Ben Bierman's Some Takes on the Blues

Most jazz lovers understand how this genre intersects with the blues, and how the two mesh perfectly together. Trumpeter Ben Bierman "takes" this a step further by playing on the very idea that jazz can expand the repertoire by playing on the typical 12-bar constructs. On Some Takes on the Blues, Bierman has a consider amount of fun inserting blues into a wide variety of musical genres--Latin jazz, ragtime, country and, of course, rock and roll. The trumpeter also plays with the traditional 12-bar structures by expanding into 32-bar blues ("Pretty Blues") and even 48-bar blues ("Let's Chill One"), but accomplishes all this in such an easy, laid back way, opting for simplicity whenever he can.

Bierman's a bit of an academic--he's an Associate Professor at the City University of New York, and he has written several essays and articles. He's even published a book called Listening to Jazz. That informs his approach to this music to a certain extent--Some Takes on the Blues is calm, controlled and thoughtful. But Bierman also balances that out with a fierce enthusiasm that only a true jazz musician can lay out, something that probably resulted from sharing the stage with everyone from Johnny Copeland to B. B. King to Stevie Ray Vaughn to Archie Shepp.

Let's take this meticulous structure on step further--Bierman is also a multi-instrumentalist. In addition to his remarkably clear trumpeting, he also plays guitar, piano and bass. While he has help from guitarist Andy Reiss and drummers Willie Martinez and Emanuel Bierman, you're hearing a lot of Bierman in this songs. When you hear him grab his old acoustic guitar and play his heart out on "Leo's Rag," or when he delivers a smooth solo piano performance on "Blues for WC," you can almost imagine him in his classroom, jumping from instrument to instrument, showing his students how it's done.

"The blues has been the one constant in my musical life--in many ways everything I have to say filters through it," Bierman explains on the liner notes. While music is often performed by those who "play how they feel," to paraphrase Donald Fagen, a cerebral approach to jazz is often equally rewarding, such as when performers such as Miles Davis experimented with modal jazz in the late "50s. Thoughtfulness and rigor can earth many new discoveries, and Ben Bierman seems like the kind of musician who will pursue this approach for the rest of his life.

Crashdown Butterfly's Near Life Experience

At one of my first magazine gigs, we had a running gag about my music reviews--especially since I was the only one who would regularly tackle hard rock and even metal. This was a gag I'd place at the end of the review, and sometimes it made it in and sometimes it didn't: "Well, they're not Tool...but no one is." A dozen years later I find myself surprised that I'm liking metal more and more, as long as it tries to stretch beyond the usual croaking and thunder-drumming. You know, like Tool does. With this Crashdown Butterfly EP, Near Life Experience, I'm tempted to say, "They're not Tool, but they're trying." That's not meant to be a diss, but here's a simple truth about this Seattle-based quartet. They like Tool, and it shows.

As I said before, singer-guitarist Ira Merrill doesn't croak like a frog, not even once. Like my dear buddy Maynard, Merrill can scream but he's not a screamer. He understands the importance of adding that honey to his delivery, as well as a subdued earnestness that brings just a little more intelligence to the pounding, forceful rhythms. Drummer Steve Gale isn't trying to be Danny Carey, long-limbed and almost deviant with time signatures, but he plays tight and fast and uses his big kit to be more expressive and to echo Merrill's commitment to music rather than seismic activity. Bassist Bob Lyman and second singer-guitarist David Miller round out the quartet into a nice tight machine, but this is where a second influence comes in hot.

When Merrill and Miller share the mic, you can hear it, spooky and sad at once--Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell. Man, these two come up with harmonies that have that same sense of despair, coupled with enough swagger to show the world that not all hard rock bands are created equally. Alice in Chains is a band I started to appreciate late in life, and that had something to do with the poignancy behind the band's history, that rock-bottom view where secrets are kept. I don't know if Merrill and Miller have seen the world through the same deeply smudged sunglasses, but they know what that pain sounds like, and they know that rock and roll isn't always a party.

Another easy comparison, considering the geography, is Soundgarden. In fact, Crashdown Butterfly dedicated a recent video to the memory of Chris Cornell, and that's when you start thinking about grunge and how all the singers have gone away and how some of us secretly wish for a reset so we can enjoy that time all over again. It was liberating, the meshing of two different spheres of rock, and perhaps that's why Crashdown Butterfly sounds so good and so tight. I've always had the feeling that the heyday of grunge was too brief, too fleeting, and while it changed the way we listen to both traditional forms of rock and metal it feels troubling that it all happened twenty years ago. Near Life Experience suggests a world where everyone held on and kept playing. I'll look forward to whatever follows this EP.

Skylark Quartet's Live in Tokyo

I have to tell you a story about the first time I listened to this CD. Just after it arrived in the mail, I stuck it in the CD player and pressed play and then walked into the next room so I could give it a cursory listen while I worked. Minutes before, I had started the dishwasher in the kitchen on the other side of the house. Suddenly I heard a huge crashing sound, like glass, and I thought maybe the dishwasher was busy destroying our drinking glasses. I stopped the dishwasher, opened the door and looked around and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then it occurred to me--was that crashing sound on the CD? I went back to the beginning and listened and there it was, a sudden crash, followed by a series of low mechanical sounds. Skylark Quartet? Live in Tokyo? Did someone stick the wrong CD in its case back at the publicist's office?

Suffice it to say that you haven't heard music like this before, much less jazz. I have to go back to the fact that this came from the Marginal Frequency record label. My first taste of Marginal Frequency was Alloys from Lori Goldston and Judith Hamann, which I reviewed just about a month ago. I called that recording "a full dissection of the cello and how it interacts with its human counterparts." Shortly after I received that release in the mail, I nearly deleted an email from recording engineer Al Jones simply because I wasn't sure if he was talking about music or not. Marginal Frequency takes such a novel, off-road approach to experimental music that I thought I was being offered a course in some long-forgotten science. Marginal Frequency is so intriguing and strange that I've talked to Al about writing an article for the summer issue of The Occasional. (Yes, we're still trying to get the Spring issue out as I write this.)

The Skylark Quartet consists of Orlando Lewis on clarinet, Franz-Ludwig Austenmeister on keyboards, Hayden Pennyfeather on bass and Roland Spindler, but you wouldn't know that from merely listening to these eleven tracks, all titled "Skylark," which of course is the classic song written by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. You won't know that by listening, either. These tracks, recorded live but without audience response, are deconstructions in the most dramatic sense, a supreme reduction in the sounds of each instrument until they resemble a series of random noises recorded in a haunted, vandalized factory. The clarinet is defined mostly by the sound of air passing through the reed, the keyboards sound like random beeps and blips from a computer and the bass is so austere that you'll forget it's there until you hear a single plucked note. The drums, of course, are equally spare, a minimal amount of percussion and no beat, other than the occasional smashing of more glass on that factory floor.

Does this sound too weird for you? It doesn't for me. I can dive into my LP and CD collection and pull out all sorts of weird recordings, ones I heard once and swore never to hear again, ones I put on when I want the party to break up and ones I actually truly love because they touch something rusty and dark in the corners of my soul. Live In Tokyo is fascinating, however, for a couple of reasons. First, the music slowly appears and evolves as you progress through the tracks, and you start to recognize the strains of "Skylark." Secondly, it's "permanently archived here, and available for a time in a limited pressing of 150 CDs from glass master," according to the Marginal Frequency website, which adds to the mystery. "Documentation of this rare performance is limited to the recorded audio, and what could be gleaned from observers Kanji Nakao, Sam Sfirri, Taku Unami, and Reiji Hattori."

In other words, I don't possess all of the puzzle pieces yet, but as I chat with Al Jones and prepare for an article about Marginal Frequency, I hope to solve that mystery.

Charming Disaster's Spells + Rituals

[As an aside, I'm looking at yet another giant pile of music to review--always a good thing--but if I publish one review in Part-Time Audiophile per day, I'll never catch up. So I'm going to put some reviews back up on the blog until I catch up!]

So, what does it take to make it in the music industry these days? What does it take to become a big pop/rock star? That's kind of a boring subject in 2019, I know, since the stuff that makes the Top 40 these days is mostly crap. I hate saying that, because every other old guy out there is saying the same thing, but I listen to albums like Charming Disaster's Spells + Rituals and I think, "If this had been released when I was young, back in the '70s and '80s, they'd be a big thing. They'd be noticed. They'd get plenty of airplay."

Charming Disaster is fronted by Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris, a duo who sing well, write great songs and imbue every track with imagination and skill. We used to call that talent. Between the two of them, they also play ukeleles, guitars, pianos, music boxes, ratchet sets, glass jars, canned air and plenty of percussion. The band also includes Don Godwin, who plays bass, drums, horns, backing vocals and more percussion, with Heather Cole playing violin, Jessie Kilguss playing harmonium and Patricia Santos playing the cello. That's the kind of line-up that can play almost anything you want--and they do, in a way. Charming Disaster balances smart pop songs against a confident stage presence, sort of a swagger, that suggest the two people out front are destined for great things.

Let me amend that--in a perfect world, everyone would be talking about that cool new group Charming Disaster. Do you know them? They're great!

I know, I'm waxing nostalgic here, lamenting the passing of the days where most of us kids were listening to 40 or 50 groups and singers at most. Pop music has exploded exponentially over the last thirty years, and there will never be another Beatles. I'm blathering on and on because I know there are people out there who also miss a music scene where talent, intelligence and originality rise to the top. These people will hear Charming Disaster's mixture of bluesy pop, a little ironic country, an encyclopedic knowledge of the rock and roll canon, and a couple of great voices that harmonize perfectly. In a way, Charming Disaster resembles Queen--is anyone else getting tired of that band's second wind?--and how these people are overflowing with musical ideas that simply defy categorization.

In a way, Spells + Rituals makes me just a little sad--mostly because it is so good and so unique and maybe they'll get noticed and maybe they won't. I think of every great indie band that seemed poised to be a huge thing due to an excellent album, and how they faded into obscurity and even I don't remember them anymore. So maybe this is a challenge to all of you who are reading this. Listen to this album, this band, and let me know if you think they're as good as I do. Maybe I've lost touch with popular music, but I don't care because I still feel like I know what's good and what isn't. This is good, and Charming Disaster should be a big thing...in a perfect world that may not exist anymore.

2L Recordings' Lux

My latest review for Part-Time Audiophile is this masterful recording from Norway's 2L Recordings, Lux, is in many ways one of the finest releases I've heard from this amazing record label. You can read it here.

Brian Jabas Smith's Tucson Salvage

My first book review ever--I think--is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This is Brian Jabas Smith's collection of his Tucson Salvage column for Tucson Weekly, and it's stunningly poignant and extremely well-written. You can read about it here.

Ruth Palmer's Johann Sebastian Bach on Berliner Meisterschallplatten Direct-to-Disc LP

My latest review, on the exquisite Berliner Meisterschallplatten direct-to-disc LP of violinist Ruth Palmer playing Bach is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

Meat Puppet's Dusty Notes

My latest review is now online at Part-Time Audiophile. This one is of the Meat Puppets' brand new album Dusty Notes, their first album with the original trio since 1996. You can read it here.

Wadada Leo Smith's Rosa Parks: Pure Love

My latest review, Wadada Leo Smith's Rosa Parks: Pure Love, is now available at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

Pikefruit's Sprig

My review of Pikefruit's Sprig is now up at the Vinyl Anachronist section at Part-Time Audiophile. This is the first review we're doing this way, so hopefully this transition will be smooth.

Just click here to read the review of this endearing electronica duo!

Coming Changes to The Vinyl Anachronist Blog

I'm experimenting with a change to this blog, which will probably happen over the next week.

As my duties increase as a contributing writer to Part-Time Audiophile and as Managing Editor of The Occasional, PTA's quarterly magazine, I'm making an effort to consolidate everything I write. That means I will be publishing all my music reviews in a special section on the PTA website. All this means is that my reviews will have a much bigger reach, while hopefully generating more web traffic for my paid gig. (This blog is, as I've mentioned, for glory and not for money.)

I will continue to use this blog as a way to direct readers to the articles on PTA and elsewhere, and perhaps to make a few goofy personal asides. But I came to this decision for several reasons. First, everyone's been asking me why I still do the blog when I obviously have a more lucrative venue for publication. Second, the musicians I cover deserve more exposure than I can provide on my modest little blog.

For you, the reader, it should only involve an extra click to read the reviews. Perhaps, over time, readers will know to go directly to the PTA site instead of going here first--if the Google numbers reflect this trend, this blog may go bye-bye. We'll see. But until then, I hope my dedicated blog readers follow me to my new home. Thanks!

Black Science's Worlds Within Worlds, Worlds Without End

"Can samplers be used to summon the 5th dimensional God entities that hide within us all?"

That's a pretty heady question, posed by those who have created an interactive musical experience far beyond the psychedelic. Black Science is a musical project from Thad McKraken, who is following up his 2012 psych-rock album An Echo Through the Eyes of Forever with this daunting, noisy and yet cosmic album that addresses such issues as "contacting star people from the heavens" through a combination of "chemical mind manipulation" and "bitchin' guitar noise." McKraken, who writes, performs and produces these seven spacey, reverb-soaked tracks, is suggesting an old idea with new gleaming surfaces--mixing hallucinogens with music to uncover the mysteries of the universe.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any mind-altering drugs for this review, so I have to tackle this straight. This is very much an album that is on the fringe, albeit with a fairly conventional foundation. McKraken does have a way with beats, melodies and song structures that suggests he has experience as a indie rock musician. Each track seems to possess a conventional center, one that's wrapped with sequencers that spiral out of control. This is a nightmarish world he presents, the antithesis of meditative, and there might be something to this idea of gobbling a few shrooms before attempting to navigate this sonic minefield. Then again, what am I missing? I remember hanging out with fans of the Grateful Dead back in the day, and more than one suggested I would "get it" if I only dropped some acid first. To this day, I still think the Dead are just okay because I didn't indulge.

On the other hand, is this real, or is it tongue-in-cheek? The one-sheet promo is downright hilarious, with McKraken's quotes about psilocybin-fueled listening parties where his consciousness "was suddenly invaded by an unbelievable cavalcade of mutating surrealist imagery filled with sea spiders, mollusks and various other shellfish." My favorite part is the end, where this question is posed: "Can you summon beings from the outer reaches just by getting high and wigging out to a psych record?" Answer: "Probably, dudes, dudettes and dudercopters." In my younger days I'd give it a shot, but my vices no longer include being a drugstore cowboy.

So I'm going to make a suggestion. If this sounds like something you might want to tackle, even though you kids should probably say no to drugs, then I won't mind if you get back to me and tell me how it went. At the same time, I have to be honest and admit I'm missing something in the translation. Is this music cool? Undoubtedly. I'm always in favor of expanding my horizons, but these days I'm a little too old for the chemical methods of doing so. But if there is some kind of stargate here, I'll color myself intrigued. Until then, I'll choose to enjoy the humorous aspects of this project--just in case I'm missing the joke and taking this all too seriously.

Autogramm's What R U Waiting 4?

A few months ago while I was on a road trip, I found an FM station that was on quite a rip playing so-called New Wave tunes from the early '80s. We're talking Tommy Tutone and the Plimsouls and Broken English and even The Knack, which was more of a '70s thing. You know the sound, however, straight-ahead rock bands that are peppier than the dinosaur rock that was petering out at the same time--it was more of a return to the concise three-minute pop song than anything else, and it changed our landscape in Southern California. What's funny was how all these songs sounded so different today, perhaps because it's been so long since I've heard any of them on the radio. With everything that's happened in the last thirty years, the New Wave had more in common with old-fashioned rock-and-roll than I remembered. But it was still mighty fun to listen while the signal held.

Autogramm understands that. This pop trio, based in Vancouver BC, bill themselves as "new wave revivalists." I've heard plenty of bands, even ones based in the Pacific Northwest, that capture many of those common new wave characteristics, but it's been a long time that I've heard something so fresh and so directly connected to the music that was happening during my college days. Autogramm's members--vocalist, keyboardist and guitarist Jiffy Marx, bassist and singer CC Voltage and drummer and singer The Silo--accomplish this by playing it straight. They're not interested in paying homage to an era as much as remembering the energy and excitement and optimism that was New Wave, and putting it down as if it was still 1983. That means there's no winking at the audience...there's only love and respect, presumably captured through a lot of research.

If I had to chose an attitude that defines this type of music, it's earnestness. The New Wave was about ditching that rock star mentality and all of its excesses, the twenty minute guitar solos and the decadent lifestyles and the hairdos. There was a nerdiness to it, but it was a nerdiness that redefined cool instead of opposing it. Autogramm brings this thinking to the foreground on songs such as "Cool Kids Radio" and "The Modern World" (which starts off with the line "I don't quite fit in"). That was one of the most appealing parts of new wave, that it seemed to turn the page on pop music by appealing to an entirely different sort of kid, one who was smart and got good grades and was tired of the scroungy, drugged-out youth scene of the '70s. I can remember the day I finally cut my shoulder-length hair and replaced my black t-shirts with rock band logos for nice button-down Oxford shirts and dress shoes--it was liberating, just like this music.

Where Autogramm gets it absolutely right is in its use of keyboards. Back then, synthesizers weren't necessarily lead instruments. They added texture and foundation, much like a bass, echoing the melody in a way that was a clear update from music of the past. Casios replaced Hammond B-3s and Rhodes electric piano, and everything became simpler and more streamlined. Jiffy's keyboards define Autogramm's sound without dominating it, and that's where you'll hear all their new wave influences shine through--everyone from Gary Numan to The Cars to even a little Devo. The fact that they do this without once being mawkish is a major event, and it's the best reason for checking out this wildly entertaining album.

James Fernando's The Lonely Sailor

Solo piano works aren't that rare in contemporary jazz, but pianist James Fernando has done something unusual with his debut solo album, The Lonely Sailor. Fernando is classically trained, as you can hear in this ambitious and sweeping work, but he aims to set down these eight instrumentals by "blending classical textures with jazz vocabulary, thus expanding the concept of jazz." Fernando feels that jazz pianists are usually limited to playing "chord changes in the left hand and melodies in the right hand," which limits the ability of the piano to cross into new frontiers of sound.

The result is a solo piano work about a sailor crossing the ocean, with subtle references to Debussy's La Mer in its rising and falling patterns, mixed with occasional melodic flourishes that conjure up a bit of Gershwin. Fernando takes this a step further by using an "electronically augmented piano," which means that the beautiful sound of his Steinway piano occasionally veers into more modern, synthesized textures. He achieves this by using contact microphones placed on the piano, and running it through computer software that he controls through a separate foot pedal. Sometimes it sounds as if Fernando is running everything through a Leslie speaker, which should be a familiar sound to most, but occasionally the distortion gets ramped up and takes on a life of its own. There are points where this becomes nightmarish and coincides, of course, with trouble on the open sea.

While this qualifies as an experimental piece, it wouldn't succeed as much without the beautiful, haunting melodies that emerge from the acoustic side of the recording. The idea of sailing across the ocean--"looking into unknown territory, looking for a better place"--is quite vivid, and it won't be difficult to imagine the waves, the weather and even the horizon. You can easily tell how those influences enter into each piece through the interface between old-fashioned melody and the completely novel way of mixing the acoustic and electronic halves of the compositions.

That makes The Lonely Sailor an unusually intriguing work, one that can appeal to both traditional ideas about beauty and a yearning to slip past the boundaries of both jazz and classical composition into a new realm of sound. The quality of that sound is equally beautiful and challenging--it's fascinating to hear the interaction of the piano, the way it excites the boundaries of the studio, and the nearly alien sound of the notes running through the software. I do love the sound of a prepared piano--one of the reasons why I'm so mesmerized by Arvo Part, for example--but Fernando has found a new way to do that, one that opens a multitude of doors for other composers.

Gary Dean Smith's Awakening

Jazz musicians are often fascinating people, and guitarist Gary Dean Smith's story is quite unique. He started off playing guitar in heavy metal bands and southern rock bands, which definitely requires a different touch on the strings than jazz. After finding a lucrative career in Los Angeles working with Joe Diorio, he gravitated toward jazz fusion styles and he currently leads a quintet named Xpansion of a Sum which features bassist Spencer Pyne, keyboardist Donald Young drummer Steve Fitzgerald and sax player Phil Reyes. All of this was nearly sabotaged by a recent surgery that impaired his vocal cords--he didn't know if he was ever going to speak again. So he grabbed his guitar and played and played and played, and after recovering his voice he set out to record this five-song EP, Awakening.

This album is a calling card, the kind you hand out when you're back and ready for action. Smith covers a lot of ground with these five songs, jumping from a clear-headed '80s R&B mode with the title song, which features a vivacious turn from vocalist Mer Sal of The Symbols, to a variety of styles, none too entrenched in the esoterica of fusion. The album even ends with satisfying organ jazz--"Lenny's Lament" is smooth and relaxed and swinging, and it's nearly lifted into straightforward rock and roll with Smith's blistering solos.

There's a clean quality to these five songs, and that's partially due to the production values of legendary bassist Jimmy Haslip (who also plays on "Lucky" with guests Jeff Lorber on keyboards and Gary Novak on drums). This is a sound that leaps out at you and is rife with the feeling that everyone is so happy to be there, playing, not long after Smith was truly worried about continuing. I suppose that word is joy, and it's tangible throughout. That '80s sound that's so vivid in the title track lessens somewhat over the course of Awakening, but there's a smoothness that follows through like a stray thread, one that demonstrates the sheer amount of experience and professionalism of Smith and his friends.

EPs can be strange--sometimes they are too brief, especially if the results are good. The listener is left wanting more, which most people think is a good thing. Awakenings, however, feels very complete. It feels like Smith set out to accomplish something, to jump back into the studio and play and create something that makes him happy. Perhaps that's why this album feels so upbeat.

2L Recordings' Ljos

Let's play a musical game using logic. I think that 2L Recordings in Norway puts out some of the best-sounding recordings available, something that regular readers of my blog will know all too well. I also think that 2L's choral recordings are my favorite within the scope of their vast catalog. And I think that Ljos, the latest voice recording, is their best yet.

Suffice it to say, this is one special recording.

I love 2L's choral releases because of what they are--a mass of voices recorded in a huge church somewhere in Scandinavia. You can hear all the details in these recordings that would register if you were actually there in person, the separation between the massed voice sound, the rise of individual voices, and the way those voices travel throughout the big room and bounce off all the walls, rafters and pews. Ljos is a tad different from those releases, mostly since this is performed by the Fauna Vokalkvintett. If you say that last word over and over, you'll realize that there are only five voices here, and that shifts the dynamics of the recording so that you'll focus on different things this time around.

First of all, the five singers--Christina Thingvold, Silje Worquenesh Ostby Kleiven, Gudrun Emilie Goffeng, Camilla Marie Bjork Andreassen and Beate Borli Lokken--are standing in a circle when they perform, with the microphones situated above their heads. This placement results in a recording where you can clearly see where each woman is standing in relation to the others. That means you'll be able to "see" the distances between the singers as well as their distance from you. If your sound system is up to it, the realism will be eerie.

Ljos celebrates the holidays, which means I got my hands on it a little too late, but that doesn't matter. This is wintry music, as is typical for 2L, and it's still very much winter outside. "Autumn and winter bring months of cold and darkness to the North. This is why we have always so warmly embraced the Christmas season in our part of the world." That sentiment fuels the beauty of these Norwegian Christmas songs, which are mostly unknown to me. They have wonderful titles such as "I Am So Glad Each Christmas Eve," "The Most Radiant Rose" and "The Mound-Goblin," and that helps to push the celebration past the New Year and out toward the spring. It's a warm, wonderful feeling.

If I had to pinpoint what makes this album so astonishing, it's the fact that this quintet is small enough so that you can hear the vocalizations in their naked wonder. This isn't an ocean of voices washing over you, but five humans with very tangible presences forming words with their lips and their tongues. It's a natural sound, just as natural as if these women were standing in front of you and talking to you. That said, the sound they make as a group is so joyous and beautiful that you begin to love the songs themselves, as unfamiliar as they may be, and perhaps one day these melodies will be a permanent fixture in your home during the holidays. That's what I'm thinking, anyway. Highly recommended, of course.

Kevin Quinn's Paramedic

Guitarist Kevin Quinn's debut album, Paramedic, starts off on a somber note--the album is dedicated to his father, who "selflessly gave his life to save others from the World Trade Center on 9/11/01." This is interesting for a variety of reasons, but particularly because it seems to suggest that there's an upcoming generation of artists--writers, musicians, visual artists and more--who have come of age in a post-9/11 world. How will this perspective characterize their works as a whole? Paramedic is certainly not a somber album since Quinn and his cohorts engage in a lively and forward brand of jazz, one that occasionally brushes up against rock thanks to a two-guitar line-up. But it will be interesting to see how 9/11 informs these artists over the next few decades.

There are plenty of underlying signs that show Quinn is an introspective performer. Look at the album cover and you'll see an intense young man focusing on his playing, and when you sit down and listen you'll hear that same focus, the feeling that every note is carefully chosen and to lose just one would diminish the result. After receiving a degree in Jazz Studies from SUNY New Paltz, he headed off to ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn to start his career as a sound engineer. You can imagine him hovering over the sound board in the studio with the same serious expression as he has on that album cover. He seems like a guy who has a lot on his mind, and you can hear it in the way he plays.

As I mentioned, Paramedic features two guitarists, which is unusual for jazz. Fellow guitarist Mark Dziuba was Quinn's teacher at SUNY, and he provides a "quirky but melodic style of playing" that serves as inspiration. The two guitarists play seamlessly, despite the different tones. Sax player Dave Savitsky provides much of the jazz seasoning, so to speak--it would be a very different sound without him, which you can hear for yourself whenever he steps back and takes five. The rhythm section of drummer Jeff Siegel and bassist Ira Coleman are part of the reason why this album moves as it does, which is a major accomplishment in the wake of two guitarists. Their playing is intricate, and they never fade into the background.

As you move through Paramedic, you'll start to hear it. You'll start to hear the city and its influences, that special New York City jazz vibe that comes from busy streets filled with people from all over the world. You'll hear it when Savitsky's sax takes off and heads over the rooftops, and you'll hear it when Siegel's playing starts to sound more Latin in origin. Most of all, you'll hear it in the guitars and the way they deliver that edge, that bustling feeling like anything can happen. Quinn seems like a Serious Young Man, and there's nothing wrong with that if you can pull it together and say something with enormous feeling and conviction. He's certainly on his way, and I'll look forward to the directions he takes in the future.

Lori Goldston & Judith Hamann's Alloys

One of my favorite musical pieces of all time is Arvo Part's Fratres. It's such an emotional and edgy piece, full of sadness yet so ethereal that it sounds like it was captured by some ancient, primitive recording device. Fratres can be performed with all types of ensembles--everything from a violin and piano duet to, and this is my favorite, a dozen cellos. That sound, of a gathering of cellos, is a wondrous thing, all full of odd textures and subtle shifts in melodies that may or may not have taken place in real time. Perhaps that's why I responded to Lori Goldston and Judith Hamann's new CD, Alloys, in such an immediate and positive way. We have just two cellos here, not a dozen, but the actual numbers are obscured, just like they are in Fratres, because so many different layers of sound emerge and intertwine.

Alloys is one of those mystery discs that came out of nowhere. While Goldston is a noted cellist--she's toured with Nirvana, for instance, and can be seen on that incredible MTV Unplugged performance--there are many untested variables here such as a new recording label, Marginal Frequency, which is aiming its recordings at both audiophiles and music lovers who embrace the avant-garde. (That's me.) Alan F. Jones, a sound engineer who is based in Tracyton, Washington, handles mixing, mastering, audio restoration and sound design for film projects, so there's plenty of attention to the sonic details deep within Alloys. Working under the aegis of Laminal Audio, Jones seems to be the impetus of this project--he's the one who originally contacted me to listen to this unusual and satisfying duet.

Alloys is, among many other things, a full dissection of the cello and how it interacts with its human counterparts. There's the sounds I usually discuss, the human cues that occur simply by standing next to a musical instrument and to resonate with it. Goldston and Hamann, who hails from Australia, are like most skilled players of string instruments in the way they manipulate the angle of the bow to produce a wider canon of sound--not unlike the embouchure of a trumpet player. That's why Fratres is so hypnotic and mystical. Sounds come from the stage and you wonder where they are coming from since that was no cello, or was it? In these two extended compositions, which are largely improvised despite their exacting structures, the two cellists dig deep into the wooden caverns of their instruments and extract strange sounds you might not have heard before. It's not noise, though--it's something deeper and more guttural. It's haunting.

The cello is one of my favorite musical instruments. It has a warm, lush and romantic sound most of the time but it can take you down dark alleyways and leave you there, wondering what's going to happen next. Alloys is more dependable than that--this is a raw, windswept landscape that isn't for the passive or fearful, but Goldston and Hamann are there, holding your hand, telling you to stick close. It's a trip worth taking, even if you keep looking back over your shoulder.

Nicky Barbato Project's Every Day Is a Bad Hair Day

I can tell guitarist Nicky Barbato put this album out just for the looks on people's faces, that look that says "which kind of music is this?" Nicky's vision cuts through surf rock, jazz, '70s prog rock, funk and rockabilly--and that's just in the first song and a half. I stand by the theory that the best kind of music is the music you get from borrowing diverse ideas from others, and then throwing it back as something that's purely your own. I'm not saying this new CD, Every Day Is a Bad Hair Day, is something you've never heard before, but it's going to an easier ride for you if you're already predisposed toward Zappa, Captain Beefheart or any rock band that colors outside of the lines and onto the table and maybe a little bit on the walls.

This album takes a couple of steps further into pure goodness, however, by Barbato's incredibly dry song intros, delivered with that same ironic flatness that makes me think again of Jonathan Richman--for the second time in the last couple of weeks. A typical one of these intros goes like this: "This next one is about dating an au pair. It's called 'Au Pair.'" Secondly, the mix between Barbato's original, evocative and often hilarious arrangements are juxtaposed against some intriguing cover choices..."Dancing Queen" and "Norwegian Wood." Barbato and his core band--drummer Tony Mason, sax player Jon Irabagon and bassist Chris Anderson--perform a balancing act between these two modes, especially when the originals are often odes to the everyday such as "Space Heater" and "50 Dollar Chevy."

This is the formula for Barbato's well-known live shows, which are known for their energy and unpredictability. That's the focus of this album, Barbato's debut. Producer Irabagon and Barbato made the decision to grow the ensemble out with some string arrangements, a choir and various keyboards. That could be a risky move, and hijack some of the intimacy a smaller ensemble would have delivered. Instead, we get a mood that is closer to a big live show from a big live band, perhaps even at the holidays. This extended musical support is much of the glue that hold these songs together as a whole, a necessary thing since the shifting of gears between the songs--and within the songs--can be dizzying.

Nicky Barbato Project has one major strength, besides Barbato's ability to really shred on guitar, and that's sounding like four talented musicians who decide to meet on the weekends and play whatever they want. I've mentioned the shifts in tone, and there are times during this album where you simply lose your place. You forget how the song began. You have no idea where the song is going. And right now, in the present, you have no idea where you're at within the song. That's an exciting place to be if you're up to it, and I am.

June Bisantz & Alex Nakhimovsky's Love's Tango

There's a happy little place in the music section of my brain where I really respond to tropical jazz, that smooth yet enormous sound that floats along with the tradewinds, that stuff made so popular in the '50s and '60s by people like Martin Denny and Henry Mancini. The perfect trigger for me, for this kind of connection, is Mancini's "Lujon," which I'd never heard until I watched the 2000 film Sexy Beast with the amazing Ben Kingsley. Or perhaps Annette Bening's character in American Beauty playing an old recording of "Bali Hai" during dinner also evokes that same sense of adventure, coupled with a supreme sense of being at rest while enjoying the spoils.

Singer June Bisantz and pianist Alex Nakhimovsky have toured together since 2005. They also love a lot of the same things--classical music, for instance, and Latin rhythms. The first few minutes of this new album is directed right at the heart of the world of tango, which shouldn't be a surprise, but you'll start to hear those same shifts in the music, toward Mancini and Denny, and that's when those emotional connections are made and it all sounds so lush and beautiful. Actually, it sounds Lush and Beautiful, because this is the type of music I think about when I hear those two words. Remember the old Calgon bubble bath commercials? Like that.

It's the classical training this duo shares--they both played violins as "their first instrument"--that really stretches out that gorgeous Tahitian sunset, the one that was filmed in Technicolor. Bisantz's voice is smooth, mellow and beckoning--by that last word I mean that she's calling out to you to pack your bags and come along. Nakhimovsky's piano is stoic and provides that stability for the soloists to shine--Norman Johnson's guitar, winning horn and string sections and Ed Fast's amazing support on all sorts of percussion. The perspective can shift depending on Bisantz--it moves in close when she's singing, and then it pulls away and spreads out when she steps back to enjoy the solos.

Love's Tango really sails when all decks are on hand, and I promise to stop using nautical terms after that. But that's the essence of this music, the big string sections, the sound of musical notes skipping along the tops of waves, the feeling of that warm wind across your face. That's not a bad thing in the middle of winter. I warned you that that a lot of tango was coming this way, and it was going to be "a thing" in 2019. Now I'm just wondering if it's a seasonal thing, a way to comfort jazz fans and get them through the winter in one piece. I see no problem with that; it's working.