Smith & Burrouws

Ever since the days of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, electric guitar/bass guitar/drums trios have primarily been vehicles for rock music. They are comparatively rare in jazz, and rarer in free improvised music. Those that do exist often blur the boundaries with rock, using its vocabulary but not its syntax or vice versa. Because of its rock legacy, the format itself attracts players who have affinities with rock…

Guitar maestro Josh Smith has always been inventive in his work, but he goes the extra mile on this one by delivering the feel of one of his live performances even though this CD was recorded within the confines of his new Flat V Studios…

Johnny Smith's best-known album, 1952's Moonlight in Vermont (also the title of his signature song), assured the guitarist a place in jazz history. While saxophone legend Stan Getz is a prominent guest on the record, and certainly threatens to steal the show on numerous occasions, the spotlight never strays too far from Smith, who easily entrances with his supremely laid-back style…

Curt Smith (born 24 June 1961) is an English singer, songwriter, musician and founding member of the pop rock band Tears for Fears. Smith was the initial lead singer and frontman for Tears for Fears, roles he has come to share with fellow member and childhood friend Roland Orzabal, after leaving the band for almost a decade due to Orzabal's increasing dominance over the band…

Originally proposed to ECM Records in 1979, the collaboration of trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Jack DeJohnette has finally found new life in America. Recorded last year in Bill Laswell's New Jersey studio (but without his heavy-handed production aesthetic), this unadorned acoustic session documents two of the world's most versatile and virtuosic improvisers working through a set of six new compositions written by Smith.

Nearly 30 years and nine albums in, Patti Smith shows no signs of giving up, or giving in, despite the fact she expected to be quietly doing her work instead of making rock & roll albums and playing in front of audiences. But then 9/11, Afghanistan, war in Iraq. Smith lives the vocation of a poet in an old-world sense of that word. Once, bards were the gadflies of society. Smith's Trampin' is a work that directly evolves from that tradition and fits squarely in her oeuvre. Trampin' is Smith's first outing for new label Columbia. She and her bandmates – Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Tony Shanahan, and Oliver Ray – walk the tightrope between in-your-face garage rock, poetic ballads, and raucous, improvisational pieces (à la "Radio Ethiopia")…

According to her brief liner notes, Patti Smith indulged the idea of a covers album, considering songs as far back as 1978 on the back pages of Jean Genet's Thief's Journal when she was still assembling her groundbreaking early catalog; it's evident she feels that covers have been part and parcel of her recording experience from the outset. Her debut, Horses, has her own apocalyptic version of Van Morrison's "Gloria" as well as a healthy portion of Chris Kenner's "Land of a Thousand Dances" inside "Land." On 1979's Wave she covered the Byrds "So You Want to Be (A Rock and Roll Star)," and scored with the single. Her intuitive reading of Bob Dylan's "Wicked Messenger" was a beautiful aspect of Gone Again in 1996, and she paid tribute to Allen Ginsberg by using one of his poems in "Spell," on 1997's Peace and Noise.

Dr Lonnie Smith - Rise Up! (2009)
Jazz/Funk | FLAC (tracks) | no CUE | LOG | 01:02:08 | 380 MB

Lonnie has been at the forefront of the jazz scene since he was named Top Organist by Downbeat Magazine in 1969. Recently, Lonnie was voted the Organ Keyboardist of the Year in 2003, 2004 and 2005 by the Jazz Journalist Association. Dr Lonnie Smith's latest release, RISE UP! features Peter Bernstein, guitar; Herlin Riley, drums; Donald Harrison, alto sax with guest musicians Matt Balitsaris, guitars, James Shipp, percussion and Jo Lawry, vocals.

...Matthew Smith (b. 1953) builds up his Symphony No. 8 in Four Movements (2003) from the raw sounds of six 1/16-size Suzuki violins, eight jaw harps, strings, and percussion and his Symphony No. 4 in Five Movements (2001) from a smaller assortment of stringed instruments. The bowed sounds and overlapping percussive tracks combine into distorted abstract patterns akin to electro-acoustic music, often with eerie, futuristic touches; Smith's use of open strings in fifths also anchors his music in the past by summoning memories of sixteenth century viols.