Jack Bruce, More Jack Than Blues, HR Big Band Meets Jack Bruce, 2006

By now it is pretty clear to all that when we lost Jack Bruce we lost one of the pioneers of advanced electric bass, an irreplaceable vocal force and a major composer-performer in rock and jazz in the latter 20th century. A new DVD/CD set of his 2006 German Jazzfestival performance is out, and it is a most welcome addition. More Jack Than Blues (MIG 80312 CD & DVD) gives us an hour of Jack in very good form, singing and playing some of his most familiar material (and some less so) with the HR Big Band as his backdrop.

The arrangements are very much a plus, appropriate and expansive without countering the thrust of the Brucian way. So "We're Going Wrong," the old Cream number, has layers of combustible horn lines that further the song. So also there are some very nice Jack and bigband versions of "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," "Rope Ladder," "Born Under A Bad Sign," "Theme from An Imaginary Western," and even "Sunshine of Your Love."

Jack's bass is in full bloom here, but he also plays acoustic guitar and piano in his inimitable way. His vocal instrument may show the slight effects of time, but it has everything there to make it the shining singularity it was and is.

The HR Bigband is a powerhouse with excellent, well rehearsed ensembles and worthy soloists.

This adds to every number a new jazz-inflected breadth without losing the primacy of the original versions. That night in Frankfurt was a triumph and one cannot watch and listen without a feeling of the sadness of loss. Yet of course Jack lives on here for us.

A real addition for all Jack Bruce enthusiasts, and a good set in itself. I am glad to have it! Check it out.

Adam Rudolph Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra, Turn Towards the Light

Getting this album and seeing who was on it immediately filled me with expectations. Adam Rudolf Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra? Yes. The album at hand is called Turn Towards the Light (Cuneiform Rune 406). It turns out this is the ninth album by Rudolph and his extended guitar outfit, but this album is an all-new grouping, with 13 compositions by Rudolph that he "improvisationally" conducts. It is a stellar line-up consisting of:

Electric guitar and effects: Rez Abbasi, Nels Cline, Liberty Ellman, David Gilmore, Miles Okazaki, Marvin Sewell

Bass guitar: Damon Banks

Acoustic guitar and effects: Marco Capelli

Electric bass and lap steel guitars: Jerome Harris

Electric and national steel guitars: Joel Harrison

Electric guitar and banjo: Kenny Wessel

That was enough to get my interest! And here there were nine previous albums, and every single one I have missed. Not entirely surprising, since I only know lately what is sent me and so I do not cover and hear EVERYTHING, even if I could. So I put the music on and found myself in a sort of jazz-rock guitar heaven.

These are thick walls of guitar improvisations and structural spontaneity around good compositional ideas and content Adam Rudolph thought out. It is music structured, often outside in overall effect, freely unfolding according to the given foundation of each number.

These are all PLAYERS of course, so they do indeed GO forward and make something fascinating out of what Rudolph sets them out to do. It is very electric music in result, not so much insistent in a rock way--there is no pounding pulse that ordinarily accompanies fused and psychedelic song-structured music. This IS motif and riff-based often enough. And there is pulse much of the time, but no pounding per se. You could say it is an electric version of Fripp's League of Crafty Guitarists, except it isn't. In common with that group though are composed parts for multiple guitarists, yet mostly this is more free and out-rockish in result.

What it is--a virtual cornucopia of modern jazz-rock electricity--does not translate into an easily described thing. It is a guitar ORCHESTRA, and so it does have multiple layers of structured and improvised segments that come together to give us 13 stringed universes, all contrasting within a general stylistic originality.

It is music to stimulate and excite the guitar lover in you. And in the process it presents composed-improvised music that innovates by letting the flow of parts and guitar excellence come at us, segment by segment. It is serious. It is great fun. I would suggest you hear it by all means.

Wolves in the Throne Room, Live at the Bell House 9.12.11

Every so often I get something in the mail that's a sort of "What? Who expected this?" That happened recently with a small consignment of music from the boutique Saint Roch Av. Recordings label, a New Orleans-based entity located on the street so named in the label. The release that hit me mightily was the album by the group Wolves in the Throne Room, namely Live at the Bell House 9.12.11 (Saint Roch Av. limited edition cassette).

This has that huge sound of amassed guitars, bass and drums plus exorcist-type vocals. At one point this stuff was called Death Metal and its hugeness and worked-out chordal progressions sound a little like some of those Viking type groups a friend of mine turned me on to a few years back. So post-Death Metal?

The point is the music and this band has worked pretty hard to get a very effective wall of sound that makes the whole thing stand on its sonic head in a way.

The date was part of the band's Celestial Lineage tour. The Bell House gig was in Brooklyn.

It is music that will sound familiar to anyone who has checked out this sort of thing, but they really do excel at getting one big overwhelming sound with Gothic chord progressions and pounding drums.

I like this band! It's not about chops here, but it sure is about POWER walls!

The label has a website if this sounds interesting to you: http://www.strochavrecordings.com/about/

Spaghetti Eastern Music, Sketches of Spam, Sal Cataldi

I get swamped sometimes with music, but in the end that means I get things and pay attention to them and reap the rewards of the unknown now and again. Such a thing is undoubtedly Spaghetti Eastern, Sal Cataldi's inaugural project by that name, and the album Sketches of Spam (Bad Egg Music).

First off, the music knocked me out. Sal's post-Rypdalian electric guitar work is very hip on the one hand, and he gives us some excellent space rocking things that show off his beautiful electric sound and conceptual post-psychedelic Milesian imagination.

And then there is the acoustic guitar-vocal songs, on the other hand. He can sing and the songs have a quirky darkness-in-light that Sal suggests is out of the Nick Drake-John Martyn bag. That may well be but the songs stand on their own. Henry Miller comes up too in Sal's ruminations, and we hear from him on the miseries of New York. I do not say no to that, any of it. Then there is something like "Nap Dust," based on Zappa's progressions from "Sleep Dirt." It is cool. "Ticket to Ride"? A remake that works.

There is 70 minutes of musical strength here. I love his electric work and I appreciate the songs. It's a nicely DIY album with overdubs to get a group thing when he needs it. What counts is it is very good indeed.

It's good, first-rate, original music. And it belongs on this page for the excellent guitar work. So I would like to recommend this one to you. It stands out as important. Encore! You can find this one on Bandcamp. You should.

Sonny Sharrock, Ask the Ages, with Pharoah Sanders, Elvin Jones, Charnett Moffett

If you do not know the late Sonny Sharrock's guitar playing, you need to remedy that. He was the original avant jazz guitarist, the one who started it all, pretty much.

One of his very best albums, Ask the Ages has just been remastered and reissued (MOD 0016). It is an excellent example of Sonny in his later period, recorded not that long before his untimely demise.

The first thing to note is the seminal personnel: percussion titan Elvin Jones is on drums, the master Pharoah Sanders plays tenor and soprano, and Charnett Moffett is on bass. Along with Sonny this is a fabulous outfit, truly for the ages, and they completely mesh. Not surprising. Sonny was on Pharoah's first Impulse album and all knew and appreciated each other's work. And of course Pharoah played with Elvin on some key Coltrane dates.

The quality of Sharrock's originals is another wonderful element. Every one is quite memorable, classic.

And then the soloing. It is outstanding on all fronts. Sonny had gotten a considerably bit more metallic in his playing and that comes through here along with his shredded skronk. He is in beautiful form, to say the least. And for that matter, so are Pharoah, Elvin and Charnett.

This was a date that managed to synthesize the swinging outness that Elvin favored with the electricity of Sharrock in peak mode. Pharoah sounds essential. And Charnett, too.

This is a way to start appreciating Sonny, if you don't know his work. But it is a landmark date regardless, something all who cherish modern avant jazz will need to hear and own. But for the out rockers this is equally essential.

A classic among classics!

Slobber Pup, Pole Axe

Slobber Pup? Hell, yeah! They come front and center with their second album, Pole Axe (Rare Noise). It is the potent pairing of guitarist Joe Morris, keyboardist Jamie Saft, drummer Balasz Pandi, and for this outing the saxophonics of Mats-Olof Gustaffson.

The Rare Noise label favors some heatedly outside electric music and Slobber Pup makes some of the best such sounds of any outfit going. The potent combination of the plugged-in versions of Joe Morris and Jamie Saft and the sheer viscerality of Mats-Olof Gustaffson joined with the creatively out percussives of Balasz Pandi...all this portended some great music when I put the music on my machine. I certainly was not disappointed.

One of my very first musical mentors was right to remind me long ago that, as much as technical and instrument-specific abilities that you must learn in your early days is crucial, it ultimately has to fit properly into a group context if you are going to play music in your life. Nobody thrives much doing nothing but unaccompanied solos...except perhaps Cecil Taylor, but that's another story. And even he gets a group together much of the time. And face it, the solo piano is complete in itself if the player is exceptional. Not to put down the many excellent unaccompanied solo efforts of avant improvisers out there since the early '70s either. Just a general truth.

And so Slobber Pup combines some very potent players who work together to create a very cosmic group sound, filled with virtuosity now and then but also working to achieve a special blend of free electrics that is much more than a collection of solos and accompaniment. I suppose you could say at times that all are soloing at once, yet there is a lot of attention to achieving four-way torque.

On the other hand you get moments when Joe Morris lets his special outside ability fly in the wind overtop the maelstrom, with some of his best cranked playing ever.

So you guitarists reading this should take note--what he is doing here is a product of a great deal of hard work, years of finding his own voice, and then a long time interacting with others in ensembles, finding the give-and-take.

And that is certainly true of everybody in Slobber Pup. It's hard to sound like this with the sort of edge-of-the-universe virtuosity that is a good deal harder to achieve than some of the mainstream normalities. I don't mean playing on changes; that is an art in itself. I mean that it is very difficult to fly without instruments with consistently artistic results, so to speak, to take off for parts unknown trusting the instinctual freedom you achieve with years of dedicated, sometimes financially un-remunerative, finger busting hard labor and mutual cooperation.

All that goes into this music. And all that helps make this music a deluge of creative overtopping, a fine, fascinating suite of electric excesses and bold sound sculpting.

Bravo! Check this one by all means if you seek to go into musical orbit as a passenger on a first-class spaceship.

Joe Louis Walker, Live in Istanbul, 1995, DVD

If you do not know the music of electric guitarist, singer, songwriter, bandleader Joe Louis Walker you probably should. He is a bluesman-blues rocker of power and soul. And you can hear him do a full set with a good band in the 85-minute DVD Live in Istanbul (MVD Visual 7505D), recorded in 1995.

Joe is in peak form and his band is right there with him. The excellent sound and visuals of the set are first-rate, the audience into the moment, and Joe is up for it.

We get nine songs and all the fire generated from them. Joe is in the mood to play and his vocals are sharp and cutting. It reminds you that Walker kept the blues alive then when many of the classic electric bluesmen of the classic period had passed and there weren't as many out there doing it right.

He surely was. He surely still is. And this DVD gives you a full set to demonstrate why he is both a master of the art and a consummate showman. And a crack guitarist, of course.

So grab this if that sounds good to you. It's got that something.