Pixel, We Are All Small Pixels

On a morning of another blizzard outside and my computer giving me the fits with a severe need to defrag I play Pixel's album We Are All Small Pixels (Cuneiform Rune 372) (LP or CD) and I get stupidly happy. Good music does that. To hell with the blizzard.

So why is this good? They are from Oslo. But that's not why. They are a band that makes the phrase jazz-rock respectable because the songs singer and double bassist Ellen Andrea Wang writes for the band are really fetching and they rock. Drummer Jon Audun Baar, trumpeter Jonas Kilmork Vemøy and saxophonist Harald Lassen give substance to the music and make what could be what is.

It's in a way as radical as Morphine (with that bari doing rock) in that they work with what they have and make something different. Ellen sounds great as vocalist and her bass makes you dig in. But the arrangements, the heat of an excellent drummer and those hip horns put this in gear.

This may be only their second album--but hey they sound really seasoned and hot as hell when they go to it. The songs are really something and Ellen delivers them! OK, get this one too. But only if you want. It's put a smile on my face all week. I don't smile all the time, either.

Greg Lewis, Organ Monk: American Standard

Greg Lewis, one of the very hippest jazz organists out there now. Organ Monk, his celebrated group gathered together to pay homage to Thelonious Monk not by imitation so much as by osmosis, by absorbing the essence of the master, doing the tunes & compositions he did in his performing life and making it new. That's what has been going on and it continues on Organ Monk: American Standard (self-released).

The idea is of course that Monk through his career played some standards along with his irreplaceable compositions. Greg Lewis has collated the best of them and set his band on re-doing them with hip arrangements and the same flare as they have given to Monk's music per se.

And guess what? It works. They kick up plenty of fuss and swing the hell of of the tunes. It's Greg on the B-3, of course, Ron Jackson on guitar, Riley Mullins on trumpet, Reggie Woods on tenor and Jeremy Bean Clemons on drums. Everybody can solo with bop and post-bop fire and they get it all smoking here.

Lulu is back in town! She's at a club digging Organ Monk. If you can't get to one to hear them then get this disk. Or do both. It's hitting that elated peak when everybody is on top of it all. Greg is Monk organist and more--and everybody does what a tribute should--not ape, cog-i-tate!

Jenks Miller, Spirit Signal

Well, it occurs to me on a Monday morning that there is probably nobody out there that likes precisely the same set of musics that I do. That's always going to be the case from individual-to-individual, but I do sometimes wonder what the people who like Bartok or Archie Shepp think of the things I throw your way on the guitar blogsite and vice-versa. I cover the various genres I do because I believe they are all key components of "new" "modern" music. And also my generation anyway tended to banish borders in their listens, some of us, and experienced anything and everything that was and is...."heavy, man"! We still do. Those who made it through and have all the sensory-motor and cognitive apparatuses in good working order. I always felt I was a part of a renaissance flowering of all kinds of excellent (and sometimes very new) musics in the '60s and early '70s, and ultimately it had nothing to do with drugs, not in any way that mattered. There was a confusion between being high and consciousness-raising then, and what that did was discredit what the new vision was about, enabled those against a change to roll back the clock further and further. All of that is far in the past, now, but the cultural residue remains and is an important part of our heritage. We press on...

So Jenks Miller is part of that. He's heavy (man). Seriously though his solo electric guitar album Spirit Signal gives you the sort of basement blow-out experiments my friends and I sometimes indulged in long ago, only it's better because Jenks has thought about the various neo-psychedelic realms he wants to cover and then sets about doing something interesting from segment-to-segment.

So there's some heavy duty sustained feedback, slide blues freedom, heavily distorted metal chords with some punky vocals, noodly raga rock blues metal, noise metal, things that remind you of where people started going when Hendrix cranked, when Zappa freaked out, and whatnot.

I like it. This guy plays ordinarily with Horseback (black metal?) and Mount Moriah (country-rock). This solo album is kind of a one-off hoot. But it reminds you of the sort of new joy in electricity that some of us experienced in our halcyon days. And so I do approve and I found it a fun and absorbing listen. This isn't about chops. It's electric music for a guitarist and his imagination. And for all that it succeeds.

Craig Yaremko Organ Trio, CYO3

Organ trios can come around these days in more than one flavor, so to speak. There are those that stay within the tradition well established in 1960 or so by Jimmy Smith and others. And then there are those that take the music into the present to varying degrees.

The Craig Yaremko Organ Trio do the latter on CY03 (OA2 22105). And they do it in ways that still keep with the hard bop tradition but reflect the post-scene as well. There are some jazz classics and a bunch of originals that hang together to make a cohesive statement.

So, who are these folks? Craig Yaremko heads the band, writes many of the compositions and plays soprano, alto, tenor, flute and alto flute. He's a modern bopper with a great sound and good lining. His tunes are within the forms but push them to the edges at times--like for example "Blue Fountain", a blues with some tone stretching head-lines.

Matt King is on organ. He manages to keep things soulful and yet pulls things more toward Larry Young and Charles Earland than Don Patterson. He also writes a few good tunes here. Jonathan Peretz has that swinging drum feel with plenty of kicks to boot the band forward.

And the potent Vic Juris guests on two cuts to excellent advantage.

CY03 marks the true arrival of a crack modern organ outfit. These guys are doing it!

Dom Minasi and Michael Jefry Stevens, Angel's Dance

Electric guitarist Dom Minasi, pianist Michael Jefry Stevens...neither are improvising voices you can easily pigeonhole as this or that. They both are complete artists, not content to stay in one zone, not content to repeat themselves. They are musicians who evolve and grow at their own pace, who make records that say something others have not, who are motored onward by an inner compulsion, not what the flavor-of-the-month is supposed to be.

So when they make a recording together, it's a special thing just by nature of who they are. But then of course, there is the music, which is what it all means. Angel's Dance--Improvisations for Guitar and Piano (Nacht Records Download) gives a really good listen to what happens right now when the two get together and freely improvise. Now two years from now there might be something very different happening, and of course that is the beauty of these guys and the music.

There is much going on here. Some things are like clouds of sound, peaceful or turbulent, others take on more of a pulse. All explore the edges of possibility in any music neighborhood they choose to dwell. There are tonal-centered or even key-centered moments and there are moments where that stretches through the spontaneous reactions of each other to each other and they work in their own tonality, so to speak.

This is music that comes to us when two very original instrumental minds meld in the various moments. Neither sounds like anybody but themselves, but in the many moments of inspiration they go beyond what you think those selves sound like and surprise you.

That's the very best sort of improvising! Grab this album by going to http://www.domminasi.com/disc.html

Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord, Liverevil

There is a group of young titans out there who intermingle in their different ensembles freely and make some great jazz music in the process. There is Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Bryan and the Haggards, and today's incarnation, Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord. The recent 2-CD live set Liverevil (Hot Cup 131) has been out for a little while and it's something.

With Jon Lundbom on electric guitar at the front, we have a potent lineup of Jon Irabagon on alto and soprano saxes, Bryan Murray on tenor and balto! saxes, Moppa Elliot on acoustic bass, Dan Monaghan on drums, and special guest Matt Kanelos on keys.

The band really benefits from the longer cuts and a sympathetic audience, it seems to me. Everybody kicks in with committment. The solos from everyone are excellent. And the tunes are extremely hip, too! There is a little bit of humor with these guys and it's more than refreshing. Yet they are serious players. Serious!!

Jon Lundbom is a guitarist who takes it out in his very own way. There is a full press of note-fullness, a way of patterning in extended chromatic territory that is quite original, and a soulful delivery. In many ways he has arrived, but then so has this band.

Two slabs of excellence, two-CDs, two for your ear-growing exercises. This is the one to get first, I think! Then get the others...

The Claudia Quintet, September

Some times of life are born of frustration. Like this Monday morning when I try and get my reviews done, the PDFs are slow, slow, slow in coming up, as is everything else, I wonder if my virus software is actually functioning as a virus by slowing everything to a crawl, the superfast internet connection seems about as fast as my old telephone modem, spell-check not working right, the tasks and life waiting for me when done perhaps as horrifying as any I've experienced. And on and on, bitch, gripe, bla bla bla.

But then the Claudia Quintet plays as I write this and I remember why in every way I was attracted to music, why I play it, listen to it, why I've been doing these reviews so long, and I try to forget the rest.

The Claudia Quintet? Yes. Their album September (Cuneiform Rune 377). Who is it? Drummer-composer John Hollenbeck. Red Wierenga, accordion, Chris Tordini, contrabass, clarinetist/tenor saxophonist Chris Speed and vibraphonist Matt Moran, and Drew Gress on bass for all but the four cuts that have Tordini.

This is their ump-teenth album. It's the first I've heard and I am glad to be in on it now. It's progressive jazz, compositional jazz, jazz that has a sound very much its own, a touch of rock, things that appeal to musicians because they have something behind them musically, and yes, should appeal to "real" music lovers, too.

The album is all about the month of September. But it sounds good in any month. There is a sampled speech by FDR, taking the opposition to the New Deal to task for their insincerity. The rhythm and tonemic thrust of the speech is turned into a compositional structure--much as Reich has done with works like "Different Trains", only perhaps more "jazzed".

Well and so there are other nice things to like here. This is ensemble music of a high sort. It is important music. It is not in any way expected music. It is not the same old music. So if you are a bassist, a guitarist, a music lover, it is music to hear and grow your ears with.

And so I put it to you, dear readers, as an example of something that's excellent about the time we live in.

We live. This music helps that along. It is very recommended.