unforgiving lens of time and age.
"Life Without Susanna," one of the album's standout tracks, is a bittersweet goodbye to Susanna Clark, an established country songwriter who formed quite the team with her husband, Guy Clark. Crowell references her again in the album's closing track, "Nashville 1972," a star-studded roll call of the musical luminaries (Steve Earle and David Olney, among others) he encountered upon moving to Nashville that year.
If "Nashville 1972" is a paean to the good old days, "It Ain't Over Yet" is Crowell's history — musical and otherwise — reconciled in just over five minutes. Featuring John Paul White and Crowell's ex-wife Rosanne Cash, the song is a gently triumphant ode to life's ups and downs, "ship[s] rolling in" and others "right back out." The choice of Crowell's ex-lover and one of his genre's brightest new stars can't be a coincidence.
There's no doubt that Crowell was an architect of Americana as we know it, and with Close Ties, we're fortunate to have a look at his blueprints.
Trio Dali - Mendelssohn
Going through some old HDD's
One of the best German rock bands from earlier this year.
This was still from yesterday evening - a great album of Keith Jarrett with Jan Garbarek this time...
Starting the day off with some nice chamber music...
Bert Schurink posted:This was still from yesterday evening - a great album of Keith Jarrett with Jan Garbarek this time...
One of my fav Jarrett albums Bert.