#glasgow improvisers orchestra

[gianttankeh]

1.5 Months presents: Sonic Bothy Ensemble / Jason Kahn / Jer Reid & Raymond MacDonald at The Glad Cafe, Glasgow: 14/11/24.

You can find out more about this edition of 1.5 Months here.

[burlveneer-music]

corto.alto - Bad With Names

Corto.Alto is the brain-child of award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer & producer Liam Shortall. Hailing from Glasgow, Scotland, this genre-defying producer brings together influences from Hip-Hop, Broken Beat, Electronica, Dub and Punk with an informed Jazz sensibility. Liam Shortall is a seasoned instrumentalist and composer in his own write. Having worked as a trombonist in the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, Tom McGuire & The Brassholes, AKU Trio as well as many other projects. He has also composed, produced and recorded on tracks for Joesef, PYJAEN, The Sound of AJA, Raelle, Cara Rose, Jack Richardson, Fat-Suit and many others. He is the younger ever graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's undergraduate Jazz programme, having being enrolled at the age of 16. corto.alto's highly anticipated debut album, is set to release in 2023. This album will feature some of the finest talents in Scottish and UK Jazz, including Fergus McCreadie (Scottish Album of the Year, Mercury Prize Nominee 2022, Edition Records), Graham Costello (Gearbox Records), Johnny Woodham (Alfa Mist, Sekito Records) and many more. corto.alto sets to continue his exploration into the world between improvisation and electronica.

[dustedmagazine]

Raymond MacDonald — Desire Lines (Multi.Modal)

Desire lines are those paths worn into the ground by the feet of pedestrians who take the obvious route while disregarding prescribed sidewalks. It’s a curious title for an album of circular-breathing-driven solo saxophone music, for while that is decidedly not a method that respects the paved lanes of saxophone practice, it’s hardly the easy route.

Raymond MacDonald is a Scottish saxophonist and psychologist. As a member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, co-leader of various projects with guitarist George Burt, and participant in numerous  collaborative endeavors with musicians including Marilyn Crispell, Günter “Baby” Sommer and Lol Coxhill, he has a respectably bulky bag of recordings made with other people to his credit. In academic settings he speaks of the universality and healing aspects of shared musical experience. It’s taken him nearly two decades to get around to making a solo album; if you mapped out the desire lines of his practice, this album does lie on any of them.

But having gotten around to making one, it makes sense in purely musical terms. MacDonald’s approach to solo saxophone on Desire Lines affirms his command of that daunting situation, and it’s guaranteed to elicit a response from anyone who hears it. Casual listeners will note that he can play an unbroken line for upwards of twenty minutes. Improv heads will immediately recognize both his debt to the work of Evan Parker and the ways that he makes his own space in relation to it. Beginning with Parker’s essentials — a reliably unbroken column of breath — MacDonald finds a path of his own. The first, played on a tenor, starts with a long, burred tone that dips and abrades before launching into a sequence of variations. While Parker has often started out with a high-velocity pattern, which he then changes in hurtling blasts through fractal mind-spaces, MacDonald works his way up to such passages, and then past them into a sequence of stutters, high pitches, and twisting but connected asides. It’s a thrilling ride, and when it finally ends after twenty minutes with a loud guffaw from the performer, the giddiness of moment is shared. The second and third tracks, which include one on soprano, are shorter and more patient in their development, but equally involving.

So, back to that title. Music that makes significant demands on both the player and the listener is probably never going to become an obvious musical shortcut. However, once heard, you might find yourself returning to Desire Lines again and again, trampling down the carpet between the CD shelf (at press time, the album is not available in any other format) that holds the letter M and your playback machine.

Bill Meyer

[spektral-raumohr]

Borage (with other flowers) - 'transitory' album release and opening tour 

24.8. - Spektral Raumohr, Berlin

1.9. - WIM, Zurich

14.9. - Beethovenfest, Bonn

In support of their debut album release, Borage invite saxophonist/accordionist Aurora Nealand and pianist Declan Forde (the other flowers) for this one-off concert and live recording. This event also forms part of their wider efforts to generate and curate collaborative projects with local and international musicians. Gefördert von Musikfonds und die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.

listen and pre-order the album here: https://jamesbanner.bandcamp.com/album/transitory

Borage

Megan Jowett – viola/voice

James Banner – double bass

Borage is Megan Jowett and James Banner. They play brittle, strange, dark, weird and vibrant improvised music inspired by animals, plants and governments on strings and voices. Borage will release their first album transitory on WISMart Records on 15.9.2023. – the release tour takes place in August and September in Berlin, Zurich and Bonn, featuring guests including Declan Forde and Aurora Nealand, and is gratefully supported by Musikfonds. A northern European and Scandinavian tour is planned for spring 2024, followed by concerts and a residency in Lisbon in the summer.

Aurora Nealand - saxophone, accordion

Aurora Nealand strives to live at the intersection of Lunatic and Librarian. She is a sound artist and multi-instrumentalist (saxophones, accordion, voice) based in New Orleans, LA. She is deeply interested in the sonification of everyday objects and knowledge-generation through the stories and history that Sound (with a capital S) contains. Nealand is the leader of  The Royal Roses, the non-traditional Traditional Jazz band, which draws its approach to collective improvisation’s lineage, spanning from the New Orleans Early Jazz traditions, to the AACM, and collage-sound art and musique concrete. Nealand's other musical projects include The Monocle Ensemble - her original music project and installation ensemble, redrawblak Trio, Instigation Orchestra, John Hollenbecks GEORGE, and the Danger Dangers. In 2019/2020 she debuted KindHumanKind- a 90 minute fully staged theatrical show at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, based on her original music. She is co-creator of the City Songs Project (created originally for Knoxvilles Big Ears Festival), regularly works as a musical facilitator with Found Sound Nation -an organization which facilitates international musical collaboration, and she has been involved with the Walden School for Young Composers (as a teacher/performer) for 20 years.  

Declan Forde - piano

Declan Forde (*1992 Glasgow, Scotland) is a pianist and improvising musician living in Berlin since 2014. Forde is active across a spectrum of musical situations; in duo with Greg Cohen (Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, etc.) since 2016; original music with James Banner: USINE; traditional Jazz and freely improvised music in ever changing combinations with musicians living locally and internationally such as Han Bennink, Tony Malaby, Tobias Delius, Jeff Williams and many more. Since 2015 Forde has been curating the concert series ‘Practically Married’ with bassist James Banner at Donau115 named ‘one of the best jazz clubs in Europe’ by The Guardian. They released their first album ‘Circus’ featuring João Lopes Pereira in October 2018, and three more recordings in March 2020. .

Forde performs regularly as a soloist and was invited by the Berliner Festspiele to perform as part of American artist Rashid Johnson’s installation ‘Antoine’s Organ‘ at Berlin’s Gropius Bau July-December 2019. Beyond the world of Jazz and improvised music, Forde has performed, toured and recorded for over ten years with the Scottish singer and artist Rachel Sermanni. He plays piano on her first release ‘The Bothy Sessions’ (2011), ‘So it Turns’ (2019) and ‘Dreamer Awake’ (2023).

[musicmakesyousmart]

The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra - Poetics

Creative Sources

2008

[scotianostra]

November 3rd 2002 saw the death of Lonnie Donegan, Scottish skiffle music star and Scotland’s first pop superstar.

Born Anthony James Donegan in Bridgeton, Glasgow, his  father was a professional violinist who had played with the Scottish National Orchestra. The family moved to East Ham when Donegan was two and his father gave up music.

Donegan renamed himself after his hero, the blues musician Lonnie Johnson, hIs first break was playing banjo and guitar with Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, whom he joined in 1952. The following year cornetist Ken Colyer was imprisoned in New Orleans for a visa problem. Donegan returned home and left them for Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, who were newly signed to Decca.

It was while playing in the Chris Barber Jazz Band in 1954 that Donegan recorded a cover of Leadbelly’s Rock Island Line to the accompaniment of a girl playing the washboard. The song was a big hit and launched the skiffle music craze, a kind of jazz/folk/country/blues fusion usually using homemade or improvised instruments. The homemade music inspired many to take up the guitar, including a young John Lennon. (His first band, The Quarrymen, was a skiffle group).

Donegan became known as The King of Skiffle, and “Rock Island Line” was the first of 17 Top 10 hits for him in this country.

In the 1960s, Donegan became more involved in the business side of the industry and formed his publishing company Tyler Music. A 17-year-old Justin Hayward signed a deal with Tyler Music, which ended up giving Donegan the lion’s share of the royalties for Nights in white Satin and the other songs Hayward wrote for The Moody Blues before 1974.

He was still playing the cabaret circuit in 1976 when a heart attack forced Donegan into semi-retirement. Van Morrison presented Donegan with an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, calling him, “a man we’re all in debt to. He started the ball rolling.”

[justforbooks]

Lee Konitz, jazz alto saxophonist who was a founding influence on the ‘cool school’ of the 1950s  died aged 92

The music critic Gary Giddins once likened the alto saxophone playing of Lee Konitz, who has died aged 92 from complications of Covid-19, to the sound of someone “thinking out loud”. In the hothouse of an impulsive, spontaneous music, Konitz sounded like a jazz player from a different habitat entirely – a man immersed in contemplation more than impassioned tumult, a patient explorer of fine-tuned nuances.

Konitz played with a delicate intelligence and meticulous attention to detail, his phrasing impassively steady in its dynamics but bewitching in line. Yet he relished the risks of improvising. He loved long, curling melodies that kept their ultimate destinations hidden, he had a pure tone that eschewed dramatic embellishments, and he seemed to have all the time in the world. “Lee really likes playing with no music there at all,” the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler once told me. “He’ll say ‘You start this tune’ and you’ll say ‘What tune?’ and he’ll say ‘I don’t care, just start.’”

Born in Chicago, the youngest of three sons of immigrant parents – an Austrian father, who ran a laundry business, and a Russian mother, who encouraged his musical interests – Konitz became a founding influence on the 1950s “cool school”, which was, in part, an attempt to get out of the way of the almost unavoidable dominance of Charlie Parker on post-1940s jazz. For all his technical brilliance, Parker was a raw, earthy and impassioned player, and rarely far from the blues. As a child, Konitz studied the clarinet with a member of Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he had a classical player’s silvery purity of tone; he avoided both heart-on-sleeve vibrato and the staccato accents characterising bebop.

However, Konitz and Parker had a mutual admiration for the saxophone sound of Lester Young – much accelerated but still audible in Parker’s phrasing, tonally recognisable in Konitz’s poignant, stately and rather melancholy sound. Konitz switched from clarinet to saxophone in 1942, initially adopting the tenor instrument. He began playing professionally, and encountered Lennie Tristano, the blind, autocratic, musically visionary Chicago pianist who was probably the biggest single influence on the cool movement. Tristano valued an almost mathematically pristine melodic inventiveness over emotional colouration in music, and was obsessive in its pursuit. “He felt and communicated that music was a serious matter,” Konitz said. “It wasn’t a game, or a means of making a living, it was a life force.”

Tristano came close to anticipating free improvisation more than a decade before the notion took wider hold, and his impatience with the dictatorship of popular songs and their inexorable chord patterns – then the underpinnings of virtually all jazz – affected all his disciples. Konitz declared much later that a self-contained, standalone improvised solo with its own inner logic, rather than a string of variations on chords, was always his objective. His pursuit of this dream put pressures on his career that many musicians with less exacting standards were able to avoid.

Konitz switched from tenor to alto saxophone in the 1940s. He worked with the clarinettist Jerry Wald, and by 20 he was in Claude Thornhill’s dance band. This subtle outfit was widely admired for its slow-moving, atmospheric “clouds of sound” arrangements, and its use of what jazz hardliners sometimes dismissed as “front-parlour instruments” – bassoons, French horns, bass clarinets and flutes.

Regular Thornhill arrangers included the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and the classically influenced pianist Gil Evans. Miles Davis was also drawn into an experimental composing circle that regularly met in Evans’s New York apartment. The result was a series of Thornhill-like pieces arranged for a nine-piece band showcasing Davis’s fragile-sounding trumpet. The 1949 and 1950 sessions became immortalised as the Birth of the Cool recordings, though they then made little impact. Davis was the figurehead, but the playing was ensemble-based and Konitz’s plaintive, breathy alto saxophone already stood out, particularly on such drifting tone-poems as Moon Dreams.

Konitz maintained the relationship with Tristano until 1951, before going his own way with the trombonist Tyree Glenn, and then with the popular, advanced-swing Stan Kenton orchestra. Konitz’s delicacy inevitably toughened in the tumult of the Kenton sound, and the orchestra’s power jolted him out of Tristano’s favourite long, pale, minimally inflected lines into more fragmented, bop-like figures. But the saxophonist really preferred small-group improvisation. He began to lead his own bands, frequently with the pianist Ronnie Ball and the bassist Peter Ind, and sometimes with the guitarist Billy Bauer and the brilliant West Coast tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh.

In 1961 Konitz recorded the album Motion with John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones and the bassist Sonny Dallas. Jones’s intensity and Konitz’s whimsical delicacy unexpectedly turned out to be a perfect match. Konitz also struck up the first of what were to be many significant European connections, touring the continent with the Austrian saxophonist Hans Koller and the Swedish saxophone player Lars Gullin. He drifted between playing and teaching when his studious avoidance of the musically obvious reduced his bookings, but he resumed working with Tristano and Marsh for some live dates in 1964, and played with the equally dedicated and serious Jim Hall, the thinking fan’s guitarist.

Konitz loved the duo format’s opportunities for intimate improvised conversation. Indifferent to commercial niceties, he delivered five versions of Alone Together on the 1967 album The Lee Konitz Duets, first exploring it unaccompanied and then with a variety of other halves including the vibraphonist Karl Berger. The saxophonist Joe Henderson and the trombonist Marshall Brown also found much common ground with Konitz in this setting. Konitz developed the idea on 1970s recordings with the pianist-bassist Red Mitchell and the pianist Hal Galper – fascinating exercises in linear melodic suppleness with the gently unobtrusive Galper; more harmonically taxing and wider-ranging sax adventures against Mitchell’s unbending chord frameworks.

Despite his interest in new departures, Konitz never entirely embraced the experimental avant garde, or rejected the lyrical possibilities of conventional tonality. But he became interested in the music of the pianist Paul Bley and his wife, the composer Carla Bley, and in 1987 participated in surprising experiments in totally free and non jazz-based improvisation with the British guitarist Derek Bailey and others.

Konitz also taught extensively – face to face, and via posted tapes to students around the world. Teaching was his refuge, and he often apparently preferred it to performance. In 1974 Konitz, working with Mitchell and the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean in Denmark, recorded a brilliant standards album, Jazz à Juan, with the pianist Martial Solal, the bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen and the drummer Daniel Humair. That year, too, Konitz released the captivating, unaccompanied Lone-Lee with its spare and logical improvising, and a fitfully free-funky exploration with Davis’s bass-drums team of Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.

In the 1980s, Konitz worked extensively with Solal and the pianist Michel Petrucciani, and made a fascinating album with a Swedish octet led by the pianist Lars Sjösten – in memory of the compositions of Gullin, some of which had originally been dedicated to Konitz from their collaborations in the 1950s. With the pianist Harold Danko, Konitz produced music of remarkable freshness, including the open, unpremeditated Wild As Springtime recorded in Glasgow in 1984. Sometimes performing as a duo, sometimes within quartets and quintets, the Konitz/Danko pairing was to become one of the most productive of Konitz’s musical relationships.

Still tirelessly revealing how much spontaneous material could be spun from the same tunes – Alone Together and George Russell’s Ezz-thetic were among his favourites – by the end of the 1980s Konitz was also broadening his options through the use of the soprano saxophone. His importance to European fans was confirmed in 1992 when he received the Danish Jazzpar prize. He spent the 1990s moving between conventional jazz, open-improvisation and cross-genre explorations, sometimes with chamber groups, string ensembles and full classical orchestras.

On a fine session in 1992 with players including the pianist Kenny Barron, Konitz confirmed how gracefully shapely yet completely free from romantic excess he could be on standards material. He worked with such comparably improv-devoted perfectionists as Paul Motian, Steve Swallow, John Abercrombie, Marc Johnson and Joey Baron late in that decade. In 2000 he showed how open to wider persuasions he remained when he joined the Axis String Quartet on a repertoire devoted to 20th-century French composers including Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

In 2002 Konitz headlined the London jazz festival, opening the show by inviting the audience to collectively hum a single note while he blew five absorbing minutes of typically airy, variously reluctant and impetuous alto sax variations over it. The early 21st century also heralded a prolific sequence of recordings – including Live at Birdland with the pianist Brad Mehldau and some structurally intricate genre-bending with the saxophonist Ohad Talmor’s unorthodox lineups.

Pianist Richie Beirach’s duet with Konitz - untypically playing the soprano instrument - on the impromptu Universal Lament was a casually exquisite highlight of Knowing Lee (2011), an album that also compellingly contrasted Konitz’s gauzy sax sound with Dave Liebman’s grittier one.

Konitz was co-founder of the leaderless quartet Enfants Terribles (with Baron, the guitarist Bill Frisell and the bassist Gary Peacock) and recorded the standards-morphing album Live at the Blue Note (2012), which included a mischievous fusion of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? and Subconscious-Lee, the famous Konitz original he had composed for the same chord sequence. First Meeting: Live in London Vol 1 (2013) captured Konitz’s improv set in 2010 with the pianist Dan Tepfer, bassist Michael Janisch and drummer Jeff Williams, and at 2015’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival, the old master both played and softly sang in company with an empathic younger pioneer, the trumpeter Dave Douglas. Late that year, the 88-year-old scattered some characteristically pungent sax propositions and a few quirky scat vocals into the path of Barron’s trio on Frescalalto (2017).

Cologne’s accomplished WDR Big Band also invited Konitz (a resident in the German city for some years) to record new arrangements of his and Tristano’s music, and in 2018 his performance with the Brandenburg State Orchestra of Prisma, Gunter Buhles’s concerto for alto saxophone and full orchestra, was released. In senior years as in youth, Konitz kept on confirming Wheeler’s view that he was never happier than when he didn’t know what was coming next.

Konitz was married twice; he is survived by two sons, Josh and Paul, and three daughters, Rebecca, Stephanie and Karen, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

• Lee Konitz, musician, born 13 October 1927; died 15 April 2020

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[radioarte]

su www.radioarte.it

ogni domenica una monografia dedicata all'ascolto ed allo studio dell'opera di un autore

-

on www.radioarte.it

every Sunday a monograph dedicated to the listening and study of the work of an author

questo mese / this mounth

La Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra è un grande ensemble di improvvisazione composto da circa 20 musicisti provenienti da diversi background artistici che spaziano dall'improvvisazione libera, al jazz, alla musica classica, folk, pop e sperimentale, fino alla performance art.

Dal suo progetto inaugurale nel 2002, l'Orchestra si è guadagnata una reputazione internazionale e ha raccolto il plauso della critica per i suoi progetti innovativi e l'esplorazione della musica improvvisata. Una serie di collaborazioni con improvvisatori di fama mondiale e altri ensemble hanno ampliato gli orizzonti artistici del gruppo e dato vita a connessioni musicali in tutto il mondo.

La Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra si esibisce in locali di tutto il Regno Unito e dell'Europa e ha istituito un proprio festival annuale a Glasgow che fornisce una piattaforma per musicisti e artisti improvvisatori. Oltre alle attività di composizione, registrazione ed esecuzione, sono impegnati in un programma continuo di attività educative e di sensibilizzazione che comprende workshop, conferenze e masterclass.

/

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra is a large improvising ensemble of around 20 musicians from diverse artistic backgrounds ranging from free improvisation, jazz, classical, folk, pop and experimental musics to performance art.

Since its inaugural project in 2002 the Orchestra has established an international reputation and garnered critical acclaim for its innovative projects and its exploration of improvised music. A host of collaborations with world renowned improvisers and other ensembles have expanded the band’s artistic horizons and given rise to musical connections throughout the world.

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra perform in venues around the UK and Europe and have established their own annual festival in Glasgow which provides a platform for improvising musicians and artists. Alongside their composing, recording and performing activities they are committed to an ongoing programme of education and outreach activities including workshops, lectures and master classes.

Email

giocontact@gmail.com

[practicegoodpractice]

Friends & Family

Practice Good Practice and DECAGRAM present:

Friends and Family (The Glad Cafe - 2pm, Sunday 18th December)

2pm-8pm, Sunday 18th December at The Glad Cafe, 1006A Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow G41 2HG

tickets: https://decagram.co/ticketsandmerch/decagram-and-practice-good-practice-present-friends-and-family-glasgow

A celebration of community, music and art. Lots of excitements in store - full info to come over the next few weeks, but for now, feast your eyes on this joyous line up - suitable for all ages!

Semispecific Ensemble - improvised amateur jazz, interplanetary electronics; ever-changing psychedelic mutations. Always different and often unique.

Bear - Swapping her mechanical orchestra for an acoustic guitar Bear (AKA Sarah Kenchington) resurrects some truly mesmerising songs from a former life. Featuring live Projections From B. Gilbert Scott and guest vocals from Ceylan Hay.

Mercuro-Chrome - field recordings, fractured samples, kick drums and surrealist poetry. Equally confusing, surprising and delightful.

Reverse Engineer - Outstanding adventurous ambient electronics from Edinburgh based pioneering producer Dave House.

Bell Lungs - Ceylan Hay collects objects and instruments and uses them alongside her voices to create thickly layered live-looped improvisations transporting you into a hazy world of mystic creatures and heady dreams.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Live Picks: 8/30-9/2

L.A. Witch

BY JORDAN MAINZER

We got ya covered through Sunday!

8/30: Set It Off, Subterranean

We previewed Tampa symphonic rock band Set It Off’s set at The Forge earlier this year, describing them as “a Warped Tour-approved band who has released three albums, the most prominent 2016′s Upside Down but the best 2014′s sickly sweet Duality, which found success in the grand condition of cheesy concept records, its theatrical, sweeping melodies and instrumentation overcoming its less palatable pop rock aspects.”

Since then, the band has signed to Fearless Records and released a new song, the faux-industrial emo, overproduced “Killer in the Mirror”.

Indie pop duo Chapel and rapper De’Wayne Jackson open.

8/30: Round Robin, Thalia Hall

We don’t know much about this performance other than that it’s a night of improvisation by people who live in, are from, or are rooted in Chicago music. Judging by the lineup, it’s a must-see. It includes Roscoe Mitchell, Akenya, DJ The Twilite Tone, poet Kevin Coval, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, and SILY favorites like Matana Roberts, Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux, Mind Over Mirrors’ Jamie Fennelly, Chicago Symphony Orchestra cellist Katinka Kleijn, Matchess, and Makaya McCraven.

8/30: L.A. Witch, Beat Kitchen

Drawling psychedelic band L.A. Witch released their self-titled debut last year and have been touring strong off of it ever since. Expect to hear lots from the record and hopefully some new material.

Spacey band Moonwalks and local sludgy post-punk duo Pussyfoot open.

8/31: Miguel, Union Park

We previewed Miguel’s show at the Riviera earlier this year:

“War & Leisure, the latest album from Miguel, is, as its title suggests, simultaneously political and personal, the former somewhat new territory for him. The songs are varied as usual; he’s sultry on “Wolf”, funky on the synth-addled “Told You So”, and ready for the radio on the Travis Scott-featuring “Sky Walker”. Stylistically, it’s sort of a combination of his previous two albums, the drug-induced Kaleidoscope Dream and guitar-oriented Wildheart. And while it’s not as earth-shattering and trendsetting as those two, it’s perhaps his most cohesive and fully realized effort.”

Since then, he’s performed “Remember Me” from Coco at the Oscars and shared a new song, “Python”, among other things. At his headlining North Coast Music Festival slot, he should mix it up between his last three albums live, concentrating on War & Leisure.

8/31 & 9/1: Kidd Jordan and Friends, Constellation

Dog/Days is a week of free performances at Constellation, Links Hall, and Hungry Brain. This Friday at Constellation, jazz saxophonist Kidd Jordan plays with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, and drummer Alvin Fielder.

8/31 & 9/1: B-52′s, Ravinia

The Athens, Georgia freak new wave band’s got a decade worth of untouchable material, and they play almost all the highlights during their live set, plus the goofy as hell title track to Funplex. What’s not to love?

New wave legends Culture Club co-headlines. Thompson Twins’ lead vocalist Tom Bailey opens.

9/1: Barrence Whitfield & The Savages, Reggie’s 

Soul Flowers of Titan, the new album from Barrence Whitfield & The Savages, is purportedly inspired by Sun Ra and the King Records/Federal Records Cincinnati sound of the 50′s-60′s. Is the latter noticeable? Definitely. The former? Not sure. Most of the songs, like the chaotically horn-laden “Slowly Losing My Mind” and the garage-meets-soul “Pain”, are in line with tracks from recent efforts Under the Savage Sky and Dig Thy Savage Soul. Though I guess the spirit of blues ditty “Let’s Go to Mars” is closest thematically to “space is the place,” much of Soul Flowers of Titan sounds right at home with the rest of Whitfield’s discography. And that’s a good thing, since Saturday at Reggie’s they’ll play a lot of it, plus some highlights from the band’s pre-Bloodshot Records days.

Garage rockers The Woggles headline. Baby Money & The Down Payments, the project of Chicago based songwriter Pamela Maurer open.

9/1: Sumac, Empty Bottle

Post-metal band Sumac headlines Empty Bottle as part of Scorched Tundra X. Earlier this year, they released a mammoth collaborative album with Keiji Haino, and next month, they follow up 2016′s What One Becomes with a new full-length, Love in Shadow. So far, they’ve released the 15-minute “Attis’ Blade”, which builds and sprawls to a mid-section of noise, quiet strumming, and back before revealing longing growls from Aaron Turner. I’ve heard the rest of the album, too, and it’s a good mix of new territory for the band combined with what they’ve always done well. 21-minute Opener “The Task” starts like a traditional metal song but dissolves into a calm eye before the storm of more brutality and the band’s trademark buzzing dissonance, all before ending with organs and Turner’s guttural moans. “Arcing Silver” is the shortest and most straightforward of the bunch in terms of its arrangements, peaks, and valleys, though it does end with some ambient guitar squalls that introduce more jams. And the introductory guitar tones on closer “Ecstasy of Unbecoming” are more reminiscent of Sufi music than metal, though distorted power riffing kicks the rest of the song into high gear.

Avant-garde metal band Yakuza, doom band In The Company Of Serpents, and hardcore band Couch Slut open.

9/2: Matthew Dear, Estate Ultrabar

We previewed Matthew Dear’s DJ set at smartbar earlier this year:

“Truth is, I have never been a huge fan of Matthew Dear’s original material for whatever reason–but his almost 3-hour entry in the DJ Kicks series from last year shows just how good of a curator he really is, starting with a meditative Nils Frahm track and just exploding into a dance frenzy from there. That’s why his DJ set at smartbar should be one of the best you’ll see all year.”

This time around, he’s headlining a BBQ at Estate. He’s releasing a new album Bunny in October and has revealed two tracks: the hypnotic “Bunny’s Dream” and the repetitive “Echo”.

Remix extraordinaire Josh Wink, Canadian DJ Kenny Glasgow, Fortune, Pershan, and Nick Jannite also spin.

9/2: Rapsody, Union Park

After being prominently featured on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, last year, Rapsody released her own “one of the best of the decade” rap albums. Laila’s Wisdom sees Rapsody proud to be a black woman in the rap game. “Yeah, they call me black and ugly / But I go so hard, make the whole world love me,” she spits. Sure, her features--Lamar, Anderson .Paak, Black Thought, Busta Rhymes, and BJ The Chicago Kid among them--are impressive. But her flow, especially on songs like the unstoppable “You Should Know”, the funky “Pay Up”, and the skronking “Power” (she outshines even Lamar on that one), is the main attraction. She’ll be worth the one day price of admission at North Coast.

9/2: Hannibal Buress, Chicago Theatre

We previewed Hannibal Buress’ set at Arcada Theatre back in March:

“Hannibal Buress is both a comedian for the world and Chicago, so seeing him in the area presents lots of opportunity for in-jokes. (The one about the ridiculousness of being asked for an ID at O’Hare airport from his 2015 special Comedy Camisado comes to mind.) While he’s probably best known these days for his role on Broad City, he’s increasingly building up his filmography and TV appearances and has recently started a podcast, The Handsome Rambler, on which he’s interviewed Open Mike Eagle and Run The Jewels. But he’s funniest on stage.”

[rapturerecords]

Song: Jazz Interlude / Swing Doors

Composer: Billy Munn

Director: Billy Munn conducting Charles Brull’s Dance Orchestra

Record Label: Charles Brull - A Harmonic Private Recording CBL 37

Released: ca. 1950

Location: Galaxy News Radio

Here’s an unusual piece. We are about to embark upon a journey into the use of library music (also known as stock music or production music) used in the Fallout series.

We’ll start with this instrumental track heard on GNR. As with all of the instrumental pieces, Three Dog makes no formal introduction of this song on the radio. Some of you may recognize this as the opening music for “The Adventures of Herbert ‘Daring’ Dashwood”.

Unusually for library music, this song is listed right alongside the other more familiar vocal tunes in Fallout 3′s end credits. However instead of the plethora of copyright information, artist name, and record labels, all of that is replaced with “Courtesy of APM Music, Inc.”

APM Music is one of the well known providers of production music, combining various music libraries and underscoring countless cartoons, films, and TV shows, yet almost anonymously.

Curiously, of the music reprised from GNR in Fallout 3 into DCR in Fallout 4, the ones that didn’t make the jump all came from APM Music.

More on that later.

As is the case with library music, finding artist and recording information is extremely difficult as these songs were never meant to be sold to the public, instead being exclusively used for the film and TV industry. What follows is an attempt to extricate this information.

Note: Library music is typically identified by composer or emotion. Very little can be confirmed about the musicians who performed on the recording.

About the composer

Far left: Jack Hylton, Center: Pat O’Malley, Far right: Billy Munn

Born in Scotland in 1911, Billy Munn had a natural talent for jazz. By age 11, he improvised on the piano for Glasgow’s Black Cat Cinema during children’s programs.

He joined his first dance band at age 14 while his ambitions as a pianist led him to joining in 1926 Jack Hylton’s dance band, the preeminent British bandleader. This lead to numerous offers of freelance recording and broadcasting work and the start of his work scoring for film and television. 

Eventually he would lead his own ensemble at the Orchid Room in Mayfair along with launching the Jazz Club program on the BBC in 1947.

For further reading...

About the recording

First comes first: Why does the label say “Jazz Interlude” while Fallout identifies it as “Jazzy Interlude”?

While the original record label belonged to Charles Brull, it was eventually acquired by famed UK library label KPM, which is managed in the States by APM Music.

CBL 37 is an odd mixture of spinning at 78 rpm and being made of vinyl, meaning you’d need specialized equipment for playing it.

As far as I can tell, it was first reissued in 1999 as a CD, KPM 0398 Roads to War (1933-1945) Part 1. You may find that a total of 3 songs from Fallout 3 also appear in the track listing. Here, the song picked up a description as Track No. 45:

“English swing dance music”

And an incongruous extra “y” on the track title which presumably carried over into 2008.

So as to ascertaining the date of the recording. If the CD is to be believed, this track was recorded sometime between 1933 - 1945. I have found no evidence to confirm this.

The record label itself does not have a date of publication. However, an image of Bert Graves’ “Cool Cucumber”, CBL 53, a mere 16 away from 37, shows in a very small subtitle: “Recording First Published in 1957″.

Charles Brull seems to have also provided discs for broadcast on the BBC as test pattern or test card music. You may recognize the same three tracks appearing under 1954.

1954 might have been the end of it except for some entries from our friends in the Nordic countries.

The Danish Cultural Archive or the Dansk Kulturarv has digitized the radio set-lists of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). The archives indicate that Billy Munn’s “Jazz Interlude” was played over the air in 1958, 1959, 1961, and 1963.

Meanwhile, the Swedish Film Database records that Billy Munn’s “Jazz Interlude” was used in the soundtracks for the 1952 film Farlig kurva and the 1950 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel or Pimpernel Svensson.

In the meantime, various recent films have licensed the song under its “new” name “Jazzy Interlude”. Of particular note is the TV series Manhattan. Naturally being about the Manhattan Project, there are a couple of references to the Fallout series, notably the use of several songs including “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”, “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle”, “Fox Boogie”, and “Jazzy Interlude” in S1E6 “Acceptable Limits”. Here’s a short sound clip from the episode.

Listen to the flip side “Swing Doors” here.

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TFEH & Sonically Depicting present: Moreskinsound (Ania Psenitsnikova & David Toop) / Arma Agharta / Machine Elves at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh: 19/9/24.

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Our Virtual Tribe: Sustaining and Enhancing Community via Online Music Improvisation

Our Virtual Tribe: Sustaining and Enhancing Community via Online Music Improvisation

This article documents experiences of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions during COVID-19 pandemic via interviews with 29 participants. Sessions included an international, gender balanced, and cross generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3…

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#Repost @miamiperformance • • • • • • Faena Forum Meet our Performers: Greg Alvarez Jenna Balfe Cookie and daWine Dreamon Sonia Hernandez-Baez Jose Garza Jan & Dave Kunstwaffen Male Model Charo Oquet Rafael Vargas Bernard Eliu Almonte (Spain/Dom. Rep.) Alina Labour (Dom. Rep) Anna Recasens, Laia Solé y Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo (Spain, USA) Seiko Kitayama (Japan) Cristina Savage - (Spain) Alexia Miranda - El Salvador Salomé Cosmique - (Colombia /US) Glasgow Improviser Orchestra (Scotland) Alexei Tellerias - (Dom. Rep) |Shanti Lalita (Puerto Rico) Bartolomé Ferrando (Spain) UOM Three-Brained Robot Gustavo Alvarez - Mex Alba Soto - (Spain) Rushad Eggleston Krzysztof Dziemaszkiewicz - (Poland/Berlin) Paperwater Glaem Parls - (Dom. Rep.) Randy Burman Yeifri Ramirez Ramirez - (Dom. Rep.) Kim Keever Alette Simmons-Jimenez Elvin Díaz (Dom. Rep.) Connor Bonvillain and João Felipe da Fraga - (Brazil Rep.) Eugenia Chellet - (Mexico) Eli Neira - (Chile) Richard Vergez | Joseph Herring Beltrán i Janés - (Spain) Cinthya Escorcia (Colombia) . . . #performanceart #performer #installationart #miamibeach #miamibeachlife #edgezones #edgezonesgallery #edgezone #performative #performativeart #pandemicart #internationalfestival #artfest #artfestival #onlineperformance #onlineperformanceartfestival (en Dominican Republic) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEl5030jo-S/?igshid=4qpt0i3x850u

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Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra presents Odie ji Ghast

GIOdynamics improvised open mic @Nice N Sleezy Glasgow 10/02/2020

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April 29th 1931 saw the birth of  Lonnie Donegan.

Born Anthony James Donegan in Bridgeton, Glasgow, his  father was a professional violinist who had played with the Scottish National Orchestra. The family moved to East Ham when Donegan was two and his father gave up music.

  Donegan renamed himself after his hero, the blues musician Lonnie Johnson, his first break was playing banjo and guitar with Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, whom he joined in 1952. The following year cornetist Ken Colyer was imprisoned in New Orleans for a visa problem. Donegan returned home and left them for Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, who were newly signed to Decca.

  It was while playing in the Chris Barber Jazz Band in 1954 that Donegan recorded a cover of Leadbelly’s Rock Island Line to the accompaniment of a girl playing the washboard. The song was a big hit and launched the skiffle music craze, a kind of jazz/folk/country/blues fusion usually using homemade or improvised instruments. The homemade music inspired many to take up the guitar, including a young John Lennon. (His first band, The Quarrymen, was a skiffle group).

  Donegan became known as The King of Skiffle, and “Rock Island Line” was the first of 17 Top 10 hits for him in this country.

In the 1960s, Donegan became more involved in the business side of the industry and formed his publishing company Tyler Music. A 17-year-old Justin Hayward signed a deal with Tyler Music, which ended up giving Donegan the lion’s share of the royalties for Nights in white Satin and the other songs Hayward wrote for The Moody Blues before 1974.

  I think Donegan adapted his accent and style to suit an American audience in the 50's and 60's and they lapped it up, playing all the old classics in his own imitable style.

  He was still playing the cabaret circuit in 1976 when a heart attack forced Donegan into semi-retirement. Van Morrison presented Donegan with an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, calling him, “a man we’re all in debt to. He started the ball rolling.”

Donegan died on 3 November 2002, at age 71, after a heart attack in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire mid-way through a UK tour, and before he was due to perform at a memorial concert for George Harrison with the Rolling Stones.