Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Dom Minasi, Juampy Juarez, Freeland

Dom Minasi lets us know he is fitter than a fiddle these days with his recent duet album with the also very together, harmonically astute Juampy Juarez. Freeland gives us a sophisticated guitarist's guitarists romp through beautifully changes-oriented and beyond-changes freedom in ways that ratify and affirm both ways of sounding the guitar and the very fertile ground that lies between. Make no mistake this is schooled playing in the best sense of the term.

The program goes from the masterfully sculpted changes and enlightened lining of "Angela" to the open blues insights of  "Blues Blues Blues"--and in time to some startling free improvisations. The album ends with a rollicking adventure inside and outside of Monk's classic "Well You Needn't."

This plainly and elaborately, simultaneously, is a tour de force of jazz guitar yesterday and tomorrow. Both are masters, both let the world hang a while as they create sheer joy in the spontaneous, studious and stupendous hipness of absolute guitar expression.

If the planet seems to be going to the dogs right now, literally, there is so much more music left inside our human souls. Here is some of the very best going, a guitar heaven here on this rat nest of a planet. Minasi and Juarez are at the top of expressive brilliance on this one, I tell you true.

If you love the guitar you need to get this album, do.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Carla Diratz, Pascal Vaucel, pRéCis.AiMaNt

Vocalist Carla Diratz and electric guitarist Pascal Vaucel hold forth beautifully well on the new album pRéCis.AiMaNt (Pochette vinyl 33T). It is a series of originals with bass and drums (those latter sounds programmed by Pascal and also drum sounds compiled from field recordings) that conjures without imitating the sort of art you expected from the Tony Williams Lifetime in its first very heady days with John McLaulghlin, Larry Young and, eventually, Jack Bruce. Or also think about the quirky music-in-a-message-in-a-bottle of early Soft Machine with Robert Wyatt? That. The lyrics are poetic-personal, the vocals artfully individual, the guitar openly prog-fuze-neo-psychedelic in excellent ways, the rhythm team simply loose and jazz-rock-ful as befits a primarily accompaniment role.

Every track has its own individual sensibility, every minute has definite immediacy. Carla's vocals are absolutely tabla rasa, original, very herself, sultry-smart, musically bending and twisting over the sound skies we behold gladly. Pascal is a whirlwind in a thoughtful genie's magic lamp.

It is music that one cannot ignore, advanced and avant, very human, very hard edged yet sensitive in sensibility. In the horizon of music today pRéCis.AiMaNt is the Morning Star, a light bearing signal that comes out of the past yet signals a future daybreak maybe? Yes.

Excellent in all ways is this. Guitarists and psychedelicatessan owners take note, vocal aficionados and new electric music fans hearken! The pasture is the future-ful foddering grounds and we can hear it now! I am glad to talk about this one and I fully suggest you listen a bunch of times! Oh, yes.