Trumpeter Toshinori Kondo has achieved the most impressive blend of yesterday and tomorrow. Since his decision to apply his study of computer technology to culture in the early 70s, he has worked on diverse projects. Kondo’s work as a film and theater actor, author, and performance organizer have complemented each other to create a very personal mosaic of expression, whose pivot point has always been his music. In 1978 he went to New York, partly out of curiosity and partly to make international contacts, and stayed for five years. He quickly got into the music scene there and played with Herbie Hancock, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Firth, and others.
Recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York City - January 9, 1997. The purpose was a charity concert for celebrating David Bowie's 50th birthday. Many friends of the artist took actively part at this event, therefore it is referred to as an album of "David Bowie & Friends": Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters, Lou Reed, Robert Smith (The Cure), Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Sonic Youth. For many years this Live album has circulated as a bootleg, now it has been officially released in April 2011.
For the 2018 opening celebration of the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, Teri Lyne Carrington asked her students to select and perform songs from the famed jazz Real Book - a compilation of lead sheets or scores of jazz standards - written by women composers. When she released there was only one in the entire book, Carrington, a Grammy Award winning virtuoso jazz drummer, composer, inter-disciplinary artist, activist and educator, who has worked tirelessly over the last decade to advocate for inclusivity and raise the voice of women, trans and non-binary people in jazz, set out to shift the narrative.
The amazing Queen - starring the equally amazing Freddie Mercury - in a mind-blowing live concert for a sea of thrilled fans in Rio de Janeiro in 1985…
Though based in multiple musical realms, pianist Alain Mallet's ambitious Mutt Slang projects coalesce into a world that exudes 'exotic' yet ultimately feels familiar, the roots of its various components meeting somewhere deep within. Sharing the musical landscape with young musicians from Palestine, Brazil, Italy, Israel, Japan, Bulgaria, Panama, Ireland, Puerto Rico and the US, the complexity of their backgrounds - musically, ethnically, and otherwise, permeates the session, suffusing Mallet's compositions with an undeniable energy and life. "Mutt Slang is very much the result of this convergence of all the musics I love, of digging to get to their shared soul and rebuild something fresh, in order to discover where I belong and give others a chance to do the same." - Alain Mallet
Yochk'o Seffer is a Hungarian born musician who is among the finest winds player (mainly alto saxophone) in the history of progressive music…