Tones For Joan's Bone

For the second time in two years, Chick Corea has assembled a band to give aural illustration to the fantasy writings of L. Ron Hubbard. For those who have trouble with Hubbard and his teachings, this may be a red flag to avoid the record altogether. The Ultimate Adventure is a tale that draws on characters from the Arabian Nights - there is an ad for the book in the back of the CD booklet. With that out of the way, one has to deal with the music entirely on its own terms. Corea has spent decades playing both electric and acoustic jazz. This is the first time since 1976's My Spanish Heart that he has woven his love of both so completely into a single album. There are more than a few echoes here that call upon the ghosts of the earliest Return to Forever band - primarily in the gorgeous flute playing of Hubert Laws and Jorge Pardo, in the saxophone artistry of Tim Garland, the drumming of Steve Gadd…

Mr. Corea, a jazz pianist, composer and band leader of enormous repute and success, was commissioned to write his septet by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, six of whose members joined him in this performance. The composer’s gifts were abundantly evident, both in his manipulation of the instruments and in his own keyboard work, which was characterized by powerfully insistent rhythms and rich embroidery.

Richard Bone is an American composer and musician who has been regularly releasing albums since 1993, mostly on his own Quickworks Laboratory Discs label. The music on Indium consists of unreleased music as well as music written to be performed at Artemiy Artemiev's First International Festival of Electronic, Electroacoustic, Experimental and Avant-garde Music in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. A combination of dark and light tones, contrasting hard/soft metallic textures, and diverse rhythms, it’s a striking work that plays like a power surge running through your mind.

Modern electric blues guitar can be traced directly back to this Texas-born pioneer, who began amplifying his sumptuous lead lines for public consumption circa 1940 and thus initiated a revolution so total that its tremors are still being felt today. Few major postwar blues guitarists come to mind that don't owe T-Bone Walker an unpayable debt of gratitude. B.B. King has long cited him as a primary influence, marveling at Walker's penchant for holding the body of his guitar outward while he played it. Gatemouth Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, Goree Carter, Pete Mayes, and a wealth of other prominent Texas-bred axemen came stylistically right out of Walker during the late '40s and early '50s.