Axel Weiss, Cheryl Pyle, Silent Noise on Saturn

Maybe it's because we are in the thick of the present but it seems to me that there are ever more possibilities in the combination of styles and genres than there were years ago. Noticeably to me, rock has to some extent disengaged itself from the pop parade and taken its place alongside jazz and classical as music more outside the mainstream than previously. You look at the top 20 in pop at any given point now. How many are rock? Much less than 30 years ago. (You might say the same of soul, as compared to hip-hop, but that's another discussion.) So perhaps as a result, there is a continued intermingling of styles happening in all kinds of permutations. I find it interesting.

Turning to today's album we see an example of the confluence of styles. Axel Weiss and Cheryl Pyle join together for Silent Noise on Saturn (Intrinsic Records). Cheryl plays flutes here in her own special way; Axel comes at us with a battery of electric and acoustic guitars plus keys and such.

What's especially interesting to me is the spectrum of styles--from free to jamband to bossa and so forth. Each cut sets up its own world, with Cheryl's beautiful tone and cellular improv phrasings. Axel shows great versatility, driving the music from a rock jamband sound to classical, jazz and folkish modes.

It's mood music for your life. But it has tensile strength and gentleness with content that is substantive. It may not be the masterpiece of the century (how many times is that happening, anyway?) but it floats its way into your ears in a very welcoming way.

Recommended!

Dylan Ryan Sand, Circa

The renaissance of power trio progressivity must be with us. There are some killer examples out there these days. One of them surely is drummer Dylan Ryan and his Sand (Dylan Ryan Sand) as can be heard on their latest, Circa (Cuneiform). This is fuse-prog with some lively compositional ideas from Dylan and excellent playing from all three members.

Tim Young lets loose on electric guitar, Devin Hoff is something to hear on bass, and of course Dylan is on drums, playing busily in the heat of things but always remaining focused.

The spectrum of moods is wide, from spacey and gentle to hammering jazz metal. It's a group confluence but you get lots of tasteful and hard-edged playing from everybody. Dylan sees the band's signature strengths as "harmonic openness or simplicity, the dramatic or dynamic shifts, the ensemble passages and especially group unison parts."

And I would add that it is how those factors play out with originality that makes this band an outstanding one. Tim's guitar has a through-looseness that is nearly belied by the significance of the lines and chordal patterns he unleashes. Hoff and Ryan are both engaged in original ways too.

Listen to their version of Keith Jarrett's old groover "Mortgage On My Soul" and you'll get what the band is doing straight-off. But then the originals take you further into the heart of what they are about.

It's an excellent go, an essential power trio album of the year for those who want involved, substantial music that still has an edge. Hear it.

Marc Ducret, Tower-Bridge

Jazz guitarist-avant composer Marc Ducret has never been an artist to be taken for granted. His music and ensembles are filled with twists and turns, the unexpected and the worthy. His guitar work is very electric at times and always personal. Given all that, one never knows what is next. But I must admit the scope and intensity of his work with a 12-member band on Tower-Bridge (Ayler 139-140 2-CD) surprised me.

It is surely his most ambitious work to date. The entire double CD set was recorded live with a series of six Ducret compositions that deftly combine freedom and preset compositional form, structure and spontaneous heat.

The band is a well-chosen one. They play the music with in-the-moment ingenuity and drive. In the process they respond well to solo and collective improv opportunities. There are two drummers (Bruun and Rainey) and a percussionist (Lemetre), Antonin Rayon on piano, three trombones (Fourneyron, Mahler, Persigan), Tim Berne on alto sax, Fred Gastard on bass sax, Kasper Tranberg on trumpet, Dominique Pifarely on violin and of course Marc on electric guitar. Very good, excellent players, all. Combined they make for a stunning sonance.

The compositions have linear and cyclical aspects, make full use of the sonic spectrum of the instruments, have complex lines at times and generally make full use of forward time versus suspended time, of open freedom collectively and rock drive.

Beyond this, it comes across as ultra-convincing large ensemble avant jazz for today. There is a good amount of Marc Ducret's special guitar work, but this predominately comes across as a group effort, a triumph of large ensemble modernism.

It is not to be missed, if you are serious about keeping up with what's happening today. This is.

Moraine, Groundswell, with Dennis Rea

For the thinking person, we have fusion-prog rock by Moraine, the Seattle-based outfit headed by electric guitarist-composer Dennis Rea. I believe this is the third album for MoonJune (066) and it most certainly is a strong one with the band very much homogenized into a multistranded unit of adventure with a sound of its own.

Part of that surely has to do with the individual sound palettes of each band member. Alicia DeJoie plays an electrified violin with a beautiful tone and attack that one might say is post-Steve-Goodman in that it transforms a classically trained background into vibrant electric kinetics. In James DeJoie we have an important ingredient to the band's sound, especially with his rich baritone sax but also his agile flute. Kevin Millard plays foundational and virtuoso lines on the SN stick bass. Tom Zgonc drums with fused rock turbulence and drive. And Dennis Rea plays an electric guitar with a special lining ability that is about wonderful note choice and sound texture, using his chops in the service of the musical statements of the moment.

This set has compositions that work well to bring out the special group sound and to rock through with their own brand of fusion. Rea contributes four pieces, Alicia two, James two, plus there are several by names unfamiliar to me but the music all has that post-Sort Machine smarts that set things up for good soloing all around from Alicia, James and Dennis along with some nice ensemble flourishes.

This may well be the most impressive of their albums in terms of a cohesive original group sound. It is a beautiful listen and will be welcomed by all prog-fuse enthusiasts. Dennis remains one of the more important yet relatively unsung fusion guitarist figures out there. The whole band comes through with flying colors. This is band music with a highly original way about it all.

Very recommended.

Tal Gur, Under Contractions, with Eyal Maoz

Tal Gur plays alto and soprano sax and composes. His pieces are effective. Tal joins forces with the always interesting guitarist Eyal Maoz, bassist Sam Trapchak and drummer Nick Anderson for the self-released gem of an album, Under Contractions.

Tal excels with outside, mostly quiet lyricism and he shows how that works on the album. Eyal Maoz contributes his sound-sensitive, gritty and sometimes amped-up guitar. As on his own albums, in trios and such, Eyal is a guitarist of quality and stature, inventiveness and leverage. One of the most interesting guitarists today in fact.

The rhythm sections holds its own, providing free-wheeling structures that make this a band in the best way. "Waiting for A Birth", a ballad, succeeds as strikingly well as some of the more up numbers.

Yet throughout there is more than the contemporaneous, there is a group sound that is strong and original.

The guitarist readers will surely dig what Eyal is doing, as will anybody attuned to modern open-form jazz. Tal has a sound of his own, too. And Trapchak gives us some excellent wood in his tone, a nice choice of notes and a perfect running mate for Nick Anderson and his smart drumming.

Highly recommended!

The Group (Il Gruppo), The Feed-Back

When The Mothers of Invention under Frank Zappa came out with their first album, Freak Out, in 1966, it stunned me. The double album included a long cut called "The Return of the Son of the Monster Magnet", which featured a drummer laying down a basic rock beat, over which was a mix resulting from a studio filled with percussion instruments and a group of crazies who laid down a bizarre concatenation of avant-out sounds. Being a young lad at the time it scared me just a little bit. What was this? It was a "freak out", apparently. That's all I knew for sure.

Here we are some 48 years later. I received in the mail recently a CD with a cover I recognized as having a period look. The Feed-Back was (and is) the album title. On the spine of the CD the artists are identified as "The Group" (Schema Records). I listened and danged if it didn't remind me of the "Monster Magnet" Mothers. A drummer lays down various beats, on top of which are some very intricately, collectively improvised out sounds involving guitars, vocals, various instruments and electronic alterations.

I certainly liked what I heard. If anything, it was better than "Monster Magnet" but well within that mode. So I was determined to cover it. Today I looked up the music on the net and it turns out it is the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, the seminal, pioneering avant improvisation ensemble out of Italy and this indeed, as the label indicates, was originally an RCA Italiana LP recording (from 1970). Like the MEV and the AMM they were critically important for the avant live acoustic-electronics improv scene. Members included Frederick Rzewski, Ennio Morricone. Franco Evangelista, Giancarlo Schiaffini, etc., basically improvising composers.

This album never to my knowledge made it into the bins of US record stores or if it did, I must have missed it. On the front cover nowhere does it identify the artists, so who would have known?

Anyway it's a full album of Il Gruppo in a psychedelic freak-out mode! The reissue gives us the music in an excellent digital remastering and all I can say is, if you have the slightest interest in the seminal avant garde outfits of those days, you do not want to miss it. It's wacky but it is serious about it. The band created here an over-the-top psychedelic ambience that is a genuine pleasure and a hoot.

I'll be...!

Kalle Kalima and K-18, Bunuel de Jour

Avant cafe folk thrash? I don't know if that quite covers what I hear on guitarist Kalle Kalima & K-18's album Bunuel de Jour (TUM CDE 038), but it's a start. Kalle has done tributes with this band to other seminal film auteurs--Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch (type Kalle's name in the search box for a review of the latter)--and now he and the band turn to the surrealist icon.

The band thrives from a mixture of Kalle's ever-probing skronkish and pre-skronkish guitar, the quartet-tone avant folkisms of accordionist Veli Kujawa, acid-etched alto saxist Mikko Innanen, the ever-present woody sense of bassist Teppo Hauta-Aho, and Kalle's original compositional stance.

The oil and water contrasts of these musicians make the music vibrate and oscillate like a gestalt rabbit-or-vase foreground-background optically moving drawing. The music is this and that in rapid turns, simultaneously, or within a longer time field.

The ensemble sound and the distinctive personalities of the band members make for both a vivid whole and a caustic series of parts. You can profit just by listening to Kalle's guitar work, but it's meant to be a part of the unusual whole. The avant jazz, rock and cosmopolitan urban folk qualities intermingle in ways that intrigue and keep your attention from flagging.

Hear this one and you'll be challenged and pleasured all at once. Worth your ear-time for sure.