Kayhan Kalhor & Erdal Erzincan The Wind (2006) {ecm 1981} [repost]

The Wind is Kalhor's second musical journey outside of his native land, this time to Turkey to meet and learn from the premier baglama (saz) master, Erdal Erzincan. Kalhor plays kamanche (Iranian spike fiddle), which is usually bowed, and thus contrasts with the plucked sounds of both the sitar and oud-like baglama.Made up of twelve unnamed "Parts" that run into each other, The Wind is really one long improvisation that rises and falls, inhales and exhales as Kalhor and Erzincan become one musician with one mind.

Being a perpetual student, Stephan Micus usually makes world music by default. He breathes patience and skill into the exotic instruments he uncovers, but certainly with respectful bending of the rules along the way. Towards the Wind follows in the same exploratory tradition – educated, but unassuming as to the nature of what an instrument is "supposed to do." Here, the album evokes an easily digestible cross section of Middle Eastern mysticism – swirling sand dunes, rust-colored sunsets, and sacred spaces.

The second ECM album by Norwegian cooperative group The Source gets back to basics. Since its formation in 1993, when founder-members Trygve Seim, Øyvind Brække and Per Oddvar Johansen were all students at the Trøndelag Conservatory of Music in Trondheim, The Source has been very much a moveable feast, its motto, "No two concerts alike!" The group has embraced the wildest stylistic collisions, working variously with poets and DJs, rai vocalists and rappers, ice hockey players, and conceptual and performance artists. Their collaborators have ranged from rock band Motorpsycho to classical musicians including the Cikada String Quartet (as on their 2000 ECM recording The Source and Different Cikadas). Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of their performances have been as a quartet, most of their music was written for quartet, and this eponymously titled disc addresses a backlog of much-played material whose appearance on disc is overdue.

During the fall of 2013, they first met at November Music Festival and since then there has been a successful collaboration and a deep friendship between the Iranian kamancheh grand master Kayhan Kalhor and the three Dutch jazz musicians of the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio.

"I'm back!" Kicking off her first collection of all new material in over a decade with one of the most unequivocal declarations in her entire catalog, the Divine Miss Q is clearly out for blood. Titled for one of the most self-defining singles of the '70s, the raw roar of "Devilgate Drive," Back to the Drive serves up a dozen tracks that might look back to the Chinnichap era for energy and enthusiasm (Mike Chapman is among her collaborators here), but are eyeing the future too…

With the outfit's four members hailing from Stockholm, Åmål, and Gothenburg, My Brother The Wind is a fully improvisational cosmic rock collective consisting of members of widely known Swedish acts Makajodama, Magnolia, Animal Daydream and most notably Anekdoten, one of the more widely recognized names in the 1990s prog rock revival. Those who frequent the works of Popol Vuh, Amon Duul, Sun Ra, Träd, Gräs Och Stenar, Ash Ra Tempel, Gong, Pink Floyd and other visionary, psychedelic rock artists are advised to investigate this act.