Tag Archives: musically speaking

Guitarist Joshua Breakstone: Storyteller

Breakstone CoverJoshua Breakstone
With the Wind and the Rain (Capri Records)
A Review

Fans of old-school jazz guitar will welcome the arrival of the latest recording from Joshua Breakstone, who doesn’t just play jazz, but celebrates it in his playing. On his latest
venture, With the Wind and the Rain,
Breakstone and his longtime mates—bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer Eliot Zigmund—invite cellist Mike Richmond to join in on four of the nine tracks.

Breakstone loves the sound of the cello, which, he tells me, found its way into the jazz lexicon in the ’50s and ’60s, when a number of premier jazz bassists began featuring the instrument on recordings. As he says in his liner notes, the possibilities of the cello-augmented trio really
flowered once he began hearing the quartet as a string section with percussion, rather than as a trio with added cello. The strings play as a section on the head of three of the four tracks with cello, and as Breakstone said in phone conversation, this sort of arrangement “makes you
attend to the music much more closely, and really brings out accents of the whole sound of the strings.”

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Clarinetist Doug Wieselman Transcribes Water

Wieselman coverDoug Wieselman, From Water (88 Records)
A Review

Last June, thanks to the kindness of the Kites, friends of ours in Portland, Oregon, Melissa and I spent a couple of nights with the Kite family in a house perched over the Pacific Ocean. Our 180º view of the watery expanse was bracketed by Cape Meares to the north and cliffs to the south, and haystacks
promenaded out into the water just below us. As expected, it was visually stunning, but what was unexpected—forgotten in the many years since we had sojourned at the water’s edge—was the sound. Constant yet ever-changing; thunderous but nuanced, with echoes bouncing off the land and the clouds, and with grace notes from wind and rain, the sound was absolutely mesmerizing and transformative. This coastal son et lumière gave me simultaneously the contradictory notions of just how vast is the ocean, and just how tiny the planet.

So when, a few months later, I got word of clarinetist/composer Doug Wieselman’s album, From Water, I was more than intrigued. All of the tunes on this 10-track album—with the exception of John Lennon’s “Julia”—are originals that were primarily made from melodies Wieselman heard in bodies of water. Add that he’s worked with some of my favorite musicians—Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, and Jenny Scheinman, among others—and I was ready to listen.

This guy has got a serious pair of ears and absolute command of his instrument.

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Omar Sosa Finds Light in Shadow

Omar Sosa, Senses (Otá Records)
A Review

Senses CoverDon’t think of Omar Sosa as a Cuban pianist/composer. Think of him, instead, as a shaman for whom music is a spiritual
instrument for opening a window onto the other world, enlarging our capacity for
compassion and joy, celebrating the life force.

On Senses, which finds him solo at the piano, he uses it to heal himself in an emotionally difficult period and to apply balm to any chafed spirit who listens.

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Mary Halvorson Quintet: Wow.

Sometimes you just know—and quickly, too.

The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix was on a Friday afternoon in 1967. I was hanging with my friend Eric Walsh at his parents’ house after school when he put on Are You Experienced. It was only a few seconds into “Purple Haze” that, eyes wide and forearm hairs standing involuntarily erect, I knew I had never heard anything like it before and wanted to hear more. It filled a void whose existence I hadn’t even suspected.

MaryHalvorson.300dpi#6C0886Jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson had a life-
changing experience when she first heard Hendrix at the tender age of 11 or so. She abandoned the violin she’d been sawing away at for a few years, grabbed herself a black-and-white Stratocaster and some tablature books, and started on her quest to play like Jimi Hendrix.

The circle came full last week when I slid Halvorson’s Bending Bridges CD (Firehouse 12 Records, 2012) into the tray and hit Play. I knew in just a few seconds that I was hearing something previously unheard. There was something in the angle of the melodic lines, the way the horn lines rubbed against each other, something in the gloriously doleful feel that said: “New voice. Pay attention.”

She’s bringing her quintet—with Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet), Jon Irabagon (alto saxophone), John Hébert (bass), and Ches Smith (drums)—to the Outpost this Thursday, and I’ll be wearing bells. Continue reading →

Another Poet in Nueva York

Alexis Cuadrado, A Lorca Soundscape (Sunnyside)
A Review

Lorca_CoverBassist, composer, and Barcelona native
Alexis Cuadrado may be the most lyrical cat on the New York scene these days. One thing’s certain: his latest release, A Lorca Soundscape, is the evocative musical analogue to the poetical phantasms of Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, a dark and
magical record of the poet’s experience in
Depression Era New York City.

For Cuadrado, the parallels between that time, the early 1930s, and our own are clear and disturbing, as this collection of
compositions makes absolutely clear. He calls the pieces a protest against the “inequality, racism, and injustice” that endure as part of our “daily narrative” 80 years after Lorca’s work was published. We could also call them an eloquently lyrical portrait of a world out of balance, and a stunning artistic achievement. Given the personnel on the album—Cuadrado (bass, percussion, background vocals), Claudia Acuña (voice), Miguel Zenón (alto sax), Dan Tepfer (piano), Mark Ferber (drums), and Gilmar Gomes (percussion)—the high level of artistry on the album should come as no surprise at all.

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