LA FENICE (ECM) 9/10 “Not another Keith Jarrett solo piano album,” I hear you say. In a sense there’s no such thing as a Jarrett solo piano album, anyway: they are all conversations between the improviser, the piano, the room’s acoustics and the audience’s listening intensity. For many years he…
Category: Album Reviews – Archive
MUDANG ROCK (Fractal/Birdland) 9/10 Let no early notes foster expectations, because they’re sure to be dashed by music that keeps shifting shape and slithering out of reach. Initiated by guitarist Henry Kaiser, the project uses traditional Korean music to underpin seven improvisations. Kaiser assembled Sydney’s Simon Barker (the ultimate western…
If Donald Trump has been good for anything, it has been prodding the art of protest songs with the sharpest stick since the Vietnam War. Simultaneously, after cracking for half a century, the foundations underpinning musical genres collapsed almost entirely in 2018. Occasionally the genre-disintegration and protesting collided, as on…