Mike Baggetta, Spectre, Featuring Jerome Harris and Billy Mintz

Mike Baggetta is an electric guitarist and musical conceptualist of real stature. His new album Spectre (Fresh Sound New Talent 499) breaks important ground and constitutes a high-water mark thus far for his artistry on disk.

He plies an extended electric sound on guitar these days from some marvelous post-jazz-rock sonics and sensitivities. Joining him is Jerome Harris on acoustic bass guitar and Billy Mintz on drums, in a series of originals by Mike and Billy, some collective improvisational-compositions and an Ornette classic, "War Orphans."

Mike has evolved an original style that here reminds me sometimes of the McLaughlin of  "In A Silent Way" and just after, maybe the exotic touch of vintage Terje Rypdal, but mostly his well conceived original musical self, with some really nice digital delay effects and the trio in a very focused and creative zone.

The guitar work is lyrical and beautifully sonic. There is much brilliance to hear!

And by the way, as it so happens, I post on Mike's earth entry anniversary. Happy birthday, Mike!

Grab this album!

Mike Wheeler Band, Turn Up !!

From the blues heartland of Chicago comes vocalist-guitarist talent Mike Wheeler, his quartet and a couple of horns for some exciting soul blues in the honored tradition and lineage of Little Milton, Jr. Wells-Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Bobby Blue Bland, that tradition.

Mike brings his own considerable, blues drenched voice and extroverted soulful guitar prowess in a series of mostly original, always on it songs. Turn Up !! (Delmark 835) is what I am talking about.

If you need proof that the real blues has not left us, turn to Delmark's recording program in the last decades--Mike Wheeler being a prime example of how Chi-town still is the place for the real thing, just like Wrigley Field is the place for real baseball (and OK, White Sox are doing it too)!

This one is hot. Careful, don't burn your hands on the CD!

Ross Hammond, Sameer Gupta, Upward

I am preconditionally inclined toward any well-done merging of rock-jazz and Indian music. So it is only natural that I would take to Upward (Prescott Recordings). It melds the 12-string acoustic guitar of Ross Hammond with the tabla of Sameer Gupta.

There are eight improvisational jams that work nicely. Ross plays some outgoingly musicianly guitar that is in a developed sort of post-raga-rock mode, not cliche oriented but original, thoroughgoing in a modal, folksy bluesy manner that marks Ross as a talented guitarist. Sameer plays beautifully and does a great job incorporating multiple tabla drums tuned to various intervals while also articulating some movingly intricate tabla pulsations.

The two together are a fine fit. The music keeps one focused in its artistic unexpectedness and its interestingly expansive improvisational panorama.

If you dig the idea of some new ways to articulate the Western-Indian nexus and can appreciate a fine guitarist and fine tabla player holding forth at length, this one will find you in a happy place!

Pritsker / Jarvis Duo

The duo formation of electric guitar and drums may have been unusual in the past, but it is less so today. That does not mean that what is stylistically expected is written in stone, or somehow codified into formula, not by any means. And when you pair composer-guitarist Gene Pritsker with composer-drummer Peter Jarvis, and set them loose on a series of compositions, you should expect the unexpected, the unpredictable.

And that is most definitely and happily what you get on their duo CD simply entitled Pritsker / Jarvis Duo (Composers Concordance 032). This is free-wheeling improvisation-composition in an open-form rock context. We experience a series of six compositional frameworks by six composers--Peter Jarvis, Gene Pritsker, David Saperstein, Joseph Pehrson, Jessica Wells (with the addition of Daniel Palkowski on keys and Dan Cooper on bass for her work), and Daniel Palkowski.

Each one is different. each one has its own center, sometimes extended in a sort of prog rock realm, sometimes with the spice of avant, sometimes frankly experimental but generally straightforward and seeking to create dialogic interactions that give equal weight to the drums in a melodic-periodistic way.

I will forbear a detailed description of each, mainly because they speak for themselves far more eloquently than any brief and telescopic prose would here.

It is music that grabs your interest right away but then should be heard repeatedly to get fully on the wavelengths involved.

Gene and Peter turn in carefully considered and vibrantly interesting performances. The idea that "anything goes" is operative. In the end, this is music of fascination--groundbreaking, and
memorable--with each piece exploring its own turf and giving us a coherent approach, but every one of them rather unique.

The album gives you serious fun, daring fare, lots to ponder. Anyone of a progressive mind will appreciate it, I do believe. Kudos!

The Damned, Don't You Wish That We Were Dead? DVD Documentary

The Damned. One of the first, maybe even the very first punk band out of England. Really? So why are they not legends compared to their more celebrated contemporaries, the Sex Pistols and the Clash? In a way the documentary film Don't You Wish That We Were Dead, now available on DVD (MVD Visual 8307BR) is a complicated answer to that, with three years worth of narrative footage from the band and their contemporaries, live music footage and a kind of total punk attitude.

These were/are street-wise rebels from the working-class England that was especially ripe for expressing the hopelessness of their lot in the era. The original band and its offshoots have been together on and off from then to now, incredibly, and none of them self-destructed for the most part, but hung in (with one exception, but see the video). They were a good deal more musically talented and proficient than some of their brethren.

The personal relations between band members have been strained from time to time, to say the least, and the documentary brings out the squabbles, the infighting, the periodic breakups and realignments and the acclaim that came their way in spite of all.

It's a band that never turned punk into a formula, though they had a huge influence on what that formula became. They did manage to evolve as a band away from stereotyped punk roots--but then so did the Clash.

In the end though you sense the frustration of the band in the later days. They've kept going for around 40 years and what in the end have they gained? As one of them put it, had they all died in a plane crash in 1981 they'd be legends. Now they break the rules as a bunch of cranky old vets supposedly too old to rock and roll but telling the world to f-off nevertheless, going out there on stage and doing it regardless of what the world thinks.

The working-class English accents are occasionally a challenge for US ears, but then without their own narrative testimony we'd miss out on the detailed feeling of being there for so long.

The film is well-done, highly personal, and in its own way critical of the stereotypes of rock stardom. May they continue on for another 40 years! A good one to see!

T.J. Borden / Kyle Motl, Consensual Fault

When the players are mutually attuned and well-versed in their art, the cello and acoustic bass duet can be something special. We get that on the CD Consensual Fault (self-released)--with cellist T.J. Borden and bassist Kyle Motl freely improvising together. There is a natural affinity of cello and contrabass in their family lineage and the warm range of lower tones (and range of harmonics) they both can sound as a matter of course. That affinity is in the forefront on the album at hand.

When it comes to these reviews one might recall the adage "many are called, few are chosen." Or is it the reverse?! At any rate the new music/free jazz improv sort of duo here may not be for everyone. You the reader are naturally self-selecting in the end. You either are open to various possibilities or you are not. Or you really don't know what to think! Or you are an intrepid explorer, unafraid to go where few have gone before, or relatively few, anyway, and so you try different things. All that is your business.

So I will tell you what you can expect from this recording, why I find it quite good, and you of course can make up your mind.

Both avant garde classical new music and jazz from its inception and on into its more avant evolving have been of two minds in terms of technique. There of course is the standard way to play an instrument at any given point in time, what unfortunately has sometimes been called the "legit" manner. And then there are a nearly infinite number of special ways to color the sound--a great jazz player will develop various personal ways to express the music, and so new music has often called for musicians to sound their instrument in unconventional ways.

Borden and Motl are artists who have developed a wide vocabulary of these extended techniques and give us in three extended improvisations a dialog that cross-references a full gamut of sounds. It is in the way the two artists intermingle a blend of ever-varying sound color possibilities and the sequencing of such utterances that this recording stands out.

They create dual constellations of experimental and expressive soundings throughout. The ideal listener opens up to the interplay of the intersecting constellations and lingers on the sensual properties of the totality. That is the point of this music. Borden and Motl engage in a well-expressed and varied palette of sound worlds, making full use of the timbral familial relations of the cello and contrabass and creating always interesting blends from the available sounds. And to the "trained" ear in such things it is a stimulating and very successful musical journey.

So I definitely recommend it to you!

Horse Lords, Interventions

In the last several decades we have seen the increasing advent of avant-progressive electric bands playing with a certain rock heft yet exploring decidedly non-mainstream musical approaches. Horse Lords is one of those bands today, as we can hear by their innovative and creative opus Interventions (Northern Spy 075).

It is a quartet of electric guitar, sax, electric bass and drums, played variously by Sam Haberman, Max Eilbacher, Owen Gardner and Andrew Bernstein. There are synth electronics to be heard as well now and again.

What the music is all about is a well-defined, mesmeric set of interlocking minimalist grooves. It takes advantage of the core rock formation to give us a series of complex hypnotic insistencies. One of the reasons it works so well is that rock has often incorporated repetition into its more astro-oriented explorations, whether in be early Pink Floyd, middle period Soft Machine or classic Dead sprawls centered around "Dark Star."

Horse Lords incorporate some of the electric heaviness of classic psychedelic rock but then remove all vestiges of song or improvisationally linear jam elements in the overt sense. They concentrate on the unfolding groove-repeating aspects. And they do it well!

It is uncompromising in its insistent presence. It gives you some very creative takes on what electric guitar, bass, sax and drums can get going.

Anyone into the avant trance minimalist bag of possibilities will find this album much to their taste. You can dance to most of it I guess, which is only to say that it gets very much into grooves that roll you forward.

Nice. Hear this one!