Wildcard - Joe Goehle

Rubblebucket – Omega La La

This album is the first to ever make me get up and dance at my computer as I listened to it from front to back. As I continue listening, I admire the hypnotizing vocal harmonies that seem to float over infectious ostinatos and “poppy” guitar riffs. Listening further, notice the many layers that this band creates, through varying textures, dynamics, and timbres. The music just feels good. The whole album feels like a party or a live show -something incredibly difficult to do in a studio session. Despite overdubs of electronic sounds and effects, the music sounds raw and spontaneous. I find myself asking these questions: Can I create improvised music that feels this good? Can I improvise music that makes me want to dance like this? Where is the line between arrangement and improvisation and how to I blur it?

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman 

If I could play my bass like Johnny sings these songs, I would die a happy man. I’m currently transcribing his singing on this record purely for tone quality. Working on pulling a beautiful sound out of my instrument with the bow and fingers is something that I have never focused on in so much detail. It is a truly eye-opening experience. Check out the vocal slide at 4:34 on the track “My One and Only Love.” Like Butta’

Blood Sugar Sex Magik – The Red Hot Chili Peppers

I keep returning to this album all the time. I have been listening it since I was 13 years old and it is one that I continue to check out almost daily. To me, this is the peak of the RHCP and sets the standard for all genres that incorporate multiple musical styles. You can tell that they draw from a multitude of musical inspirations and create something that is unique, something that is their own. At first I was really digging the bass lines of the album, but the more that I listen the more I identify with the variety of formal structures that are fused with seemingly non-sensical musical ideas and lyrics. It seems so random, yet is planned in a way that brings order to the chaos. When I improvise, I think about this album frequently. I have tried to compose songs that capture the spirit of the band and I am still searching. There is a certain energy that I think is lacking in modern “improvised music” – whatever that term may mean. I think it may be more about letting go of the music and letting it breath.

November – John Abercrombie

There are an amazing amount of melodies on this album. The band interacts with one another and creates music that is always subservient to the entire group sound. Each line flows through one another, making logical sense with what was played before and anticipating what comes next. An ebb and flow is created through keen listening and awareness of where the music is headed. All of the compositions are beautiful and even a tune like Marc Johnson’s “Right Brain Patrol,” though technical in nature, has a feeling of simplicity and lyricism that I think is the key to all great music. Something that I have been working on lately is trying to hear the band’s sound as one sound while playing. It is extremely challenging. I feel a certain musical “schizophrenia” as I jump around listening to certain sounds and trying to fit my part in. I find that I can relax if I let my hands just “do” what they need to do. Again, the theme of letting the music breath returns in this recording. Listening to this album has helped me take a step back and listen to a model of what I would like to achieve in my own playing. 

Joe Goehle is a NY based bassist and composer who is currently performing with a number of ensembles in both New York City and upstate New York. His music combines freely improvised music with traditional structures from many styles of music. He is an avid supporter of music education and strives to incorporate relevant musical experiences into the lives of his students.

Podcast 26 - ZhirtZ n ZkinZ

For the first time ever, I interviewed an entire band. At least, three fourths of a band. I sat down with Kenny Warren, Patrick Breiner, and Will McEvoy of ZhirtZ n ZkinZ. They recently released their debut album on Sulde Records. We drank some beer and got real. We talked about recording the album in Maine, why it took two years to release, and playing music for the people. Also, Kenny tells the Maine joke.

If you like what you hear, please Subscribe in iTunes and give us feedback. That will help us out tremendously. Also, feel free to email me with any suggestions or questions. Thank you for listening!

Podcast 25 - Mike McGinnis

(Photo by Michael Weintrob)

For our 25th episode, I'm happy to feature Mike McGinnis. Mike is primarily known as a clarinetist nowadays although he also sounds great on the saxophone. We talk about what led him to focus on the clarinet, the tradition of being an anti-traditionalist, and being a silo enthusiast. We also talk about his two most recent releases. The first is called Road*Trip which features Bill Smith’s great piece titled "Concerto for Clarinet and Combo” and a suite of his own. The second is called The Ängsudden Song Cycle which is a collaboration with poet and artist MuKha that features vocalist Kyoko Kitamura and an all wooden ensemble.

If you like what you hear, please Subscribe in iTunes and give us feedback. That will help us out tremendously. Also, feel free to email me with any suggestions or questions. Thank you for listening!

Office Playlist - tUnE-yArDs - Nikki Nack

Wildcard - Ben Russell

Ben Russell, violinist, vocalist and songwriter, can be seen performing with several NYC ensembles, hiking unfamiliar trails in upstate NY, and drinking unique tequilas in numerous Northeast watering holes. In coming up with this list, I found that I kept thinking of musicians in pairs or groups. Like the old timey, scratchy, rough around the edges music of both Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson. Man, I love how they tell a good story. Or the  meditative and/or cerebral music of Mitsuko Uchida's Mozart, Henry Cowell playing his own music, or Keith Jarrett's improv concerts in Japan (Sun Bear). I like those in a quiet space. I'm fascinated by how Bruce Molsky and Tim Eriksen meld their voice with their violin, but each with his own style. I wouldn't be writing music if it wasn't for those guys. And lastly, I'm often listening to songwriters over and over again. Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, and the Beach Boys are on the top of my list right now...

Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson

Mitsuko Uchida's Mozart

Henry Cowell

Keith Jarret - Sun Bear Concerts

Bruce Molsky

Tim Eriksen

Randy Newman

Leonard Cohen

Beach Boys - Wild Honey

Podcast 24 - Matt Otto

There is a good chance that Matt Otto is one of the best saxophonists that you have never heard. He grew up in California but has since lived in Japan, Indiana, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and now Kansas City. We talk about his aunt being a rodie for Don Cherry, performing acid jazz in Japan, playing free jazz with Rashid Bakr, and what it feels like to own a house. Matt’s story is strange and incredibly interesting and his music is incredible. Please check this episode out!

If you like what you hear, please Subscribe in iTunes and give us feedback. That will help us out tremendously. Also, feel free to email me with any suggestions or questions. Thank you for listening!

Office Playlist - Paul Bley - Turns

Wildcard - Elsa Nilsson

Critters Buggin - Guest

Ah the joys of instrumental grunge! Its loud, there're effects on everything, crazy spoken loops and unison ethnic percussion sections, but technically its jazz. Well, there are saxophone solos. Joyful, raucous and unpredictable ones, but still. Critters Buggin's records are full of grooves that feel like walking through swamps because there is just so much tension on the time. Sonically it goes from the very organic to the very affected and electronic without being gimmicky. Its very hard for me to pick a favorite recording of theirs, but "Guest" was the first one I heard and it opened my eyes to the idea that the only confines placed on any instrument are in our minds. Just because an instrument is traditionally considered to be one thing doesn't mean you can't break that mold. Critters broke many concepts I thought of as molds, and every time I hear it I fall deeper in love with improvised music. I have listened to this record at least twice a month for the last 6 years. Comfort food for my ears!

Ron Miles - Woman’s Day

Sometimes you come across a record that is just sincere. When you feel like you are having a deep personal conversation with the musicians, and occasionally hearing things you weren't supposed to. It's intimate, and it’s a record you listen to alone. This is that record for me. I only listen to it when I'm alone, and I love everything about it. I kind of don't want to write specifics because I feel I would deprive you of the joy of discovering it on your own. I will tell you that I love the sounds, the amazingly strong but delicate compositions (like its a salt crystal that will break if I touch it but then punches me in the face with a hidden arm), the fluid and thoughtful improvisation and the seamless group dynamic and communication. That's vague enough right? Now you really want to hear it. Go listen to it. Or "Laughing Barrel". Both amazing records. I can wait.

Masada - The Circle Maker - Issachar

More comfort food records. I listen to this almost weekly as well. More instruments doing things I didn't necessarily attribute to them until I heard this. This always makes me happy. I like to be sonically surprised. One thing I love about these records is that even when they go out (and they do) the ground and the groove remains. This free playing within the framework of a groove is one of my favorite things. I love the edgy quality to the tone and the general "don't give a damn" attitude it conveys to me, even on the softer songs. Somehow, these records always make me want to dance. And like the crazy agro arms spinning kind of dance (before you ask, no you can't see it). But sometimes that's what you need to stay sane.

Some more records I listen to OFTEN:

Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsies Soundgarden - Live on I5 Tom Waits - Rain Dogs Freddy Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Yusef Lateef - Gettin it together Jamie Baum - Solace Den Fule - Lugomleik

Elsa Nilsson's band is a tour de force, mixing personality and tradition to take the listener on a journey through sounds from Brazil, Cuba, Turkey, and the Baltic countries, all through the lens of Jazz and Swedish Traditional music. Nilsson has built a solid career and reputation upon her belief that all folk music (including jazz) has a common thread, and that by weaving those threads together, a deeper, more layered understanding among varying cultures can be reached.

Podcast 23 - Ben Allison

Photo: Greg Aiello

The show this week features the great bassist and composer Ben Allison. He recently released a record on his own for the first time titled The Stars Look Very Different Today. We talk about a lot of interesting things including how Dungeons and Dragons relates to jazz music, Dick Cheney, and why he streams his music on his own website instead of Spotify. Also, we get his candid take on why Star Trek is better than Star Wars.

If you like what you hear, please Subscribe in iTunes and give us feedback. That will help us out tremendously. Also, feel free to email me with any suggestions or questions. Thank you for listening!

Wildcard - Michaël Attias

Jimmy Lyons - The Box Set

"As if a magic lantern had thrown the nerves in patterns on a screen"... (Eliot)

Every performance here is evidence of a direct physiological connection between nerve thought tongue fingers air – of a heart big enough to appear heartless – of a mind-spirit-body cluster alive, fierce, generous – pure alto – but also tough merciless dialectical, one becoming two dividing and disassociating like a motherfucker, tongue-scalpel articulating bone muscle and ligament of line. True trance-music, to be actually effective (not decorative, not a postcard of a journey nobody has actually made) is achieved through such specificities...

Haïm Botbol

I had two early childhoods before coming to America: one, episodic, among the Moroccan diaspora of my mother's family in the north of Israel; and the other in Paris, as exiled secret Jews, the May 68 revolution still in the air of the streets ten years later before the lid we live under came down.

These were among the first sounds to cradle me, voices in my grandmother's living room, Nahariya, mint tea, coffee and the early morning laughter of my six aunts. The pervasive languages were Judeo-Moroccan Arabic, Hebrew, French, and through the marriages of two of my aunts, Italian and American (Chicago) English. Haïm Botbol was born into a family of musicians in Fez. L'Orchestre Botbol was big in the cabarets of Casablanca and Marrakech that my father frequented in the 50's and is now a symbol of the once-possible intertwining of Arabic, Jewish, and Andalousian tradition. There's even some Gnawa thrown in there (hear the clapping in the end). A gone world. He was a rock star.

Robert Johnson - King of the Delta Blues Singers

Rimbaud of the blues, he cultivated schizophrenia as a high form of polyphony, I becoming Other, the self poised and grooving at the border of its own disintegration: each musical strand, guitar string, attack, level of speech, is its own entity, a separate voice – other solo guitarist/singers have mastered the technical challenge of sounding like three or four people playing at once, but this is something else  in the order of Being, he went much further, too far, to where the extreme individuation of each part makes it sound as if it were produced by a different person, psyche, body. It's symptomatic of these mysteries that people argue about the correct speed of the recordings, claiming his voice was higher or lower (mostly), wanting him to be One when he was so Many. 

Robert Johnson, Casals playing Bach, Schnabel the Beethoven sonatas, Charlie Parker, Coltrane …  explorers of the multiple voices inhabiting a voice, tearing down its walls, opening big holes of anti-matter (another name for the devil in Robert Johnson's songs?) in the middle of a phrase, of a thought, driving a stake through its heart, genius at the peril of madness. In our day of careerist self-promoting human networking machines no thicker than a profile, it's time to bring some of these old notions back, I call for a new Romanticism to explode the gridworld. Hear the gestures his voice makes, the ghosts in the guitar. Pure genius.

Charlie Parker - "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" from Bird at St. Nick's

Here's Bird tearing other holes in the fabric, offering another idea of polyphony as a single line folding in on itself, splitting into two, three registers, then reconnecting at the speed of genius, sweet and brutal and lyrical beyond belief. Each motive generates architecture in time but also serves as a wedge to deconstruct the barline, topple it over the abyss. Hear that first bridge of the first chorus! Danger: is he stuck? Abyssal negation forthwith negated by the heartwrenching leap into the top of the last A, alto splayed across registers, crucified by a chord. You have to be willing to die right Now to play a solo like this. Anything else is the mediocrity of resignation, obedience, or just the jive of sham knowing … and at the end that amazing clusterfuck cadence of Miles and Bird finishing the chorus in amazing compression leaving a big hole of time before the insolence of another Country Garden tag.

DJ Rashad - Only One from Double Cup

“Girl you know there's nothing is real”. Gridworld warped by the tugging of two's and three's in opposite directions of time.  Under every sound is a kernel of word and in a every word a rhythmic energy pullings its syllables apart, splitting atomic sense. This is the music of initiates to the same mysteries of rhythm which yield Bata, Gnawa music, Andrew Hill. A multidirectional multimorph of time, all feel, nothing at a metric right angle to the other. Exquisite layerings of THROB against PROD, JAB against JAM, tiny metal biting teeth of the accelerated hihat, dark bass of the Mouth Hole swallowing every sound in its path.

There's a torque in the machine, proliferating inflections in the meter, twist the neck of a robot long enough it might begin to speak a hybrid of human language, dream a human dream, yield sounds of motor, engine, pixel - but also gristle, rain, volcano, wind. Time and timbre in the hands of DJ Rashad were infinitely malleable. Such a deep and impeccable understanding of the properties and powers of his materials, mixes tested directly on the bodies of dancers in the fire of Footwork battles, himself once a soldier-dancer of Chicago visionary warfare trance music. In the last few albums, the emotional coloring deepened with a more insistent note of loss, guilt, desire dissolved in currents of electronic sound, human-ness shed of its burden of too heavy solid flesh. DJ Rashad died April 26 of this year, laid to rest. Let It Go.

 A magnetic presence on the New York scene since the mid-nineties, saxophonist/composer/improvisor Michaël Attias was born in Israel, spent his childhood in Paris and his adolescence in the American Midwest. Exposing himself to a wide range of life and musical situations, he has crafted a supple, passionate and uncompromising language in which to render the diversity of his imagination and commitments.