Hommage a Eberhard Weber, Pat Metheny, Jan Garbarek, Gary Burton, Michael Gibbs, SWR Big Band, etc.

Eberhard Weber has been one of the innovative bassists of our era, without a doubt. His many recordings as a leader and sideman on ECM are seminal. He is a bassist with a special sound, a lyrical acuity and a compositional approach to soloing that sets him in the highest echelon of players of our time. And of course his compositions themselves are of a piece with his musical approach and wonderful in themselves. A stroke in 2007 put an end to his playing, very sadly. But he has made several excellent recordings in later years by taking live bass solos that were captured on tape and orchestrating them. (You can type his name in the search box above for more on that.)

For the occasion of his 75th birthday earlier this year a special concert took place at the Stuttgart Theaterhaus with many of his friends and close associates. Hommage a Eberhard Weber (ECM 2463) is the result of that happy gathering.

On it is featured a special 30-minute work written by Pat Metheny especially for the concert, "Hommage," as played by the SWR Big Band and soloists, including Pat. Featured as well is "Resume Variations" composed by Weber, with looped and resituated Weber bass solos and some fine improvisations by Jan Garberek.

Ralph Schmid, Michael Gibbs, Rainer Tempel, and Libor Sima each arrange a Weber composition for the SWR Band and soloists, with fine results.

And what soloists! In addition to the presence of Metheny, Garbarek and SWR Big Band members, joining them on stage are Gary Burton, Scott Colley, Danny Gottlieb, Paul McCandless, Klaus Graf (alto) and Ernst Hutter (euphonium).

The result is some excellent music and fabulous sonarities. It is a most fitting tribute to the master, yes, and some very fine music in its own right. Essential listening.

Kid Millions & Sarah Bernstein, Live at Gravesend, Feb. 11, 8 PM

Cassettes are back! I've noticed some cassette-only releases lately. Now I have been sent one! It is in beautifully primitive analogue sound. It features Kid Millions on drums and Sarah Bernstein on very electric violin and ritualistic vocals. It is Volume 5 in the "Gravesend After Hours" series (Gravesend Recordings). So not surprisingly it is entitled Live at Gravesend Feb. 11, 8 PM.

I've always found Sarah's music to be well worth hearing. Kid Millions I do not know by that name, but for this set he really kicks up some torrid overdrive drumming.

Sarah is filled with the energy of quasi-metal violin freedom and when she vocalizes you think New York city is occupied by at least one tribe, which of course it is.

It's totally unpretentious heavy freedom that for me anyway has something about it that sets it apart. It's edgy underground stuff, which the cassette release and the cover art only serve to further underscore.

I suppose I should say that this is not for the timid, nor does it run through standards or swing in some conventional way. All that is cool, too, but that is not THIS.

What it is, it is without a doubt. And the hearing of it initiates you into the tribe and creates some kind of magic. What tribe? You know, THE tribe.

Get it if you want some heavy-duty obscurity that is really very good.

Lorenzo Feliciati, Koi

The realm of electric jazz as made so vibrant in the late '60s-early '70s by Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi and others was subject to controversy during the ascendance of the Neo-Trad phase of the music in the '80s. Time has moved on of course and we understand that many styles can exist together in the present without the need to dismiss one or another, or claim a monolithic hegemony for just one. We are learning, finally? I don't know what if so, but maybe.

And so I have certainly appreciated the electric jazz renaissance that we have seen in the last decade. Not that the music ever left, of course, but there has been a renewed spirit present today in the music that may have been less present for a time in the past.

So an excellent example of the new electric avant jazz can be heard from Lorenzo Feliciati and his recent album Koi (RareNoise 34849). This is some very cosmic, tall-ceilinged, rock-beated composition-improvisation. Lorenzo excels as electric bassist, guitarist and orchestrator. Alessandro Gwis plays some very nice piano and effects-filtered piano, and Steve Jansen plays some very hip drums and helps out in the programming.

Added to this core trio are guest spots by Pat Mastelotto (drums), Angelo Olivieri (trumpet) and Nicola Alesini (soprano). A three-man horn section of tenor & bass trombone and baritone adds special color at times, quite nicely.

So that is the game plan. The music itself has drive and lots of bottom thanks to Lorenzo's bass and the horn arrangements. The entire sound picture is extraordinarily inventive with electronics and conventional instruments melding together for sonic originality. It's spacey, yes, but not in ways entirely predictable. And the compositional element really rings out and structures everything.

I am thoroughly impressed and enlivened by the sound of this music and the many milestones one passes through in the course of (repeated) listening.

This is beyond music of the highest sort. Bravo!

White Out w/Nels Cline, Accidental Sky

White Out and guitarist Nels Cline belong together. They fit together like hand-in-glove. Nels comes through with effects-laden avant guitar tone and noise to make a most effective sonance with Lin Culbertson on analogue synths, autoharp, voice and other electric elements, Tom Surgal on drums and other assundries.

There is a series of singular soundscape trips awaiting you on their latest album Accidental Sky (Northern Spy 066).

Nels is these days the lead guitarist with Wilco, but of course he has also been an important guitarist in outside, progressive jazz realms and it is here that he returns to more frankly avant modes. With White Out and the music on this album, it is never a matter of, "Wow, listen to what Nels is doing on guitar!" At least not at first listen. He is part of a virtual orchestral matrix, a blend of noise and tone, a cosmic set of adventures that have the totality of sound in mind much of the time.

What matters is not the mere existence of totality as much as the complexity and musical merits of the seven chapters of sonic poetry that makeup the album. Most of the time where synths (and modified percussion) leave off and guitar begins is never always entirely obvious unless you listen closely at some length. And that is a tribute to both Nel's and White Out's virtuoso mastery of altered sound and the sort of chemistry the three create and sustain throughout.

It is music that goes its way unassumingly, without pretense or showful assertion. It is not for all that slight or casual. It is very earnest and ambitious in its creation of ever-moving sculptures of sound combinations. And in the end it succeeds rather thoroughly in coaxing us out of our habitual listening stance, or protective attitudinal shells, disarming us and sending us propelling outwards into new territories.

It is at times pretty massive for a trio. It is at all times provocative and impactful.

I'd say, "a triumph," because it is in its own way. But aside from all the review type hyperbole you might read these days it takes an important place among today's best instrumental-electronics ensembles. So, yeah, call it a triumph if you like. Call it whatever you want. But more importantly, listen to this music closely!

Izzy Young, Talking Folklore Center, Documentary DVD

Izzy Young, folk enthusiast and promoter of the Greenwich Village folk scene during its height in the early 1960s, is a near legendary character in New York musical history, perhaps best known for his championing of a young Bob Dylan in the first stages of his career, but also for his Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, a place to meet, hear music, buy records or folk music books, sheet music and periodicals, hang out and meet up with central figures on the scene.

We get a kind of retrospective of it all on the 1986 documentary Talking Folklore Center (MVD Visual 52150), a Jim Downing film recently made available on DVD.

The idea is that Izzy, who fled the NY scene in the early seventies to set up shop in Scandinavia, returns to his old haunts in the Village in 1986, discovering the remains of the Bohemian world he was a key part of, meeting up with Art d'Lugoff of Village Gate fame, hosting a live folk show on WBAI, and re-establishing contact with artists like Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders (of the Fugs), talking with them and hearing them recite poetry and sing songs.

What's perhaps most striking about it all is the shift in time from the early '60s, 1986, and the present day. By '86 there is a palpable decline in the Village as a center of creativity and activity; today, we of course realize all-too-readily, there is near extinction.

The changing economy of real estate, the neo-con surgence, the ever-mutating world and the decline in appreciation of folk and activist forms of local art, all are too readily apparent, of course to Izzy then as well as to us all now. A further sense of loss comes our way in touching moments as he returns to the physical locales, the empty site of the Folklore Center and other Village institutions and their spiraling rents that make continuing local scenes all but impossible, and even a visit to the Jewish neighborhoods Izzy grew up in, accompanied by reunions with his mother and his brother, the latter continuing the bakery business his dad had established.

You feel the movement of time, identity and the fragility of any creative scene in the great metropolis. And you appreciate the dedication of people like Izzy to make possible and centralize a landmark cultural movement now for the moment very much no longer with us.

A good absorbing slab of musical-cultural history! Anyone interested in the folk-beat movement in New York will find it a fascinating film.

Garrison Fewell, Invisible Resonance Trio, with Roy Campbell, Luther Gray

Life as you go through it gives you at times a kind of shock, as the cycles of birth and death realize themselves directly to you. I have lost some dear friends and we all have lost some important musical voices in the last year or so. Today's music commemorates the life and music of two of them, Roy Campbell and Garrison Fewell. I did not know Roy but have appreciated for a long time his musical gifts and have experienced the true anguish of his passing in the New York jazz community. Garrison I similarly have embraced as a musical force of importance, and got to know his kindly, saintly self in his last year or so on this earth.

Now they are both gone. But the music lives on in the form of recordings, happily. Garrison Fewell's Invisible Resonance Trio (Creative Nation Music 027) is something Garrison was working to get out in the last months of his illness. We are surely the better for it, though it was with a bitter-sweet sadness that I received this CD in the mail. It is a late 2013 recording of Garrison on electric guitar, Roy on trumpet and flute, and Luther Gray (who remains with us, thankfully) on drums and percussion.

It captured an inspired moment of the three together in excellent form. Free and freewheeling is the set. Free jazz it is if we must attach a name to it. It was the last time the three played together, happily in a studio setting.

There is great creativity and an electricity in the air to be heard palpably on all of this. So much so that I almost feel a certain reluctance to try and put my impressions of it into words. To make words take the place of the music is no doubt something of a violation when the music dwells on such a high plane as this music does. Yet my job as I see it is to describe as best I can with the aim of generating interest and appreciation.

So I will say that each plays a distinct role in the music that results. They listen and proceed, complementing the statements of each without stepping on what each the other is doing. Their high level of interaction is such that each leaves a space for the others so that a fully three-way synchronicity blossoms forth. And that result has, as Garrison would surely affirm, a kind of spiritual dimension, a striving outward from self to create another three-way musical being that is the trio here.

Garrison plays his own kind of guitar on these improvisations, neither predictable nor inevitable. Roy on trumpet and flute does the same in his own special way. And Luther contributes an ideal percussive being that builds a sonic arch to the others, acting not always as a "drummer" in the obvious sense as much as a third, melodic-textural voice.

The results are moving, a testament to deep listening and deep responding, a kind of memorial for those who have left us and a rejoiner for us all, to keep going, to keep on the path as they surely did when they lived.

A sad goodbye to Roy and Garrison, but a reaffirming hello to Luther and to us all. This is music that will ever speak. Hear the voices. Heed the wordless message!

Bruce Forman Trio, The Book of Forman, Formanism Volume II

Well, if I might say, there is a guitarist named Bruce Forman and he should be given your attention. I didn't know him much from Adam until I was sent his trio recording, The Book of Forman, Formanism Volume II (B4Man-Music 104). I am surely glad I was.

Bruce is an extremely schooled, original force in the guitar-bop-jazz-and-beyond mainstream. The trio recording at hand finds him in the context of a game trio of the very celebrated drummer Martin Smitty Smith, who it is great to hear again here, and bassist Alex Frank, a key component in the success of this date.

The music alternates between some choice standards and some hip Forman originals.

Bruce is a player who has ingested all those cool chordal possibilities one can hear from the masters in a solo mode and made something of them, then come up with some great single-line creativity and combined the two for a sound that seems effortless and swings madly, yet is an original product that shows extreme ability and smarts, and reflects the great effort Bruce has no doubt put forward to obtain this level of mastery.

The influence game can be instructive at times. I suppose there's a bit of Wes Montgomery, Johnny Smith, Joe Pass, Jim Hall, Kenny Burrell, and others you could point to that have gone into Bruce's modern jazz style. But then he has taken it on so much as his own that calling on the forebears is more of a ritual than something to keep in your head while digging the music. It just blossoms outward as, indeed, "Formanism."

This is an important mainstream cat, a guitar master of today. And the trio puts together a very, very groovy set on this date. If you go for guitar excellence, just get this one and put it on!