While it would’ve been easy for jazz pianist Glauco Venier to record an album of solo piano instrumentals, his new album Miniatures (CD, digital) instead has him pairing his piano with percussive metal instruments for a collection of moody instrumentals that, while not perfect, is still rather intriguing.
The convergence of jazz and rock is nothing new. Miles Davis explored it on such albums as 1970’s Bitches Brew and 1971’s A Tribute To Jack Johnson, while such disparate rock groups as The Rolling Stones, King Crimson, and Metallica have all cited jazz or specific jazz musicians as being an inspiration for what they do. Then there’s the Hedvig Mollestad Trio, a Norwegian threesome comprised of guitarist Hedvid Mollestad, bassist Ellen Brekken bass, and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad whose music is equal parts hard rock and avant garde jazz, as evidenced by such albums as 2013’s All Of Them Witches, 2014 Enfant Terrible!, and their newest, Black Stabat Mater (CD, digital, vinyl). Though maybe it’s best if I let Mollestad explain it herself.
In jazz as in life, you’re sometimes only as good as the people you work with. John Coltrane, for instance, made some amazing music in his career, but did some of his best work with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones, as best heard on such classic albums as Ballads, Crescent, Afro Blue Impressions, First Meditations, Sun Ship, and, of course, A Love Supreme.
Though it shares the same name, was recorded a few months later during the same concert series, and is a collection jazz that runs from the atmospheric to the noisy, the second Live At Okuden album (CD, digital) by jazz maestros Mat Walerian and Matthew Shipp — on which they’re joined, this time around, by Hamid Drake under the name Jungle — is anything but a rerun. Well, except in how good it is.
With three people playing nearly a dozen different instruments, you might expect the jazzy album Intuit from multi-instrumentalist Kali Z Fasteau to be a bit overwhelming, aurally speaking. Especially since those instruments include a nai flute (which she describes as being an “oblique end-blown reed flute”), a mizmar (“a type of flagolet”), a djembe (a West African drum), a shaker (another African percussion instrument) and a aquasonic (“a metal bowed instrument with metal prongs”). But by having every song but two just be two people playing one instrument each, Fasteau keeps the music on Intuit rather simple but no less evocative.
Though there are some jazz musicians who can get the best out of anyone they play with — most notably Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon — many do their best work when they have a solid and consistent band behind them.
The latest example of this is Andando El Tiempo (CD, digital), the second and slightly better album from the trio of pianist Carla Bley, saxophonist Andy Sheppard, and bassist Steve Swallow.
While I may love jazz when it’s dark and moody, and find that it gets darker and moodier when you have fewer people playing it at the same time, solo piano collections have ironically never really grabbed me. But by adding some sound effects here are there, sometimes to great effect, Jon Balke’s Warp (CD, digital) has, for the most part, caught my attention. It didn’t keep it the whole time, but it certainly caught it.
When I first saw that the Anat Fort Trio’s new album Birdwatching (CD, digital) featured alto clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi alongside double bassist Gary Wang, drummer Roland Schneider, and Fort on piano, my first thought was that it would probably sound like the wonderfully evocative albums Currents and Post Scriptum by the similarly configured Wolfert Brederode Quartet. And while it does at times, the overall tone of Birdwatching actually sets this album apart.
In my career, I’ve interviewed a lot of interesting musicians and actors. But since many of the magazines and websites that originally published those stories aren’t around anymore, I’ve decided to pull some of the more interesting interviews out of my archive.
The following interview with Marilyn Manson took place in August of 1996 at a house he had rented in New Orleans while recording Antichrist Superstar. Parts of the interview were used in a piece about him I wrote for the music magazine huH.