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Mike Ladd
Vijay Iyer & Mike Ladd: InWhatStrumentals
by Karl Ackermann
In 2003 Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd released In What Language?, a hybrid jazz/hip hop response to post-9/11 American paranoia. Inspired by many related injustices, the inflection point was the extended detention, handcuffing and humiliation of a prominent Iranian filmmaker passing through JFK International Airport. Seventeen years later America was mired in multiple unprecedented crises, giving cause to repurpose that album. Iyer and Ladd had the instrumental masters from 2003, and release them here as InWhatStrumentals: Music from In What ...
read moreMike Ladd: Cerebral Refugee, Part 2-2
by Paul Olson
Part 1 | Part 2
Spoken-word poet? Rapper? Alternative hip-hop producer? Sociology-minded conceptualist? Postmodernist? Mike Ladd is all of these. Ladd's 1997 debut album Easy Listening 4 Armageddon served notice that his was a major, original talent. Recent work--like his collaboration with Vijay Iyer, In What Language?, and his brand-new Thirsty Ear debut Negrophilia: the Album--stunningly demonstrate that this is a mature artist whose time has truly come. These two CDs are as much jazz" recordings as they are anything ...
read moreMike Ladd: Cerebral Refugee, Part 1-2
by Paul Olson
Part 1 | Part 2
Spoken-word poet? Rapper? Alternative hip-hop producer? Sociology-minded conceptualist? Postmodernist? Mike Ladd is all of these. Ladd's 1997 debut album Easy Listening 4 Armageddon served notice that his was a major, original talent. Recent work--like his collaboration with Vijay Iyer, In What Language?, and his brand-new Thirsty Ear debut Negrophilia: the Album--stunningly demonstrate that this is a mature artist whose time has truly come. These two CDs are as much jazz" recordings as they are anything ...
read moreMike Ladd: Negrophilia - The Album
by Rex Butters
Mike Ladd's much anticipated followup to last year's highly praised In What Language reunites him with his collaborator on that project, keyboardist Vijay Iyer. What knocks this outing into unexpected sonic originality may be their co-collaborator, Guillermo E. Brown. Best known for his work with the David S. Ware Quartet and contributions to projects by Matthew Shipp and DJ Spooky, Brown released Soul At the Hands of the Machine, an atmospheric densely layered humid slab of electronica, three years ago. ...
read moreMike Ladd: Negrophilia - The Album
by John Kelman
With a sound that is as forward-looking as it is aware of the past, poet/programmer Mike Ladd follows up his collaboration with keyboardist Vijay Iyer on last year's acclaimed What Is Language? (Psi) with Negrophilia - The Album. This time it's under his name rather than Iyer's and, consequently, a more specific look at his own musical and philosophical vision.
The term poet" is used with intent, rather than rapper." Ladd's prose aspires to something greater than simple rhyme, evoking ...
read moreMike Ladd: Negrophilia - The Album
by Farrell Lowe
William S. Burroughs turned the literary world on its ear with his cut-up" style of writing. He simply chopped completed texts into pieces, mixed bunches of different texts together, then glued the results together into juxtaposed compositions. This often made for some interesting albeit convoluted reading. John Cage applied similar techniques to his writing and music composition in an attempt to free minds from following well-worn conceptual pathways. Mike Ladd's Negrophilia follows in those footsteps to some degree; the music ...
read moreMike Ladd: Negrophilia - The Album
by James Taylor
With each new release from Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, I find myself saying, This is it--the perfect synthesis of free jazz, hip hop and electronica (DJ Spooky's Optometry ); no, this is it--an even better aesthetic revelation (El-P's High Water )!" Not to sound redundant, but Mike Ladd's latest, a mind-blending tag team effort with pianist Vijay Iyer, Thirsty Ear house drummer Guillermo E. Brown, and some freewheeling free jazz cohorts is, seriously, a near-perfect realization of ...
read moreHolding It Down: Vijay Iyer & Mike Ladd with Maurice Decaul
Source:
Michael Ricci
Acclaimed pianist/composer Vijay Iyer and celebrated poet/performer Mike Ladd (in collaboration with Iraq veteran Maurice Decaul) launch a new work of music and poetry commissioned by Harlem Stage's WaterWorks program. Building on their groundbreaking collaborations In What Language? (2003) and Still Life with Commentator (2006), Iyer and Ladd collaborate with young American war veterans of color from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to create a new work (working title Holding it Down). Based on interviews with veterans of ...
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Mike Ladd:nostalgialator
Source:
All About Jazz
By: Trevor Pour
Expectations can be dangerous. Mike Ladd's Nostalgialator was released in Germany (on the !K7 label) in 2004, but finally made its way to the States with a 2008 release on Definitive Jux. Before my first listen, I heard Nostalgialator described as a fusion of styles somewhere between Aesop Rock and Pink Floyd. As a near obsessive fan of both those artists, I couldn't wait to dig in. But to my surprise and disappointment, Nostalgialator fell on its ...
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