Dom Minasi, Remembering Cecil, Solo Guitar Improvisations

If you've never tried (assuming you play guitar) you may not realize how difficult, even counter-intuitive it can be to play "completely free" on the guitar. Part of it is percussiveness, gravity, the way that hands situate to the keyboard versus a fretboard-and-finger action that is not a first reaction-inclination if you are say three years old and somehow get next to a guitar. And in some ways it explains why we might find more absolutely freestyle pianists than guitarists? A child may sit down to a piano and wang away at it without a whole lot of thought. Because it is a percussing. Plucking is less obvious. On a guitar really you must already know how to play it pretty well or very well before you can hope to address a potentially valid "free" and completely open improvisation.

That does not mean an excellent free improvisation on the piano is something easy. It is not at all easy. If we lost a titan of the free improv piano around a year ago, that is the giant Cecil Taylor, we are in many ways still reeling from the loss, for he was one-of-a-kind, not someone you replace so much as keep in memory and pose as a model for such things regardless of the instrument. He was brilliant and so far beyond a merely intuitive stance as to be in the same select league as all exceptionally great players of instruments in human history.

Given all that guitarist Dom Minasi, someone readers of this column I hope know of and appreciate as one of the living lights of the guitar today, aimed recently to pay tribute to the master free improviser pianist in a full set of solo electric guitar entitled Remembering Cecil (Unseen Rain UR9912).

The album is the ultimate challenge of artistry at its most exposed. Just Dom, his guitar and the recording apparatus. He gives us four free improvs that as Dom notes in the liners, are a culmination of his 30 years of playing freely and so too of appreciating the music of Cecil Taylor.

What most intrigues me in listening long and carefully to Dom is the reality that he sounds like no other guitarist when he plays, both in a more straight-ahead mode as well as freely, and that he is a very original free guitarist with a style all his own. As he mentions in the liners this is not "atonal" music but it is not pre-planned nor is it in any set time frame. It cascades. It tumbles. It makes use of all the guitar technique, the considerable guitar technique and schooling Dom has gained and maintained over a lifetime of playing. The technique Dom has accumulated is put to use in a very personal way, in other words, and that is what makes his identity strong and thoroughgoing.

The improvs perforce do not sound at first blush identifiably like Taylor's playing, but that in many ways is because the guitar has its own challenges and playing free on the instrument means a different set of possibilities. And so there is a underlying closeness between the two players in intent, but not in the ultimate sound.

In the end as a free guitarist he sounds completely like himself--not like Derek Bailey, not like Sonny Sharrock, not Elliot Sharp. Like Dom Minasi. In the course of this album you hear the artist just as he was recording this in real time, a kind of self-portrait that is also necessarily a kind of portrait of Cecil Taylor.

And in the process we find on close listening one of the gem examples of free guitar art. And so there you go.

Michael Bisio, Kirk Knuffke, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Requiem for a New York Slice

Truism: the improvisational world in its finest flower these days is a bit underground compared to something like Duke Ellington or Count Basie in the '40s. It is true in spite of some foolish talk out there that has nothing to do with the value and merit of the music itself, any more than an illusion-example that you might hit on that shows how ridiculous the idea is: if you claimed that Johann Sebastian Bach could not be very good since he did not make enough money or reach all that many people in his lifetime. The economy of the arts changes and that in the end has nothing to do with the quality of the music at any point.

So the music I talk about today will no doubt not be on anyone's best-selling music lists. I mean the double-platinum loot and all that stuff. And so what? Fact is the trio of Michael Bisio on acoustic bass, Kirk Knuffke on cornet and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello is one of the high points of advanced free improvisation today to my mind, at least on the latest CD at hand, Requiem for a New York Slice (Iluso IRCD17).

Why do I say this? Playing freely is not just a matter of everything is great and "go man, go!" People singly and in units invent worthwhile things or they do not, or of course possibly something in between. In this case we have five improvisations that are excellent. It is a matter of the whole and the parts of course, and not any of either is necessarily equal to another. Here the level is high, in all senses.

Yes, Count on it. Here the level of invention is high throughout. The bowing-plucking possibilities of Bisio's contrabass and Lonberg-Holm's cello set up a textural matrix that contrasts very nicely with Knuffke's cornet.

All three are major players, it perhaps need not be said, and together they are something special. Each are at the top of my achievement lists (in my head) for their respective instruments today. And this album is one of the best examples of their art. So if such things interest you I suggest you give this music your full attention. Buy it. Hear it. Be cool. Make friends! I kid you not. This one hits on all cylinders and never lets up. It is supremely inventive trio music. So listen!

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.

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.

Michael Gregory Jackson Clarity Quartet, whenufindituwillknow

What comes in time comes with sunshine sometimes. That is how I feel right now about Michael Gregory Jackson Clarity Quartet's new one whenufindituwillknow (Golden MGJCQ 004). That does not mean that things coming from Michael Gregory Jackson and his evolving working bands were less full of sunshine in the past. I have followed the music over the years happily and I could not say that there is any the lesser happening in the earlier. Yet, after hearing this new one a number of times it strikes me that it is no less original in its Jacksonian guitar originality and the compositional and conceptual "clarity," lyricism, exploratory outreach  and fired-up drive. It is maybe all the more so right now? It seems to me that this particular outing gives all the things I've been digging on all along but perhaps in a form that advanced Fusionologists who have missed his music will connect with immediately and directly and thereby become converts.

That is, if some still do not know out there. Anyone who likes a guitar plugged in and smartly saying it all needs to hear this music. The nine tracks all have special distinctive things happening, each one a little different than the others. You will find here a little extraordinary grooving that might remind you of "Jack Johnson," remind not for a derivative quality so much as an irresistible locking-in-ness. There are flowing free grooves and energy bursts too along with outright rockers, and then, surprise, a samba-lyric thing that only Michael might think up. And if the beauty of "In A Silent Way" makes you wish somebody would take that lyrical seed and transplant it into new soil, well Michael has come up with an original set of shooting buds that bring on the Jacksonian side of that possibility. Happily.

The band clearly clicks together and shows in each member a special belongingness.   Drummer Matias Wolf Andreason gets my attention from the start as someone who uses his snare artistically and wisely, then puts down a charge of motility that puts everything around the corner and into a place we cannot ignore. Niels Praestholm on bass and Simon Spang Hanssen on alto and soprano each have their say and add their sound to great advantage to the total result.

And then of course we have Michael's guitar work. It is outstanding and as sure and confidently assertive as I have ever heard it. I've said it before but he is a stylistic subset of one and perhaps this particular program gives you the ideal view of the warp and woof of it all.

The fact that I came and reopened this dusty blog space specifically to talk about whenufindituwillknow should tell you something--though I do plan to post here a great deal more going forward than I have lately. This album is a joy, a must for anyone in the electric guitar universe who is still listening to the new in the music.

This is the new. When you hear it you will know.

Nora McCarthy, Dom Minasi, Ras Moshe, Improvising Trio, Manna For Thought

Whatever Dom Minasi has done in the last few decades has been ever at the pinnacle of improvisational creative freedom and, hey,  properly thought out, nothing is exactly "accidental!" And the latest is no exception. I refer to the album by the Improvising Trio of Nora McCarthy (vocals), Dom Minasi (guitar) and Ras Moshe (reeds). It is called Manna For Thought (MIC-ART) and in fact it most certainly is that!

The session is not just free, which would still be interesting of course with these musicians, it is most definitely a product of a kind of structured musical thinking that gives the numbers a feeling of fore-ordinance, of a special intention, a way to get the threesome together on a page like each one is writing this music as they play it, that a composition arises in each case in the way the three think together and out loud musically.

At the same time there are compositional things going on too. All meshes together in ways where you do not feel a radical separation of planned and spontaneous note-ing, but instead a thoughtful and soulful gathering of three masters who make a very pointed effort to listen carefully to one another and create something worthwhile.

Ras Moshe sounds great here, relaxed, himself, open and note-ful, a blowing that is with a true self-sound, not some other-else-sound. He shines on this! Dom Minasi is a guitarist who never sounds like anybody but himself, too,  and at the same time invents lines and chording, timbral fingerprints that by now mark him as one of the most original and provocative guitarists active today. Poet-singer Nora McCarthy has the ability really to improvise and to do it well with a gorgeous voice and with lots of ideas like Jeanne Lee only she sounds like Nora McCarthy! And the lyrics, yes the words are hers and we dig!

The program goes from strength to strength. Now if that sounds good you owe it to yourself to get this one and listen closely! The world and this trio are ready each for the other right now! Start the melding together by getting this album. May thay make many more.

Michael Gregory Jackson, Spirit Signal Strata

If I say right out that Michael Gregory Jackson has over his career consistently distinguished himself as one of the very most distinctive and convincing guitarists in the modern jazz-fusion-post-new-thing zone, I say it to let you know where I stand. There are a number of factors that set him apart. One: Michael's music is at once the sound of joy and poetic exploration. There is exuberance, a special lyricism, a brilliantly melodic flow to his playing. Two: His music as he himself acknowledges, is a product of ALL the music he heard growing up--so jazz, rock, soul, and other things besides. Three: the factors above play into the music he makes for a performative beauty and luminance no other electric guitarist quite has out there today. Five: there is freedom to his music, at the same time as there is structure and pacing.

So all of that is readily heard on his latest and one of his very best albums, Spirit Signal Strata (Golden MGJSSS-01). For this outing Michael joins forces with a potent and open post-power trio. Kenwood Dennard is at the drums, a free-ranging and powerful exponent that brings the music ever forward. He is joined by the woody smarts contrabass of Keith Witty, who straddles the terrain between rhythm team functions and harmonic-melodic second lining quite effectively.

The program is a gradual outward traversal, beginning close to earth with some rootsy blues-rock-improv-jazz spans and then brings that further afield into spacier, more free spaces that include the roots but pull and stretch them to higher reaches of music.

The especially rewarding thing to center on is Michael's brilliant lining excursions, some of the very best from a guitarist that I have heard in years. He can keep a solid grounding in rootforms but still create a very idiomatically personal zone of drive and lyricism. On the free-er numbers he unleashes his more upward imaginative powers and creates a flow of musical lines that marks him the principal exponent in a school of one! The drenched drive of the guitar tone gives Michael's musical aura power and heft. The intelligence and soulfulness of his plectrum wielding and tone choice make it all work as a self-in-sound that gives Fusion a renewed vibrance and viability.

Is that clear? What I want you to do is get this album now, if you can. You who want to keep hip on the present-day scene need this album to throw you into the very much actuel. Michael remains and becomes ever more central! So listen.