Expression Fusion

Kamasi Washington releases his new album, Fearless Movement, via Young. Washington calls Fearless Movement his dance album. “It’s not literal,” Washington says. “Dance is movement and expression, and in a way it’s the same thing as music—expressing your spirit through your body. That’s what this album is pushing.” Dance as an embodied form of expression signals a shift in focus for Washington. Where previous albums dealt with cosmic ideas and existential concepts, Fearless Movement focuses in on the everyday, an exploration of life on earth. This change in scope is due in large part to the birth of Washington’s first child a few years ago.

The 20 years referred to in the title of this 2CD collection is only the length of the Bombay-born percussionist's solo career. Gurtu was already beginning to play Indian classical tabla at the age of six, eventually opening his jazz-fusion phase by gigging with Oregon and Don Cherry. This set's subtitle blurb reads 'the serial collaborator in full flight with…', then proceeds to list a highly impressive gathering of guest artists, hailing from both jazz and global music zones. There's always the danger, particularly with drumming leaders, to be subsumed and sidelined by your singers, guitarists and horn players, but Trilok always invites his collaborators into his own universe, retaining a strong sense of Indian classical tradition. Often this will be pleasingly filtered via a fusion with jazz, funk, soul, hip hop, African, Latin, Far Eastern or Western classical musics, but Gurtu usually tends to emerge unscathed and undiluted.

Essential: a masterpiece of jazz-fusion music.
There might have been a fact that he informed them of the name worldwide as a guitar player in the latter half of the 1960's.

Trilok Gurtu has had a remarkable career in recent years, most notably with his African-Indian projects and his compelling contribution on Tabla Beat Science, showing the versatility of his musicianship. No matter all the explorations we may attempt though, one as always is drawn back home at some point, and such is the case on Remembrance." With guest contributions from such luminaries of Indian classical music as Zakir Hussain, Sultan Khan, Ronu Majumdar, and his own mother, Shobha Gurtu, Remembrance pays homage to Trilok's past joined with the technology and diversity of his current influences.

On March 3, 2017, Grammy Award winning composer, producer, singer and drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. will present the megalithic debut album Triumph. Eleven cuts of deep fusion, soul, R&B, jazz and pop, Triumph was put together with Ronald’s brothers Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner and Jameel Bruner of The Internet. It was captured during the infamous KSL Sessions that produced Kamasi Washington’s The Epic and many other West Coast Get Down recordings.

The TRIO IVOIRE is unique in instrumentation and musical scope, melting personal roots of African, European and Jazz traditions and uniting African balafon with piano, drums and electronics to create a contemporary sound that is without comparison. This has little to do with traditional African music, but a lot with finding artistic expression in a globalized reality. On the search of transporting traditional African instruments into the modern world on one hand, looking for new ways of expression in piano and Jazz music on the other, two worlds are approaching each other that seem far apart.