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Derek Bailey & Gregg Bendian - Banter (1995) {OODiscs OO20}
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© 1995 OODiscs | OO20
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Guitar / Percussion

It's not easy playing with Derek Bailey. When you're dealing with someone who has spent, at the time of this recording, about 30 years honing his highly idiosyncratic and abstruse method of musical conversation, entering the room for some "banter" must be an unnerving event. Given his numerous duo recordings, the guitarist seems to welcome the opportunity, however, and percussionist Gregg Bendian approaches the meeting with high confidence and an imaginative array of sounds. Unfortunately, he doesn't bring much to challenge Bailey, or at least is unable to move him out of his "standard" routines.

Bassist, composer, and bandleader Graham Collier may have gotten the short shrift early in his career for not taking the same iconoclastic position Evan Parker and Derek Bailey did: "Forget American jazz, let's forge something uniquely British" (their pretensions were European though they weren't). His contributions to the jazz canon are finally being seen in light of what they actually are: very forward-looking works that extend the jazz boundary into new chromatic and harmonic regions and have an identity that is distinctly non-American. Collier's modalism is so far outside the norms as to speak an entirely different architectural language. Songs for My Father featured a Collier septet with Harry Beckett on trumpet, pianist John Taylor, saxophonists Alan Wakeman and Bob Sydor, and drummer John Webb…

Future Jazz is an interesting teaming of the Blue Note and Knitting Factory labels for a compilation of creative modern jazz (leaning toward the "outside"). The CD serves as a supplement to a book of the same name by music journalist Howard Mandel. The selections all come from 1990s releases, with the exception of Eric Dolphy's classic "Hat and Beard" (1964) and James Newton's rendition of "Black and Tan Fantasy" (1986). Better-known names like Dolphy, Cassandra Wilson, Don Pullen, and Pat Metheny are mixed with names that certainly should be as recognized, like pianist Marilyn Crispell, drummer Gerry Hemingway (both of the mid-'80s Anthony Braxton Quartet lineup), and the late saxophonist Thomas Chapin.

Legendary Japanese jazz guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi formed the New Directions trio in 1969, with Motoharu Yoshizawa on bass and cello and Yoshisaburo Toyozumi on percussion. Their first recordings together were published a year later on the original issue of this wonderful album. Takayanagi was prominent in the Japanese swing and bebop scenes from the 1950s onwards, but found a new lease of life in the uninhibited improv of New Directions, a platform he could use to divorce his playing not only from the conventional harmonics of jazz, but even the shackles of his own instrument, using violin bows and table-top guitars in the style of Keith Rowe…

Toshinori Kondo & Tristan Honsinger - This, That & The Other (1987) {ITM Records–Basic basic 50007 rel 1996}
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© 1987, 1996 ITM Records / Basic | basic 50007
Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / Trumpet / Cello

Tristan Honsinger told Kevin Whitehead, 'I grew up in New England, took up cello at age nine in Springfield, Massachusetts… My first teacher was a Dutch Jew. Almost all my teachers were European immigrants. Later I went to the New England Conservatory. It was quite a good school, but I didn't feel very welcome, so I went to Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore from '68 to '69. By then I'd had it, really, with the whole classical music world. I changed teachers so many times, I suppose I was confused by their contradictory advice'.

A holy grail among contemporary music collectors, this release on Brian Eno's Obscure label, which went out of print almost immediately, features two of the finest compositions of the late 20th century, both by Gavin Bryars. The title track had since been recorded again on two occasions, arguably to better effect on Les Disques du Crepuscule in 1990 and once, more pallidly, on Point in 1994, but this initial production was an extremely special event. Bryars' idea was to construct an aural picture of the disaster, complete with songs and hymns supposedly played by the ship's orchestra even as she was sinking.

David Sylvian's Blemish album was the first release to appear on his own newly formed independent label Samadhisound in 2003. Written as a break from a project he was working on with Steve Jansen, Blemish is a suite of eight compositions based on studio recordings of live improvisational sessions utilizing Sylvian's voice as the focal point, minimal electronic brush-strokes and, on three songs, the prominently showcased free-jazz guitar work of Derek Bailey. Samadhisound returns to this fertile ground for its fifth release with The Good Son vs The Only Daughter: The Blemish Remixes, a collection of often radical re-workings by eight artists of seven of those original, stark compositions, all personally commissioned by Sylvian himself.

Contrary to what the title of Her Story: Scenes from a Lifetime suggests, this double-disc set is not an anthology, yet it is an overview of Wynonna Judd's career, finding her live in concert sifting through her back pages. To be exact, it captures her live at the Grand Ole Opry House on February 1, 2005, singing hits that she had as a member of the Judds and hits she had as a solo artist, covering a few songs along the way. All the songs follow roughly in chronological order, so the 27-track album functions as something like a musical autobiography.