Composer Irving Berlin once famously said that "everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life." True and, although technically speaking Brooklyn is not part of the octagon that thrives between Houston Street and FRD Drive, the groove, that precious intimate rumble of inspiration, is the one element that connects one area with the other; contemporary music and its multiple historical declinations. While the paradigm differs and keeps on evolving, the end result is invariably of a similar nature, now as it was under the reign of the likes of guitarist Kenny Burrell and trumpeter Lee Morgan.
Ameen Saleem, surely one of the most promising bass players in the world, knows the simple but elusive rules that make up a groove album, and this debut as a bandleader stands out between the crowded ranks of modern jazz. Innovators, conservatives, revolutionaries—all of them are sometimes connected by the one thing that Saleem boldly cites in the title of his album. You might know the Roy Hargrove Quintet, and if you do, you might have noticed the rhythm section, chances are that you have appreciated the great work done by Saleem at the bass.
While The Groove Lab strives to come up with an original and personal sound, the end result is undoubtedly not too far from those atmospheres. Saleem does not try to overdo or take the listener off the beaten path, but while the overall attitude may appear reassuring, the range of influences a good reviewer should duly list is potentially endless. Funk, jazz and soul certainly constitute the three main points of reference, but the many veins that propagate from these often abused genres, are virtually impossible to keep track of. The fact that he is lucky enough to be able to interact with amazing musicians (pianist Cyrus Chestnut, drummer Gregory Hutchinson and the already mentioned Roy Hargrove on trumpet) surely contributes to the variegated array of elements which, at least apparently, should not find space on the same album.
Ameen Saleem manages to find the perfect balance between the idea and the usability—to use an artistically horrible but commercially positive term—of his inspiration. This is music that develops in layers: one enjoys the more superficial ones before venturing into the hidden substrates which keep the album together. For this reason, tracks like "For My Baby," with lyrics dangerously close to banality, flow from jazz to funky so naturally that the very nature of the music remains beautifully ambiguous and enjoyable at the same time.
Flugelhorns, Rhodes and Wurlitzers, tenor saxophones, to name but a few instruments involved, can sometimes pose a threat to coherence, but the rich, colorful texture underlying "Don't Walk Away," "Epiphany" and the beautiful "So Glad" make this debut an interesting and challenging work.
Via Veneto Jazz and Jando Music keep on proposing high quality jazz whose most appreciable virtues lie in the clever administration of novelty and institution, with one goal in mind: accessibility. It is not clear whether or not Irving Berlin would have loved The Groove Lab, but what is certain is that there is a common language that is spoken on this and the other side of the river. Further east, a new star might be rising.
If anyone can dub it, Thievery Corporation can. Here’s an act whose sound very much embodied the turn of the century. Coffee table, lo-fi ambient dub; A mutant form of trip-hop that defined the lounge music sound of the Noughties. Alongside such peers as Boozoo Bajou, Tosca and Peace Orchestra, the production duo comprising of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton set the template for chill-out compilations and soundtracks for the more middle-aged connoisseurs in us. Their previous outing Saudade was a modern age classic; a soft, bossa-nova influenced pastiche of dream beats and palettes. There’s also earlier records Radio Retaliation and The Mirror Conspiracy, classics in their own right. The Temple of I & I, although not a massive divergence in their sonic template, has a more roots and reggae feel. Recorded in Jamaica no less, the LP has that modern reggae sound, with a mixture of live instrumentation, local guest vocalists and digital trickery all mixed together like a chilled rum and cola, sipped on a sunny, evening.
Alas, The Temple of I & I, does not hit the high benchmarks of prior quality. Very much a Thievery album in its own right, with the tropical rhythms alongside the DC-based musicians approach to studio-dub, the LP falls short of the classic peak moments of the past. That’s the problem with nostalgia, you’re always reflecting back on the good times, or ones which you favour towards. For an act with such history, and one eye on the past, nostalgia can be as equally as rewarding and destructive depending on which way you look at it.
And if The Temple of I & I sounds dated it’s because that’s what Thievery Corporation are best at. It’s another long-player that’s perfect for lighting a spliff to, and is seasoned with tracks that will undoubtedly find their way onto Late Nite Tales compilations and such. But it feel like the 'Jamaican approach' has been done many times before – even by themselves. From 1997, Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Hi was a dub-influenced, chill-out classic. But let’s face it, Thievery Corporation have never set out to be groundbreaking. So if you loved Radio Retaliation or still go crazy over The K&D Sessions, then don’t be surprised when these tracks start gently wafting into your Spotify recommended lists. As for me, I’m going to go back to listening to Saudade.
‘Most of our Ethiopian music is based on five notes [pentatonic]. What I did was fuse the five tones with 12 tones. For many years I've been experimenting, and the more I do that the more complex it gets’ Mulatu Astatke.
New Orleans is widely seen as the birthplace of jazz, where African slaves created groundbreaking music that fused elements from both Africa and Western traditions. By the twentieth century, jazz (and subsequent African-based musical forms including soul, funk, and Cuban rumba) travelled back across the Atlantic, first through recordings and later by artists on tour. There, African musicians immediately recognized the source roots, adapted some, altered others, and in the process, created entirely new musical forms.
In Ethiopia, one of the first major musicians to lay the groundwork for Ethio-jazz was Nerses Nalbandian. His family escaped the Armenian genocide in Turkey, and settled in Ethiopia, where Nalbandi would become a band leader for many burgeoning Ethio-jazz musicians in the 1950s.
Largely credited as being the greatest innovator of Ethio-jazz and exposing it to the world, Mulatu Astatke was born in 1943 in Jimma, Ethiopia. He travelled to Wales in the late 1950s to study engineering and to the chagrin of his parents, Astatke began to take an interest in music, first studying Western classical music before heading to Boston’s Berklee College of Music to formally study jazz. It was there where Astatke took the fusion of traditional Ethiopian folk music and American jazz to a new level. Astatke explained its roots to the BBC, ‘There are tribes in the south called the Derashe. They are surrounded by people who play five tone music but they have created a diminished 12-tone scale. Diminished scales are very important in jazz music especially for improvising. We learn how Charlie Parker came up with diminished scales as well as Claude Debussy and Bach. But always on my mind is the question of who were first with the scale, these people or the Derashe tribe?’
By the late 1960s, Astatke decided to return to Ethiopia in order to cultivate Ethio-jazz in his homeland. At first, his vibraphone-based folk-jazz was considered quite unorthodox. However, within years, it transformed the capital, which came to be known as ‘Swinging Addis’. The late 1960s and early 1970s were known as the ‘golden age’ in Addis Ababa, as countless jazz orchestras and ensembles thrived in the city, led by the innovations of Mulatu Astatke and saxophonist extraordinaire, Getatchew Mekuria. Addis Ababa was in full swing in 1973 when American jazz legend Duke Ellington came to town and performed together with Mulatu Astatke.
Much of the Ethiopian jazz scene came crashing down the following year, in 1974, when a Soviet-backed military junta known as the Derg overthrew the government. The consequences of the coup and subsequent ‘Red Terror’ were profound. It left tens of thousands dead and military curfews virtually destroyed the thriving musical club scene.
When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, the Derg lost its backing and was subsequently overthrown. That decade saw a rebirth in Ethiopia. The budding democracy quickly became a thriving home of musical creativity. Ethiopian Jazz hit new global audiences through CD releases that included the Ethiopiques series and several Rough Guide albums. Astatke’s captivating soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers in 2005 brought Ethio Jazz to even wider audiences. Today, Astatke is still active, and his creativity has inspired a new generation of artists in Ethiopia, Europe, North America and beyond.
Dunedin, New Zealand based singer songwriter Kerensa Stephens has enjoyed a long and exciting artistic career. In her early life, Kerensa focused on dance, with music as a secondary practice; the 90's reversed this. Initially she sang in experimental rock bands, such as Children's Television Workshop and Waste The Earth. This underground arty exposure suited and helped her develop a lyrical, poetic writing style.
Then the colourful, wondrous world of the Rave dance scene swept through the New Zealand countryside and Kerensa found herself singing with a local electronic composer ecophonik. From within the Eudaemony Tribe, they developed a strong and extensive set which saw them invited to play a number of larger festivals in NZ, notably Canaan Downs Festival, Parihaka, Kaikoura Roots Festival, Soundsplash and Dunedin Mid-Winter Solstice Party.
Throughout the decade this was taking place, Kerensa met Auckland based electronica luminary Michael Westcot aka Terra Nine. She wrote a number of songs for two of his fabulous and well-received albums, Streamofconsciousness and Breathe. They toured in Europe, playing at the Hadra Festival in France and Full Moon Festival in Germany and in New Zealand at Prana Festival.
From then on Kerensa expanded her collaborative relationships, writing and singing for Cosmicleaf artists Side Liner [Dreamstealers, Dreamer] and Zero Cult [Vacuum, Pop Insanity], Lemonchill based in Israel, Tempest Chill's Red Eye Express in Melbourne, Oamaru based Jac Grenfell, Dunedin based laughin' gas and master producer, Forbes Williams. Recently, Kerensa has been writing songs to Moscow based Sensorica's music that she has been performing live locally. As Aviatrix she composes electronica and enjoys melding blues and jazzy tones with experimental sometimes filmic soundscapes.
Aviatrix continues to write and expand, dream and dance, sing and produce original songs across diverse genres from Lounge, to drum & base, ambient techno, trance aria, dub, psysoul, gypsy folk and psybient.
Listening to this pretty amazing 1966 archival release of John Coltrane's Offering: Live at Temple University, I am reminded of no less than the good 'ol Grateful Dead in terms of the sort of sonic mind trip the band takes it's audience -- and listeners -- on.
The show, culled from the master tapes from the Temple University radio station archives (where it was broadcast back in the day, November 11, 1966), starts with the familiar, relatively accessible and beautiful "Naima" and proceeds to get increasingly more intense and dense and out there.
This concert opens with the familiar to bring the crowd together and into the music. By the second set, they would launch into an interstellar space jam, an improvised journey through the cosmos before bringing the audience back to earth.
I'll jump ahead and let you know that that by side three of Live at Temple University, during a piece called "Leo," Coltrane and his band are reaching the outer stratosphere of what most people in 1966 might have known or considered as jazz. This is the more avant-garde and challenging Coltrane sound found on albums like Ascension and Om.
Frankly, the lines between jazz and the psychedelic music happening on the West Coast are getting pretty blurry here...
When Coltrane puts down his sax for a bit and starts singing, while the band is percolating in the background, it recalls no less than Zappa's Mothers of Invention which a year or two later would be exploring similar realms (challenging avant-garde jazz vocal-ese included, no extra charge).
When the master tape runs out suddenly at the end of that side, its almost a blessed relief.
It is a near perfect release for the listener because the music was getting pretty intense. And while I'm sure the record label could have found some fan-recorded off-the-air tape to tack on the rest of that piece, I'm sure the fidelity would have suffered greatly. No, ending the side abruptly where it stops was the right choice for production continuity.
When you flip the album side over the tone the band is calmer, with the title track "Offering" leading into Coltrane's classic interpretation of "My Favorite Things."
However, don't get too comfortable expecting any sort of lounge-jazz take on the popular tune (from the show / movie The Sound of Music) -- this take gets plenty edgy as well; although, compared to "Leo," its like listening to an hotel cocktail lounge jazz group, offering some cotton candy to sooth the audience's battered soul. Still, Coltrane takes you back out into outer space for a while and then brings you down to reality quite dramatically at the end, reintroducing the main melody line over the band's volcanic rumblings.
Many confused fans apparently left during this show but you can hear, at the end, that the ones who stayed for its entirety were clearly very much into the new directions Coltrane was taking.
I don't know much about the lineage of the older bootlegs of this show that may be circulating out there among Coltrane collectors. From the liner notes, I do know that there is only one source for the these recordings and that is the pair of master reel-to-reel tapes made at the time of the show, which have been stored in the Temple University radio station archives all these years.
So, how does Offering: Live at Temple University sound overall ? Well, I can imagine that if you had a bootleg made off a fan made tape recorded off the air in 1966, then that was probably a weak sounding experience; this sounds tremendous in retrospect. As far as I know this is the first time it has been issued off the master tape from the radio station that broadcast the show.
For a 1966 monaural recording made essentially by student engineers in a college auditorium, I think it sounds pretty spectacular -- a live recording made with a single mic (according to the liner notes, they suspect) set closer to Coltrane. The "mix" (if you will) is thus quite Sax heavy, but it is what it is. Fidelity wise, it is very clean and overall full sounding with mostly a stage sound and very little audience noise.
This is no doubt a vintage recording -- don't expect this to sound as perfect as one of the studio recordings or even the professionally recorded albums like Live at the Village Vanguard -- but most certainly it sounds way way better than many archival recordings I have heard over the years that were never originally intended for released.
At the end of the day, Offering: Live at Temple University is a fine document of a special performance, a very distinct moment in time toward the end of Coltrane's life (he would be gone a year later).
I can only imagine what Coltrane was hearing in his head that would have prompted him to stop playing his sax and start to sing during this performance. If he had a synthesizer player in the band at the time or another type of string player, perhaps they would have picked up on the melody Coltrane was singing over the musical bed he'd laid down at that point and taken the jam into other directions. The mind boggles over the possibilities...
Anyhow, this is a super deluxe release and I'm really impressed with the attention to detail that the folks at Resonance Records have put into this one. Bravo!
The dead quiet, perfectly centered vinyl pressing is of the heavy 180-gram type done at RTI and mastered by the legendary Bernie Grundman. They not only produced the album bearing period-accurate Impulse Records labels -- the label Coltrane was on at the time of this recording -- but the whole look at feel of the package is like one of those robust releases from that timeframe. The cardboard used for the cover is thick and heavy and the only thing missing is a shiny plastic-laminate layer. The producers more than make up for that little detail by adding in a collection of postcards featuring photos from the show by photographer Frank Kofsky. You also get a nicely laid out and informative four-page, LP-sized insert with detailed liner notes about the show and including commentary from people that were actually at the show -- such as acclaimed Saxophonist Michael Brecker (who was in high school at the time and see the show!).
This is one of those premium priced deluxe releases -- a limited, hand numbered edition of 2,000 copies, going for about $50 at retail -- that I can totally see spending the money on if you are a Coltrane enthusiast. Its a gem. Additionally, a portion of each sale will go to preserving Coltrane's home where he spent the last years of his life out on Long Island (http://thecoltranehome.org).
So by buying this, not only are you getting a wonderful piece of music history, you are helping to preserver a physical piece of music history for the ages.
Jeremy Underground first gained attention through My Love Is Underground. His vinyl-only label, launched in 2010, helped revive a particular style of pneumatic, '90s-inspired house. He slowly gained a reputation as a major house nerd, a man with encyclopedic knowledge of Kerri Chandler B-sides and little-known American record labels. He also displayed a broader love of music. On his YouTube channel, he shared an array of obscure jazz, soul and disco from around the world. He also dropped fantastic home-listening mixes.
Beauty is Jeremy's first downtempo compilation. His credentials to curate such a release are matched by Claremont, whose Originals compilation series was one of the decade's best. Beauty is the second release from the Claremont sub-label Spacetalk, which is run by Psychemagik's Danny McLewin. The pair met after Jeremy's soul and funk set in Maceo's, a crew bar run by Block 9. Danny was impressed, a friendship was born and the decision to make the compilation was solidified there and then.
Beauty features some of the best records Jeremy has discovered so far. The music is often pleasingly difficult to categorise. There's Sonya Spence's "Let Love Flow On," a soul track that features Jamaican musicians who usually perform in ska and reggae bands. There's Starcrost's "Quicksand," which has a folksy, soul-jazz vibe, Leila Pinheiro's bossa nova-rooted disco and Christer Norden's funky library music. The pick of Beauty might be "Hardly Need To Say." This mind-blowing smoky soul cut would have been a huge hit had it been released on a big label, as opposed to a tiny company from Glassboro, New Jersey.
Reissue culture has arguably never been more vibrant. The likes of BBE, Music From Memory and Numero Group unearth a seemingly never-ending stash of vinyl gold. But in a crowded marketplace Beauty stands out. The laid-back vibe and sparkling musicianship on the album makes it a pleasure from start to finish. In my 2014 review of Jeremy's previous house compilation, My Love Is Underground, I said, "If you're at all interested in playing old-school house music on vinyl, then this is an essential purchase." By that logic, if you're into soul and jazz records, you need Beauty in your life.
Renaud Garcia-Fons is known among jazz fans as an ear-popping virtuoso of the acoustic bass. The sounds he conjures from his five-string instrument have won him admirers around the world. But for his latest project, the Spanish-French musician says he wanted to concentrate on composition — specifically the sounds of the Mediterranean — while searching for a bridge between the music of the East and the West.
Garcia-Fons says the initial thinking behind his new album, Mediterranees, was not to compose music for a band, but to make a concept album inspired by music across the Mediterranean and the search for a common identity. That process took him back to his childhood.
"When I was in family, I was of course listening to Spanish music," he says. "But when I grew up in Paris, I had a chance to listen to many different music from north of Africa, which is Mediterranean. After that, I had really a passion for all music coming from Middle East, from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt."
Garcia-Fons says all of these different styles of music share common elements, and that he wanted to find the connections.
"We have some bridges, but also, of course, each tradition is unique," he says. "The sense of this music was also to try to establish some bridges between."
Garcia-Fons' exploration begins in Andalucia, in the south of Spain, with a piece called "Aljamiado" — its title a reference to the Spanish language from the time when the region was ruled by the Moors.
"For me, it's a good illustration of the union between Occident and Orient," Garcia-Fons says. His music moves from West to East, from Spain to the South of France, Italy and Greece, to the northern tip of the Mediterranean.
"So all the first pieces are more on the 'occidental way,' and then the big change starts in the piece called 'Bosphore,' " he says. "Because the trip arrive finally on the Bosphorus, so we reach the border with the Orient and start more Oriental influences."
Unlike some of Garcia-Fons' previous recordings, the new album is not centered on his five-string acoustic bass, but rather on composition. Nevertheless, Yatrika Shah-Rais — music director at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where Garcia-Fons performed recently with his quartet — says Garcia-Fons is a virtuoso.
"This is a world-class musician that deserves to be truly acknowledged for what he does," Shah-Rais says. "He's unique in every sense of the word. He's unique in his approach to compositions, to his music. He's unique in his technique. He's unique in the way that he has revolutionized the bass, and simply he has a fantastic band."
Garcia-Fons says he's always been intrigued with the notion that the roots of Western music come from the East. And he says that thread is present, not just in Western Europe, but also in the Americas.
"This is a fascinating point for me. And this is what also I really appreciate in all American music, from South to North, is that we can feel this influence from the Mediterranean area," Garcia-Fons says. "I think maybe the common relative is baroque music. I heard that many baroque musicians find some codex, for example, in Mexico, so I think this was one of the bridge for the music to come here and to meet other culture, other people."
