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Slivovitz: Liver
by Chris M. Slawecki
Slivovitz, and especially this live set, are not for the musical faint of heart. As a live recording, LiveR is “live-r" than most. Recorded in Milan in May 2016, it explodes from their native Italy into your senses with a colorful and frantic sound, a wailing mongrel child that fiercely claims such shared, diverse birthrights as The Mothers of Invention, The Butthole Surfers, James White & The Blacks, The Stooges, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. Yes, all on ...
read moreSlivovitz: Liver
by Glenn Astarita
This high-flying Italian jazz rock septet performs live in your listening space via the upfront and shrewdly recorded audio capturing the artists in peak form at a Milan venue. With shades of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Curlew and Italian prog rock pioneers' PFM, harmonica ace Derek Di Perri fuses an organic country-like aura into the band's electrifying attack, that consists of measured firepower and feverish soloing sprees. Here, the artists cover material from their previous Moonjune Records releases Bani Ahead (2011) and ...
read moreFrom Choro to Chaos
by Chris M. Slawecki
Berkeley Choro Ensemble The View from Here Self-Produced 2017 Like its organic natural wonders, the music of Brazil seems to flourish in different forms and styles of beauty. But much of its music has grown from the root of choro: Born in the mid-to late-1800s from the joining of Afro-Brazilian dance and jazz rhythms with European salon and chamber music, choro was simultaneously a seminal influence on Heitor Villa Lobos and other ...
read moreSlivovitz: All You Can Eat
by Dave Wayne
Freely grabbing inspiration from all manner of styles, the Neapolitan band Slivovitz functions as a high- efficiency musical omnivore, digesting and reworking different aspects of seemingly disparate raw materials into a seamless, organic whole. All You Can Eat, an appropriate title for the band's fourth long player (and their third for MoonJune), doesn't appear to be the product of mindless gluttony. Quite the contrary, the music on this disc sounds more like the product of a slow, thoughtful distillation.
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by Glenn Astarita
This Italian progressive rock, jazz fusion unit named after an Eastern European plum brandy unleashes a wealth of insightful and melodically focused arrangements via its unique sound and diverse instrumentation. As a long-awaited follow-up to Bani Ahead (Moonjune, 2011), the septet integrates a magnetic series of works, spanning Italian folk, Frank Zappa-esque time signatures and with the sleight of hand, evidenced by prog rock pioneers Gentle Giant. Conversely, harmonica performer Derek Di Perri and violinist Riccardo Villari also cast organic ...
read moreSlivovitz: Bani Ahead
by Dave Wayne
Slivovitz--also the generic name for a type of plum brandy popular throughout the Mediterranean--is a fascinating jazz-rock band that's been around for a decade or so. Bani Ahead, its second recording for the MoonJune label and third overall, is a charming blend of jazz and progressive rock with pronounced Balkan and circum-Mediterranean folk influences. Part of Slivovitz's appeal also has to do with its unusual and highly flexible instrumentation. With a front line composed of saxophone, trumpet, violin, guitar, and ...
read moreSlivovitz: Hubris
by Nic Jones
For fusion to have any auditory impact these days it arguably has to be played with a twist, something to take it beyond the level of a series of technical exercises. As a band, Slivovitz seems to realize this, but the degree to which it transcends the self-imposed limits of the idiom is questionable, especially when the music often breaks down into technical display--the only contrast to which appears to be more of the same, with added flourishes drawn from ...
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