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Shed Grace
''Shed Grace'' is the second album by the collaborative free jazz trio Sticks and Stones, featuring saxophonist Matana Roberts, double bassist Josh Abrams, and drummer Chad Taylor. It was recorded during 2003, with no overdubs or edits, at Semaphore Recording in Chicago, Illinois, and was released in 2004 by the Thrill Jockey label. The music consists of original compositions by each player, plus three covers. Reception In a review for AllMusic, Sean Westergaard wrote: "This is a democratic band to be sure, but it is Matana Roberts' clear, pure tone on alto and clarinet, and unshakeable lyricism, that really stand out. With the recent passing of some of the AACM's old guard, it's good to see that the organization has some very talented young members to keep the flame lit. Well done." Peter Marsh of the ''BBC'' stated: "it's clear from the outset that this is a band with a lot of playing under their belts... Roberts is a fluid, elegant player who rejects the star soloist approac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matana Roberts
Matana Roberts (born 1975) is an American sound experimentalist, visual artist, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, composer and improviser based in New York City. They have previously been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and a member of the B.R.C. Black Rock Coalition. The works in their multichapter ''Coin Coin'' project have received wide acclaim: '' Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres'' was named in multiple ''JazzTimes'' 2011 Critics’ Lists; '' Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile'' was called "stunning" by both the ''Chicago Reader'' and ''SPIN''; and '' Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee'' was named among ''Rolling Stones Best Avant Albums of 2015. '' Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis'' has garnered their greatest accolades, and was included in '' Pitchfork's'' Best Experimental Albums, Bandcamp's Best Jazz Albums, and the top ten of the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll in 2019. Anthony Fantano of ''The Needle D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joshua Abrams (musician)
Joshua Abrams is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist who plays the double bass and guimbri. Career While living in Philadelphia in the late 1980s, Abrams was a member of Square Roots, a street music group that developed into The Roots. He moved to Evanston, Illinois in 1991, and played in Chicago house bands for several years before forming Town & Country in 1998 with Ben Vida, Liz Payne, and Jim Dorling. Abrams was the house bass player at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge and for several years he played a weekly club date with Tortoise's John Herndon and Jeff Parker. He was a member of Mike Reed's Loose Assembly and Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble. In 2003, he played bass on Godspeed You! Black Emperor's album '' Yanqui U.X.O.''. He has worked as a studio musician on recordings made in Chicago, such as Jandek's ''Chicago Wednesday;'' Bonnie "Prince" Billy's '' Beware'' and albums from Chicago musicians such as Joan of Arc, David Grubbs, and Sam Prekop. In th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chad Taylor (drummer)
Chad Taylor (born March 19, 1973) is an American drummer, percussionist, and composer. Taylor leads both the Chad Taylor Trio with Brian Settles and Neil Podgurski and Circle Down with Angelica Sanchez and Chris Lightcap. He is a founding member of the Chicago Underground along with Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek. In 2024, he was selected to lead the University of Pittsburgh's Jazz Studies Program while holding the university's William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies. Early life Taylor was born in Tempe, Arizona and was brought up in a musical household. His father, once an aspiring concert pianist, exposed his young son to Duke Ellington, Bach, Thelonious Monk, and Mozart. By age 8, Taylor started taking guitar lessons. At 10, he relocated with his mother and sister to Chicago where he continued his studies on guitar as well as starting snare drum lessons. In 1988 Taylor began studying jazz drumming and classical percussion in High School and took ensemble classes a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Jazz
Free jazz, or free form in the early to mid-1970s, is a style of avant-garde jazz or an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, Musical tone, tones, and chord changes. Musicians during this period believed that the bebop and modal jazz that had been played before them was too limiting, and became preoccupied with creating something new. The term "free jazz" was drawn from the 1960 Ornette Coleman recording ''Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation''. Europeans tend to favor the term "free improvisation". Others have used "modern jazz", "creative music", and "art music". The ambiguity of free jazz presents problems of definition. Although it is usually played by small groups or individuals, free jazz big band, big bands have existed. Although musicians and critics claim it is innovative and forward-looking, it draws on early styles of jazz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thrill Jockey
Thrill Jockey is an American independent record label established by former Atlantic Records A&R representative Bettina Richards and based in Chicago. History Richards started the label in 1992 with $35,000 of family and personal capital, while working at a Hoboken, New Jersey, record store, and ran the label from her apartment in New York City.Pareles, JonIt's Her Label and She'll Sign Who She Wants To New York Times September 23, 1998 accessdate = 2007-05-09 In 1995, she moved the label to Chicago, where "rent and taxes are considerably cheaper" according to Richards, and the independent label found some larger success. Thrill Jockey offers full-length streaming of every song on every release in its catalog. "I believe if people can listen to the albums, they tend to buy them," Richards said in a 2006 interview with ''Chicago Reader''. Artists who have recorded on the label include Double Dagger, Future Islands, Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Bummer, High Places, Trans Am, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vijay Iyer
Vijay Iyer (; born Vijay Raghunathan, October 26, 1971) is a composer, pianist, bandleader, producer, writer, and professor based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the ''DownBeat'' magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he was jointly appointed with tenure to Harvard University's departments of music and African American studies as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts. Early life and education Born in Albany and raised in Fairport, New York (a suburb of Rochester), he is the son of Indian immigrants to the United States. He received 15 years of Western classical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Musical ensemble, bands. Initiated in 1991, the database was first made available on the Internet in 1994. AllMusic is owned by RhythmOne. History AllMusic was launched as ''All-Music Guide'' by Michael Erlewine, a "compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar, and musician". He became interested in using computers for his astrological work in the mid-1970s and founded a software company, Matrix, in 1977. In the early 1990s, as compact discs (CDs) replaced LP record, LPs and cassette (format), cassettes as the dominant format for recorded music, Erlewine purchased what he thought was a CD of early recordings by Little Richard. After buying it, he discovered it was a "flaccid latter-day rehash". Frustrated with the labeling, he res ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Hull – On The Web
Tom Hull is an American music critic, web designer, and former software developer. Hull began writing criticism for ''The Village Voice'' in the mid 1970s under the mentorship of its music editor Robert Christgau, but left the field to pursue a career in software design and engineering during the 1980s and 1990s, which earned him the majority of his life's income. In the 2000s, he returned to music reviewing and wrote a jazz column for ''The Village Voice'' in the manner of Christgau's "Consumer Guide", alongside contributions to ''Seattle Weekly'', '' The New Rolling Stone Album Guide'', NPR Music, and the webzine ''Static Multimedia''. Hull's jazz-focused database and blog ''Tom Hull – on the Web'' hosts his reviews and information on albums he has surveyed, as well as writings on books, politics, and movies. It shares a functional, low-graphic design with Christgau's website, which Hull also created and maintains as its webmaster. Education Hull attended Wichita State ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exclaim!
''Exclaim!'' is a Canadian music and entertainment publisher based in Toronto, which features coverage of new music across all genres with a special focus on Canadian and emerging artists. The monthly ''Exclaim!'' print magazine publishes seven issues per year, distributing over 103,000 copies to over 2,600 locations across Canada. In addition to music, the magazine also covers film and comedy. History ''Exclaim!'' began as a discussion among campus and community radio programmers at Ryerson's CKLN-FM in 1991. It was started by then-CKLN programmer Ian Danzig, together with other programmers and Toronto musicians. The goal of the publication was to support great Canadian music that was otherwise going unheralded. The group worked through 1991 to produce their first issue in April 1992, with monthly issues being produced since. Ian Danzig has been the publisher of the magazine since its start. The magazine had no official name for its first year of operations, with only th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CMJ New Music Report
CMJ Holdings Corp. is a music events, online media company and a distributor of up and coming music CDs, originally founded in 1978, which ran a website, hosted an annual festival in New York City, and published two magazines, ''CMJ New Music Monthly'' and ''CMJ New Music Report''. The company folded around 2017, but it was bought by Amazing Radio in 2019, who announced plans to bring back the CMJ Music Marathon in New York along with other new live and live-streamed offerings. The letters CMJ originally stood for ''College Media Journal'' but was also often considered short for ''College Music Journal''. History and operations The company was started by Robert Haber in 1978 as the ''College Media Journal'', a bi-weekly trade magazine aimed at college radio programmers in Great Neck, New York. The first issue was published on March 1, 1979, and featured Elvis Costello on the cover. Staff would often describe these early issues as "a bunch of photocopies stapled together." A y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
All About Jazz
''All About Jazz'' is a website established by Michael Ricci in 1995. A volunteer staff publishes news, album reviews, articles, videos, and listings of concerts and other events having to do with jazz. Ricci maintains a related site, ''Jazz Near You'', about local concerts and events. The Jazz Journalists Association voted ''All About Jazz'' Best Website Covering Jazz for thirteen consecutive years between 2003 and 2015, when the category was retired. In 2015, Ricci said the site received a peak of 1.3 million readers per month in 2007. Another source said that the site has over 500,000 readers around the world. Ricci was born in Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ..., Pennsylvania, United States. He heard classical and jazz from his father's music coll ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk ( October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American Jazz piano, jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the Jazz standard, standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight (song), 'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser (composition), Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear (composition), Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington. Monk's compositions and improvisations feature consonance and dissonance, dissonances and angular melodic twists, often using flat ninths, flat fifths, unexpected chromatic notes together, low bass notes and stride, and fast whole tone scale, whole tone runs, combining a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations. Monk's distinct look included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He also had an idiosyncratic habit dur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
