Drum Loop Jazz

To write a review about Christoph Spendel is not easy. Christoph is a very active musician, who has already played in more than 46 albums, which are listed at his website www.spendel.com. Inspecting these cds the problem is to find the right start . Outlining a rough sketch we have to decide between the straight ahead jazzer and the contemporary/smooth jazz musician. But this frame is really too rough, if one listens to his diverse albums. Take for his example his album "Jazz Meets Classic" with classic and jazz elements, his album "The Art Of Piano Solo", on which he is mixing jazz and hip hop incredients or his album "Electric Bolero", declared as smooth-chill out-lounge-world music.

Soul Jazz apply keen ears to the ingenious era of UK rave, hardcore and jungle and its unprecedented stylistic shifts of the early ‘90s with a haul of seminal, obscure and killer cuts.

Altoist Warren Hill has never claimed to be a jazz player, but even as a would-be pop star he has an identity problem. Hill comes across as a David Sanborn clone on this popular release and seems to have spent much less time working on developing an individual sound than he has posing for cameras; there are eight photos of Hill included in the booklet of this CD. As far as the music goes, this set of originals is essentially derivative if pleasant background music, suitable for dancing but not for close listening.

Mambo Sinuendo is a collaboration between Ry Cooder and Buena Vista alum (and formerly of many other groups as well) Manuel Galban. The album attempts to catch an old style popularized in Cuba by Galban, and was, surprisingly, never followed up on by anybody after Galban. It's a guitar-based romp closely based in the pop/jazz crossovers of the 1950s-1960s (Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, etc). There's a touch of exoticism here and there, and a larger touch of a relatively Hawaiian feel throughout the whole via the guitar techniques employed by the pair. It's all somewhere in a form between lounge, mambo, and Esquivel's old space-age-bachelor-pad music. In rare instances, there's even a little bit of a house drum loop added in by the percussionists.

Guitarist Skopelitis' dustpan approach to world music sweeps various ethnic instrumental grit and grime into the whirling blades of co-producer Bill Laswell's shop-vac. Contributing to the unholy mess are Foday Musa Suso on kora, oudist/violinist Simon Shaheen, gospel organist Amina Claudine Myers, percussionists Zakir Hussain, Aiyb Dieng and Guilherme Franco, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassists Bill Laswell and Jah Wobble, and, consistently providing the most bracing moments, Bachir Attar (leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka) raising hell on the plague-of-locusts vernacular oboe, the rhaita. When Ekstasis's free-floating anxiety is at its peak, it could almost be the disc that Can fans have been waiting for since Ege Bamyasi.