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Justin Walter
Justin Walter: A Call To Arms
by Bruce Lindsay
Justin Walter is the trumpeter in Ann Arbor-based band Nomo and a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music. A Call To Arms is his first album as leader and a marked contrast to his recordings with Nomo, a band with a distinctive take on Afrobeat rhythms, welding them to electronics and techno. A Call To Arms demonstrates another side to Walter's talents--it's a predominantly straight-ahead, post-bop album of Walter originals and two covers played ...
read moreHis Name Is Alive: Sweet Earth Flower: A Tribute To Marion Brown
by Chris May
Starting with a bold and beautiful idea--to perform a concert tribute to an iconic musician from an earlier age while that musician is still with us--His Name Is Alive have gone on to record an album of such oh-my-god beauty and vitality that the listener may at first be reduced to silent, slack-jawed wonder. And while we'll never know whether trumpeter Miles Davis would have approved bassist/producer Bill Laswell's reconstruction of his music on Panthalassa (Columbia, 1997), we do know ...
read moreHis Name Is Alive: Sweet Earth Flower: a tribute to Marion Brown
by Mark Corroto
Everything old is new again, even the new thing is, well, the new thing again.
In the 1960s, as the moldy conservatives and even the hard bop practitioners were trying to define jazz as one specific thing. Suddenly, the music exploded into multiple directions. Aided by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, adventurism jazz musicians like Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Sun Ra, Joseph Jarman, and Marion Brown incorporated freedom and Afro-centric themes into the mix.
read moreHis Name Is Alive: Sweet Earth Flower: a tribute to Marion Brown
by Troy Collins
Sweet Earth Flower: a tribute to Marion Brown is His Name Is Alive's meditative ode to the work of the under-sung free jazz saxophonist. Veterans of the American rock underground, His Name Is Alive has been exploring various musical tangents since the early 1990s, slowly moving closer and closer to a more improvisational, jazz-oriented base.
The brainchild of Michigan-based, multi-instrumentalist/producer Warren Defever, His Name Is Alive was initially signed to the illustrious British label 4AD, a ...
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