Zed Trio Heads for the Beyond on "Lost Transitions"

Somewhere in Toulouse, France in October 2009, the Zed Trio recorded their album Lost Transitions (Ayler 102). The CD showcases some out sounds from Heddy Boubaker on alto and the lesser-heard bass sax, David Lataillade, electric guitar, and Frederic Vaudaux on the drums. With a bass-less trio of this sort, the bottom comes through in the form of the bass drum, and Frederic has the "drop the bomb anywhere" approach, which means that the bass drum punctuates the music at any and potentially all possible places in any given phrase. He fills out his statements with churning figures that engage contrapuntally with freely devised alto or bass sax and the post-Sharrock-Bailey sound complexes of Lataillade.

There are ten different improvisational segments, many of which get pretty dense and robust at points.

It's a bit of a honk-out with the energy component one has grown accustomed to expect since the days of Albert Ayler himself. The Zed Trio goes more in for abstractions than the folkish qualities of Albert, and so they align a little more with Evan Parker, the pioneering Improvisation Company and those in that camp.

All that having been said, the Zed Trio most definitely hold their own. If you'd like to furnish your aural living space with an hour of wall-to-wall outness, and like the electrical charge a bit of noise-shred guitar brings to the equation, you'll dig this one.

Uz Jsme Doma, Czech Alt Rockers Celebrate 26 Years and their 7th Album "Caves"

Uz Jsme Doma, the Czech rock outfit now working on their 26th year together, do not fit neatly into a ready-made pigeonhole. Their new, 7th N American-Western European album release Caves (Cuneiform Rune 312) shows that wildly eclectic does not always mean derivative. Not with Uz Jsme Doma at any rate. There is a strong flavor of Eastern European dance/folk forms, a punk directness, the intricacies of prog rock and a healthy, hefty infusion of avant rock.

Mirek Wanek, leader and principal composer for the group, crafts some very original music. Like Zappa before him, he does not stay in any one place for very long, and also like Zappa the rock song form manages to accommodate some seriously involved musical variations with some of the heft and substance of modern classical music.

I don't suppose it should come as a surprise that Czech culture should spawn a mastergroup of this sort. After all there has been a tradition of Czech excellence in music, literature and the arts for many centuries.

Guitarist Romek Hanzlik stands out as a very dynamic thrasher on these sides. The band as a whole is put through hairpin-turn gymnastics (to mix a metaphor) that tell beautifully what a long-time tenure can do for a band. They work and breathe as one on the musical plane. And the vocals are quite impressively brash and bravura.

It's an album that gives you faith in the regenerative power of creative musicianship. This is music for today and, I believe, music that will be appreciated long in the future. Highly recommended!

Mr. Ho's Orchestrotica Enters the Space Age

The advent of modernism took a giant moonwalking leap forward in the late '50s-early '60s, as the space program took off and post-war optimism and "prosperity" briefly brought on positive thoughts of a new world to come, where everybody was going to wear tin foil suits, eat their meals from a toothpaste tube and wash it down with a load of Tang while they gazed wistfully onto the universe out of the panorama window of their space station dining room. There would be more leisure, pundits told us, and we would have to fill it up with something fun. Like modular easy listening phonograph albums.

The world and history took a turn in another direction and the future came. It was different, not what was envisioned. The mood ended but not before creating a body of musical pop that is now referred to as "space age bachelor pad music." That moniker is a bit of a misnomer. Space age yes, but this was not exclusively for bachelors. It had much to do with owning a hi-fi system (later stereo) and having music on LPs that showed off your system to good advantage. I grew up in those days and my father was one of those enthusiasts. He had the obligatory hi-fi "system," which in today's terms produced music that a good boom-box can match. The point is that he was no bachelor, nor were the male head-of-household neighbors who shared in his enthusiasms. Frank Sinatra albums were far more likely to be what a space-age bachelor put on to impress his date. Or perhaps Julie London.

Of all the things to be revived, so called "space age bachelor music" has been to me the most perplexing. It started sometime in the '80s and came out of thrift shop culture, a hippie thing that underscored a disconnect with the very mechanisms that pop culture used to continue updating modernism through ongoing consumerism. Our local free-format station here in Jersey, WFMU, began playing, with irony, albums by Les Baxter and Martin Denny, two of the more interesting of the hi-fi exotica band leaders. I suppose it was happening on other stations with an anarchic bent as well, outside of Jersey, but I never encountered it.

On the surface I was involved. I would occasionally grab dusty albums of the stuff for 10 or 25 cents at my favorite thrift outlet, mostly as a goof, but I didn't realize it was part of a trend until FMU . . . and some of my friends started purchasing expensive box-set CD packages of the stuff.

Well so it goes and this has been a rather long prelude to today's CD, Mr. Ho's Orchestrotica Presents Exotica for Modern Living: The Unforgettable Sounds of Esquivel (TIKI 001). Everything about this production is authentic, right down to the space-cheese cover art and typography, even the running time of around 30 minutes, which was often about right for the LP releases of such music.

Mr. Ho (aka Brian O'Neill) has done a marvelous job recreating the arrangements of one Esquivel. Now I'm not really sure if we are being put on here or not, whether one Equivel really existed, but the idea is that Mr. Ho has been forced to reconstruct the best of Esquivel's arrangements from scratch, since they have all been lost.

So you get the obligatory 11 cut LP in the guise of a CD with all the trappings of the space-age exotica music of the era. A 23-piece big band with the "oohing" chorus, xylophones, bongos and a "full fidelity" menagerie of sound colors designed to make your hi-fi impress all the neighbors.

As I said earlier I never have quite understood this revival. But that's because it is not something you grok on an intellectual level. Like the very astutely done TV series "Madmen," it gives you a certain ironic nostalgia and the realization that the age had complexities that only now seem apparent. Namely in this case, space age music had a certain dash to it; the best arrangements brought a sound into the various living rooms, a sound that had an aesthetic that, by becoming extraordinarily passe, serves to remind you that the pre-rock age was not without its cult achievements, it's totally distinctive elements that were completely associated with the time that existed (we're talking strictly pop here; jazz was and is another matter altogether).

Mr. Ho brings it all back with totally idiomatic arrangements, beautifully performed. And there are no skips, pops and ticks there as one would find on the thrift shop albums! It's like owning a reproduction of a totally tacky, huge-finned 1959 Dodge. Totally passe, yet it speaks for an age now long gone in ways nothing else could.

It's a hoot!

Gary Husband Comes Through with "Dirty and Beautiful, Volume 1"

Gary Husband has impressed me in the past as a dynamically lively and exciting drummer and a musical mind as tunesmith, keyboardist and all-around positive force in the universe. Some of Allan Holdsworth's albums made with Gary are of the very best sort, and Gary's doing good things as keyboardist and drummer with John McLaughlin's new group (see earlier posting for a discussion of the latest album).

That's all true, but what of his new solo album, Dirty and Beautiful, Volume One (Abstract Logic 027)? The answer is, "Wheeew, yeah!"

This is one of those albums whose personnel alone is something you can't help but take note of in anticipation. There's both Allan Holdsworth and John McLaughlin, which is saying much; then Steve Hackett and Robin Trower; then there are the old Mahavishnu heavyweights Jan Hammer and Steve Goodman. There are other significant cats too. Does the music live up to the promise of who is involved? In every way it does.

Gary has put together a program of solid originals plus a brief look at a Miles Davis perennial and an engaging Allan Holdsworth piece. They all have melodic substance and serve as excellent platforms for some eloquent songbirds to gather and achieve ensemble and solo excellence. This is good rocking fusion the way you might anticipate it but with the Gary Husband flair for subtle sophistication. Allan Holdsworth sounds like you expect him to, beautiful tone and line as always. John McLaughlin lets out with a couple of solos that are some of the best I've heard from him in a long time, showing rock-crank-velocity and gritty tone. The other Mahavishnus (Goodman and Hammer) make appearances that show you they have not lost a thing, and, well, everybody else makes good contributions.

It's the cumulative effect of the Husband smart-fusion way that makes this album a thrilling experience, if you love fusion. This is what fusion is and still can be, a real art form. I can't recommend this highly enough!

Andres Villamil Plays Guitar Music From Colombia: Chicaquicha

Like most Latin American countries, Colombia has a long tradition of guitar music. There are folk ensembles and, as guitarist Andres Villamil shows so vividly, a body of solo classical guitar pieces of great beauty and character.

Villamil's Chicaquicha (Oehms Classics 778) includes representative works for solo guitar by eight Colombian composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Jaime Romero to Villamil himself.

The pieces have genuine appeal and Andres Villamil is a player of consummate style and dash. The recording sounds great too.

Throughout there is a lyrical bent as well as gentle suggestions of the dance. It's the kind of composing and performing that brings out the beauty and expressiveness of both the idiom and the instrument.

This is an auspicious debut for Mr. Villamil. May this be the beginning of a fruitful career.

Trey Gunn Retrospective: I'll Tell What I Saw

Trey Gunn, integral later King Crimson member, touch guitarist and musical composer-conceptualist has created some important music in the last two decades. He has made eight solo albums (1993-2010) and collaborated with many artists. Some of the fruits of those efforts can be heard in his new 2-CD retrospective I'll Tell What I Saw (7dMedia 1012).

The cumulative effect of repeated listens to the more than two hours of music on this set is impressive. There are world-music-meets-Gunn-progressive-music excursions with musicians and singers from Mexico, Italy, Russia and elsewhere. There's the progressive rock-funk that relates to and extends what he was doing in his King Crimson days. There are soundscapes of a deep sort. And much more besides.

What strikes me listening to the back-to-back highlights of his solo career is the sheer musicality and sonic originality of it all. It's a style that needs your attention because the soundstage is commonly packed with musical colors and events. The time spent is rewarded with much to savor and linger over. There is wonderful guitar and bass work, there's the orchestral conception and the layering, there is compositional brilliance.

Trey Gunn may well be rock's premier sound-artist of the past 20 years. Certainly he is one of the very select few at the very top of the game.

Revel in this one. Highly recommended.

Richard Pinhas Rules My Stereo with "Metal/Crystal"

From the first snarly bass riffs and a killer space rock groove to the very end, French guitarist-electronician Richard Pinhas more than just fills two CDs, he rivets the listener to his/or/her chair (or even "its" because your pets will no doubt notice too).

Metal/Crystal (Cuneiform) is what I refer to. Richard mans the electric guitar (and electronics) and he gets some big collaborative input from two heavy electroacoustic noise titans: Merzbow and Wolf Eyes. There is bass and drums too, as I've noted, especially at the beginning and middle of the first CD and the end of the second, and the playing is very right for what's happening.

The results are nothing short of beautiful. There is a thick blanket of supercharged acoustic-electric poetry that begins a few minutes into the first CD and slowly evolves over the course of the two-hours-plus of the program. The music is noisy. yes, but in such a musical way that you begin to experience the wonderwall of sound tapestry as something otherworldly, as a music of tone and noise where the two work together in the best sort of way.

It has the same ear-grabbing qualities of Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting, only it goes for a more orchestral sonic ambiance. There's less emphasis on loop motifs and more on horizontally unfolding landscapes that drone and layer in complex ways.

The sound design is enthralling as is the psychedelic guitar work. The two fit together beautifully.

I'd venture to say that this is one of the most invigorating and astonishing examples of psychedelic soundscaping I've ever heard. An instant classic? Only if people listen to it. If you want your mind blown this is the music to check out. Oh, yes, I am not exaggerating!