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Iain Ballamy and Thomas Strønen, joined by Christian Fennesz. ‘Powerful grooves, evocative textures and exploratory improvisation, sometimes hypnotically insistent, sometimes turbulent.’
‘Heavier, drier, connecting more with how we actually sound live,’ says Strønen.
‘Music, its forms and rituals, has the power to bring us close to distant civilizations. Armenia offers a special case: a sacred culture that was preserved and presented at its fullest flowering through the work of one man, the scholar-monk Soghomon Soghomonian, known under his religious name as Komitas.’
Duduk, blul, santur, tar, saz, dap, kamancha, kanon, oud…
Armenian sacred music from the fifth to nineteenth centuries — chants, hymns and sharakans — in settings for choir and piano.
‘Extraordinarily beautiful… Hamasyan uses the characteristic, Eastern-hued Armenian modes to summon up an ancient world. It’s very different to Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble’s million-selling Officium, but if you like that, you’ll love this’ (The Independent).
Playing ndingo, genbri, guitars, suling, nay, rewab, rabab and shakuhachi, and singing.
Powerful new trio versions of Peacock classics, interspersed with recent compositions — including work by pianist Marc Copland and drummer Joey Baron — and a reading of Scott La Faro’s Gloria’s Step.
GP — bassist on Spiritual Unity — was eighty this year.
A companion volume to Résumé, from 2011, retrieving EW’s bass solos with the Jan Garbarek Group, 1990-2007, and reworking them with the addition of his own keyboard parts and contributions from veteran Dutch flugelhorn player Ack van Rooyen (who played on The Colours of Chloë, more than forty years ago). New Music with old things, EW calls it.
Cymin Samawatie and her trio, joined by violist Martin Stegner as a kind of second singer, deepening the sense of East/West dialogue in the music. Settings of the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzaad — to whom the album is dedicated — besides Cymin’s own lyrics, classic Sufi poetry by Hafiz, and the verse of Nima Yushij.
‘What playing!’ raved Alex Ross in the New Yorker. ‘Notes were placed with surgical care; inner voices gleamed in crystalline patterns; elusive emotional states were painted with quick, light strokes.’
A compendium of tiny homages to composers from Scarlatti to Stravinsky, and tributes to colleagues and influences, interspersed with heart-stopping Bach transcriptions. The wit and sublimity of these games, the incisiveness of the playing, four hands on the piano, and the affection between the elderly partners, are really something to see. Off the beaten path for us, but hotly recommended.
Brilliant piano-trio jazz; warmly recommended.
‘Break Stuff’: what happens after formal considerations… a time for action… breakdowns, breakbeats, break dancing…
Hood is a humbly bamboozled tribute to Robert Hood. Work is for Iyer’s beloved Thelonious Monk. Countdown sets Trane to a West African rhythm. Mystery Woman is driven by the compound pulses of South Indian drumming. There’s a desolate, barely-there solo version of Billy Strayhorn’s Blood Count…
With Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell, no less — the drummer’s friends from school in the early 1960s — and Muhal Richard Abrams, whose band they all joined as leavers, plus bassist Larry Gray. Issued as the AACM begins its 50th anniversary year, there is nothing complacent about this hard-nosed, exhilarating music. Terrific.
The last recording by the late Canadian trumpeter — such a mainstay of contemporary UK jazz — stamped with his trademark melancholy… lyrical, sly, sinuous. ‘As a graceful coda to a wonderful career, not to be missed by anyone who ever fell under Kenny’s spell, however belatedly’ (Richard Williams).
A hypnotic, at times starkly dramatic meditation on the Arab Spring by the wonderful Tunisian oud player. Persistently framed by shimmering, glowing strings, the quartet marks the return of pianist Francois Couturier — from Le Pas Du Chat — alongside Klaus Gering on bass clarinet, and bassist Bjorn Meyer.