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Music does not exist on paper
Evaluating the art of Cecil Taylor is like trying to forecast the weather in the middle of a tornado. His playing can be torrential, a storm of piano notes and strikes, and he performed with almost every imaginable type of ensemble over 60 odd years as a bandleader and composer/instigator, even incorporating poetry and dance. …
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Sting like a bee
It takes a certain confidence to take a ferocious and freewheeling album and call it simply Folk Songs. Tijana Stanković is a Serbian violin player, singer and ethnomusicologist, and her new disc is four extended tracks which riff loosely around Balkan folk themes – there’s a “Song For The Bees”, and a “Song For The…
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This microphone turns sound into electricity
On Shellac’s debut album At Action Park, Bob Weston, Steve Albini and Todd Trainer were credited as playing “mass”, “velocity” and “time”. Maybe this was just a throwaway gag on a record whose sleeve also included instructions for “resuscitation from apparent death by electric shock”. But considered alongside the LP’s annotations of materials and production…
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Birds of a feather
Like many encounters with the famous, they’re smaller than you imagined. This little drum-kit was on stage at E7’s Cider House at their second Forest Gate Improvisation event on 25 April. It looks almost like a toy, the manufacturer’s name askew at the top, as if the supports below have gone a bit flimsy. The…
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Five things about [Ahmed]
[Ahmed] – the quartet of Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip, Pat Thomas and Seymour Wright – have become a monster group in a live setting. For their current London residence at Cafe Oto, they follow an unbeatable blueprint for any creative ensemble, which is that each set consists of one idea taken as far as they can, with…
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More a feeling than a melody
The brand new release of a previously unheard Alice Coltrane performance from 1971 is like a gift from the gods. It seems miraculous that a music so personal, even reverential, could have made it to New York’s famous Carnegie Hall, in probably her most important year as an artist. To consider the personal, Alice’s first…
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Radical atheist culture
If ever a label had its own aesthetic, it was Emanem. “My magnum opus is the Emanem label” said the main man Martin Davidson For any record label of any genre which seeks to get across its ideas or ideology, the rigour and clarity with which Emanem operated provides an exemplary model. Davidson’s sudden death in…
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This record could change the world
I didn’t know Neil Kulkarni in real life, but I knew him from his words, which in many ways is better than real life. Some but not all will know he stayed in Coventry when he might have opted to move to London when writing prolifically for Melody Maker in the 1990s, at which point…
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Large speaker systems and very large spaces
The death of Phill Niblock breaks a golden thread which ran all the way back to the postwar cultural explosion on America’s East Coast. He was a composer of minimalist music, but before that a film maker, and a photographer who worked amid the jazz scene – he snapped his teenage idol Duke Ellington many times,…