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Johan Berthling
Fire!: Testament
by Chris May
Recorded and then played back at reduced speed, even a seemingly simple two-note bird call reveals elaborate complexity and detail. It is worth hanging on to that thought when approaching the deceptively straightforward Testament. On a cursory listening, most of the album--an amalgam of Mats Gustafsson's slow-and-deliberate long-held low-end baritone notes and Johan Berthling and Andreas Werlin's matching bass ostinatos and drum patterns--sounds primordial. The recipe goes reductio ad absurdum on track two, The Dark Inside Of A ...
read moreFire! Orchestra: Echoes
by Chris May
The story of supersized jazz orchestras is not pretty. The scene was set by the bleaching deracination of Paul Whiteman and the elephantine bombast of Stan Kenton, bandleaders whose craving for approval by the music establishment fatally compromised their art. Good taste came later with leaders such as Carla Bley and London's Keith Tippett, who proved that, in the right hands, swing and nuance could co-exist with size and power. Since around 2010, there have been some ...
read moreAngles: A Muted Reality
by Mark Corroto
For Swedish saxophonist Martin Küchen, all music is folk music. Proof of that statement is the Angles' release A Muted Reality. Whether he is referencing Balkan, African, Swedish, American jazz or Spanish dialects, he is drawing on kindred spirits in his music. With the various editions of his Angles projects, from trios to 10-piece small big bands, he releases music of the people, i.e. people music. This version of Küchen's Angles is an octet and the eleventh in a continuous ...
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