Ferenc Snetberger, In Concert

Who is Ferenc Snetberger and why should we care? To answer that fully is to explain why his first album for ECM, In Concert (ECM 2458), is well worth your attention. To put it simply, Ferenc is a nylon string classical guitar player who, like Ralph Towner before him, has absorbed the classical guitar tradition and applied it to a jazz-structural approach. Unlike Ralph Towner, however, he sounds like Ferenc Snetberger.

There are different elements that go into the Snetberger style. The album at hand gives us eight improvised pieces and a version of "Over the Rainbow." It is just Ferenc, his guitar, the acoustic excellence of producer Manfred Eicher, the very sympathetic aural setting of the Grand Hall of the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and a home audience (Ferenc is Hungarian) of listeners paying close attention and giving interlocking feedback energy to the performer as the best live situations can do.

He is a player of great finesse, a beautiful tone, a compositional and improvisational flair that is very sophisticated, very lyrical, and truly a milestone example of what the classical guitar-jazz guitar nexus can give us today. You first notice in the recital a pronounced flair for working in the Brazilian nylon string jazz idiom. He has great facility and just the right rhythmic approach to make the first part stand out.

But of course there is more. His lyricism may remind you of some of what you expect from ECM guitarists, yet it is also very much in his own right. There is always throughout the recording a feeling that Ferenc knows exactly where he is and where he intends to go. His household growing up gave him much of the Django tradition (he has Roma roots) as well as Jim Hall, Trane and Bird, and then in a kind of epiphany, Johann Sebastian Bach. Hearing Gismondi and Vasconcelos together gave Ferenc another sort of awakening as to possibilities.

The eight part suite that comprises the bulk of the album is dedicated to his home, Budapest. Much of the first sections are improvised, excellently so, before the main theme appears and is expounded upon. The influences and musical epiphanies of his formative period are all there as building block elements but then the end result is cut from whole cloth as the work of a mature, fully formed artist of inspired musical ideas and flawless technique.

I could go on but it is in the close listening that you will get all you need. Ferenc Snetberger is a major artist and this opening salvo of an album makes all that very clear. I suspect we will be hearing a great deal more from him in the coming years. In the meantime this is a very impressive solo album you will not want to miss.

A grand artiste is in our presence!

Julia Vorontsova, Over

Every day I get music in the mail and about half the time I have no idea who the main artist is. That is fun but also challenging, because it leaves me naked, so to speak, with the music and I must trust the winds of fate to bring me good things, though of course that can not always be the case. It surely was though when Russian singer-songwriter Julia Vorontsova and her album Over (Privet Records 01) came into my space.

Julia gives us 13 of her songs, sung in Russian with a straightforward delivery, many sounding very folkish in a Russian way, but with a pronounced folk-rock orientation. Julia plays folk-acoustic guitar that goes with the songs well and Zeke Zima plays some nice electric, or at least I presume that is the division of labor. She is backed by a full band and they sound good.

The liners give a run-down of the lyric contents and they show the feelings and thoughts of someone in an ever-changing world, looking for meaning from the experiences she has lived through. The melodies catch the ear. There is a dark quality to it, a melancholic cast that creates a definite mood.

It is something different for those who look to the world for new folk-rock emanations. Ms. Vorontsova has something going on that is good. You who seek something different will surely find it here. Recommended.

David Fiuczynski, Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian MicroJam!

The moment you put Flam! Blam! (RareNoise RNR 062 CD or LP) on you know that you are in for something different. It's David Fiuczynski on fretless and fretted electric guitars, along with a somewhat sizable and unique sonic ensemble that includes Helen Sherrah-Davies on violin (for most of the album), Yazhi Guo on suona (oboe) and Chinese percussion, Utar Artun and Jake Sherman on microtonal keys and conventionally tuned keys, Justin Schornstein on fretless electric bass, Alex "BisQuiT" Bailey on drums and percussion, and for three numbers Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto.

The album is a homage to JDilla and Olivier Messiaen. I do not know JDilla but the Messiaen influence can be heard in the use of bird song as a melodic foundation, though they do it in different and intriguing ways.

The microtonal possibilities coming from fretless guitar, bass and microtonal keys--and also from oboe and violin--give this music a special shimmer. There is also a Chinese and overall Asian (e.g., gamelan, gagaku?) cast to the music.

Put all of that together in the special way they do and you get some of the most interesting and pathbreaking music I've heard so far this year. Fiuczynski's guitar work is remarkable, especially on the fretless, but then everybody makes important contributions in realizing the compositions and in adding improvisational/free touches. This is music that on the surface has a sort of jazz-rock inflection, yet what is added to it puts it in uncharted territory.

I've never heard anything like this before!! It is a startling disk of music that is moving into wonderfully avant, uncharted avant territory.

You must not miss this if you want to keep ahead of it all! Remarkable!

Fernando Huergo, Hashtag

Fernando Huergo is a talented, well grounded five-string electric bassist, composer and bandleader who steps out with a nicely done quintet date of fused Latin-tinged jazz, Hashtag (Zoho 201604).

He is joined by a two-"horn" front line in Yulia Musayelyan on flute and Rick DiMuzio on tenor, both nicely put together with pertinent solos and a projectingly blended compositional twosome. Leo Genovese plays piano and electric piano and has an effective solo presence as well. Franco Pinna straddles the various stylistic parameters with finesse and power as needed.

About half of the pieces are Huergo originals, nicely spun out; the other half are arrangements of some classic Monk ("Evidence"), Shorter ("Infant Eyes"), Mongo ("Afro Blue") and Strayhorn ("U.M.M.G."), generally given a nicely inflected Latin-fuse treatment.

Throughout you bass aficionados get plenty of Huergo's fine bass playing, both solo and in ensemble. He is a player who rewards close attention!

Well and so you will also find this album worthy of your ears in the wider sense. Good players, good material, lots of interesting twists and turns. Thanks to Fernando!

Pearly Clouds, Gary Lucas, Eniko Szabo, Toni Dezso

One thing about Gary Lucas is certain. He will not be pinned down like some lab specimen and subjected to rigorous dissection. He is ever in motion. His various projects over the years find him as a key contributor in ensembles or prevailing beautifully in solo contexts that vary in proportion to the great musical maze of possibilities out there. So whether it be old Chinese pop tunes from early last century, the music of Max Fleischer cartoons, music from classic film, or you-name-it, he engages wholly in each creative project and makes of it something significantly more than it would be elsewise. He takes it all on, absorbs the essence and adds his very inventive musical brilliance for an always transformative result.

The new album Pearly Clouds (Trapeze TRACD6514) is a venture into what the liners call "psychedelic world music," a situating of traditional Hungarian folk melodies and/or lyrics within a music of today that channels blues and contemporary Gary-oid soundings for something very unique.

Gary is on his trusty Gibson acoustic but also his Strat with its patented effects spaciness and singular sound. He is joined by vocalist Eniko Szabo, who has a nicely turned musical way about her and carries the melodies with a tender strength and impeccable musicality. Toni Dezso plays alto and baritone sax here in an effectively elemental manner, which one might say is more folksy and local than it is typically, notefully jazzy. It all works well. The key undoubtedly is Gary's beautifully wrought guitar parts, carved out of a harmonic and melodic reworking of the implications of each song and the tonal specifics of Eniko's sung lines.

These are recompositions and compositions that do not leave behind classical Hungarian melodic form, but place it within Gary's creative guitar-centric soundings and Toni's simpatico sax fundamentals.

It is yet another example of the extraordinary Lucas touch, his inimitable picking and sounding acoustic work and his equally inimitable psychedelic electric atmospherics.

It all underscores once again the restless creative ingenuity of Gary Lucas the guitar master, with transformative inventions that set off Eniko Sabo's lovely vocals and their Hungarian centrality and set the stage too for Toni Dezso's melodic primality.

Gary Lucas thrives as a guitar school of one, an innovative master who rewards with a continual reinventing of what and where his music can thrive and what that entails. He has a beautiful musical and artistic counterpart with Eniko and once you set aside whatever expectations you might bring to the music it creates its own space inside your listening mind.

And so I suggest that you check out this beautiful album, for the wonderful guitar playing, yes, and so too for the overall musical world it creates and sustains so well! Bravo!

Odetta Hartman, 222

Some music leaves you somewhat speechless, or at least that is my experience. Odetta Hartman and her EP 222 (Northern Spy 069) leaves me that way. It is Odetta, her somewhat quirky voice, her avant folksy banjo, guitar and violin and her partner Jack Inslee, sound artist and producer.

This is an elaborately produced soundscape that utilizes all that Odetta is doing, from newgrass bluegrassy to very beyond, adds electronics here and there and sampled effects for a decidedly unusual result.

It is space folk, or alt acoustic-electric, or...? It is haunted by the ghost of New York Bohemia somehow, and that makes sense given that Odetta grew up in the Village.

Well all that does not prepare you for what the experience of the music is like. It is all a product of what the words I write imply, but the specifics cannot quite be put on paper.

This is an artist who gives us a wayward folk-rock cut from her own cloth.

I come away from this album energized. There is much here to like! The EP whets your whistle for more. Encore! Is this the future? Who knows? It IS the present, anyway, a very interesting one.

SkyTalk, Days in the Sun

A new prog band, SkyTalk, debuts on the recent EP Days in the Sun (self-released). It's Jordon and Talor Steinberg, twin brothers, plus Dan "Ello" Costello. Ello plays the drums, the brothers guitar and bass. They met at SUNY Purchase and found they meshed quickly and well. They wrote the five songs on the EP as they jammed and further refined each their own role in the band.

The result is some elaborately stunning prog with some excellent guitar-bass-drum interactions. The songs get elaborate prog arrangements, some great guitar solos and a sound that hearkens back to classical prog but does NOT sound like any of it exactly. This is original.

The vocals do what they do appropriately but I am very much taken with what the instrumental parts are about, especially.  This is quite nicely done. SkyTalk may be poised on the edge of something very great. As it is they are a band to take notice of. Check out this EP!