UMassDartmouthVocalJazzEnsembleplans a freeconcert on Monday, May 9
DARTMOUTH — The UMass Dartmouth Vocal Jazz Ensemble Concert is planned for Monday, May 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Recital Hall (Room 153) of the UMD College of Visual and Performing Arts Building, 285 Old Westport Road, Dartmouth. Read more on The Standard-Times
For Buffet fans, concert is an all day affair
Margaritaville was in full swing today, as Jimmy Buffet fans began tailgating at 10 a.m. in anticipation of his 8 p.m. concert at Cynthia Mitchell Woods Pavilion Read more on The Woodlands Villager
DPU student conductors, high school musicians featured in today’s concert
The DePauw University Band will present its “Student Conductors Concert” at 7:30 p.m. today in Kresge Auditorium of the Center for Performing Arts. Six DPU School of Musicstudents will guest conduct… Read more on Greencastle Banner-Graphic
PERFORMANCE/TOUR: VibratoJazzGrill
February 2011 Jazz at Vibrato’s One of Los Angeles’ most exciting new restaurants, Vibrato Grill Jazz … etc. is also the city’s premiere jazz space. Its warm and elegant interior embraces guests with stunning visuals, world-class music and sound design, and the absolute best in contemporary American cuisine. Conceived by 7X GRAMMY-winning music icon Herb Alpert, Vibrato brings these elements … Read more on All About Jazz
Youth Orchestra Gets Second Chance At Australian Tour
A youth orchestra based on Chicago’s Northwest Side was all set last week to go on its first-ever concert tour abroad. Then the blizzard of 2011 hit, and they never left O’Hare. Read more on CBS Chicago
A’s all around for the CenturyCollegeJazzEnsemble
The group continues to earn high honors in the community for its quality music and for the nationally and internationally known acts it brings to the Century College Jazz Festival each January. Read more on Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
Mos Def reschedules for February 1 show at Powerstation
Hip hop artist Mos Def will be hitting New Zealand shores in his rescheduled show. Read more on TVNZ
TRENDS: JazzToday
Poet and critic, Whitney Balliet reminds us that with the advent of the tape recorder and the long-playing record, jazz, which is the most evanescent of modern music, becomes a permanent part of our musical library. A native of New York now in his twenty-eighth year, Mr. Balliett joined the editorial staff of The New Yorker shortly after his graduation from Cornell… Read more on All About Jazz
Underwood Top Winner At AmericanCountry Awards
When it comes to Las Vegas, Carrie Underwood is a sure bet. Underwood won her second country music artist of the year award of 2010 in Sin City on Monday night. Read more on CBS 2 Los Angeles
Echoes of greatness in Muse spectacle
MUSIC: Muse. Brisbane Entertainment Centre, December 5. Read more on The Australian
Concert of folk songs and xylophones caps off two-week summer music program in Jersey City
Amy Sara Clark/The Jersey JournalStudents play xylophones in a concert at Lincoln Park capping off the first summer of the Jersey City Chorus and Summer Music program. Nineteen children sang traditional folk songs, performed a step dance, and played xylophones… Read more on The Jersey Journal
Michael Franti & Spearhead announced in November last year that they would be opening for the 2010 John Mayer “Battle Studies Tour” in the spring. It was difficult to picture Mayer, known mostly for his colorful love life rather than his guitar compositions, and Franti, known for his fights against political, religious and racial wars, on the same stage.
Franti’s practicing what he preaches. He is closely involved with CARE, an organization trying to educate mainly women and girls in developing countries in quest against poverty. He travels all around the world on CARE missions. One of the last places he visited was East Timor.
A few years ago Michael Franti & Spearhead released their Yell Fire! album, inspired by Franti’s trip to the Middle East war zones including Israel, Baghdad, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip.
But despite the mixed reactions after the announcement of the collaboration, Michael Franti was confident that his music is compatible with Mayer’s and that Michael Franti & Spearhead would connect to Mayer’s audience.
Franti, in whose veins flow all kinds of blood, is equally open to people of all ages, genders or races. And according to the positive reactions of fans after the first concerts of the Battle Studies Tour, he was right. The light, positive music blending hip hop with funk, reggae, jazz, folk, and rock, turned out to be a perfectly matching opening act for John Mayer’s “Battle Studies.”
Michael Franti & Spearhead gained mainstream recognition last year with the hit single “Say Hey (I Love You)” from their “All Rebel Rockers” album. “Say Hey (I Love You)” turned out to be a gold mine and became double platinum with more than 2 million sold copies sold.
“All Rebel Rockers” was recorded mainly in Jamaica. Franti finds inspiration not only in Jamaica but also in classical albums like Stevie Wonder’s Songs In the Key of Life. But what really makes their sound so unique is the live performance of the band. Something that draws Michael Franti to reggae are the vibes that the band creates when they play together.
Right now Michael Franti & Spearhead are working on their next album.
Most heavymetal bands write songs and albums that are best experienced from inside the mosh pit whilst jumping about and throwing other concert-goers into each other. Tool are an exception. Tool’s music is best experienced from a reclined and relaxed position in a nice comfy chair, with your eyes closed, either through good headphones or good stereo loudspeakers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not saying Tool aren’t a good liveband, in fact in the 3 times I’ve seen them, their music has sounded every bit as much at home through the walls of amplifiers and speakers typical of the genre as that of their peers, however fidelity is the differentiator, and while Tool’s live performances have all the energy you would expect of a modern metal band, they also have a real feel for organic dynamics akin to a pinkfloydesque sense of refrain. And this certainly isn’t the only similarity that Tool have to the legendary prog rockers.
Blasphemy? How can one compare a METAL band with legends like Pink Floyd? Surely the author of this article is some deluded teenager with a Tool complex?
Well, the quick answer is that the band make it very easy. Their musical ability, artistic integrity, philosophical and experimental extra-curricular tendencies and clear understanding of classical and post-classical composition methods all shine through the “heavy metal” facade, on their studio albums and in live situations alike.
Their use of compound time signatures goes way beyond the quirkyness usually associated with metal bands that occasionally stray from 4/4, and in fact with Tool, you get the feeling that the band have managed to completely cast aside “the shackles of the four” and have ascended to a higher musical plane of existence where all time signatures are equal in relevance and any portions of the music that resemble a more traditional contemporary rhythm are purely coincidental.
But the timing within the music isn’t the only difference between Tool and their more traditional heavy metal peers. Their use of their instruments to produce new and interesting sounds gives the impression that Tool are the Madagascar of the genre – cut off from their neighbours for millennia by continental drift, their music evolving separately from that of their peers into unique new species of songs, sounds and techniques, the likes of which you just don’t hear anywhere else.
Somehow, using the same instruments and amplifiers as everyone else, they manage to create new and interesting sounds and soundscapes that can deceive an uninformed listener into thinking they’re listening to a different instrument entirely – bass parts that sound like they could be guitar, guitar parts that sound like they’re a synth, drum parts that sound like they’re being played by 3 or 4 drummers rather than one, and perhaps most profoundly, vocals which are used as an instrument, equal to all of the others, as opposed to the music being a backing for a central vocal theme, like we are generally used to hearing in popular contemporary music.
Lateralus, Tool’s third studio album (of four so far, although we are told they are to start working on a fifth in 2009) has, in my opinion, been Tool’s pinnacle work to date.
On their debut album, Undertow (1993), Tool were still finding their feet. There were stirrings of a difference to their peers, although the songs more closely resembled “song format” than the progressive nature of their later works.
With their follow-up album, Aenima (1996), The metamorphosis was in full flow. Instead of a collection of songs, Tool had produced an album – a real album – a progressive piece of work that took the listener on a journey from beginning to end. The guitar work, courtesy of Adam Jones, was moving away from traditional metal powerchords into more artistic terrain, new bassist Justin Chancellor added a more organic feel to the bottom end that moved it away from the traditional role of “part of the rhythm section” into a more jazz-mentality role of “key instrument”, and these changes allowed drummer Danny Carey and vocalist Maynard James Keenan the space to really come to life.
With Lateralus, Tool had had five years to write the album due to a legal dispute with former label Volcano Records, and in this time they built upon the foundation they had laid with Aenima and created a 78 minutes and 58 seconds masterpiece of an album.
Drummer Danny Carey said, “The manufacturer would only guarantee us up to 79 minutes… We thought we’d give them two seconds of breathing room.”Carey aspired to create longer songs like those by artists he grew up listening to. The band had segues to place between songs, as with Aenima, but had to cut out a lot during the mastering phase to fit the 79 minute barrier.
The album was released on May 15, 2001, and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart.
On August 5, 2003, Lateralus was certified double platinum by the RIAA.
It was named the Kerrang! Album Of The Year in 2001, and the band received the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance for the song “Schism”.
The song “Ticks & Leeches” was ranked #1 on Digital Dream Door’s 100 Greatest Rock Drum Performances.
With their follow up to Lateralus, 10000 Days (2006), Tool once again composed an outstanding album, but one where the youthful raw happy-go-lucky passion and energy of Lateralus was accompanied, probably unsurprisingly, by a numbness and melancholy. I say “probably unsurprisingly” because the title of the album, 10000 Days, is an approximate reference to the amount of time that elapsed between Maynard’s mother having a stroke which left her paralysed, and her death, shortly after the Lateralus tour.
Composition And Content (from Wikipedia)
Drummer Danny Carey sampled himself breathing through a tube to simulate the chanting of Buddhist monks for “Parabol”, and banged piano strings for samples on “Reflection”. “Faaip de Oiad” samples a recording of a 1997 call on Art Bell’s radio program Coast to Coast AM. “Faaip de Oiad” is Enochian for The Voice Of God.
“Disposition”, “Reflection”, and “Triad” form a sequence that has been performed in succession live with occasional help from various tourmates such as Mike Patton, Buzz Osborne, Tricky, and members of Isis, Meshuggah, and King Crimson.
The title track, “Lateralus,” incorporates the Fibonacci Sequence. For example, the syllables of the lyrics follow the Fibonacci pattern, and the time signature of the chorus rotates between 9/8, 8/8, and 7/8 time, referring to the 17th Fibonacci number, 987. The theme of the song describes the desire of humans to explore and to expand for more knowledge and a deeper understanding of everything. The lyric “spiral out,” which is sung repeatedly throughout the song, refers to this desire and also to the Fibonacci Spiral, which is formed by creating and arranging rectangles for each number in the sequence’s 1,1,2,3,5,8,… pattern, and drawing a curve that connects to two corners of each rectangle. This forms a never-ending and infinitely-expanding spiral.
“Eon Blue Apocalypse” is about Adam Jones’ Great Dane named Eon Blue, who had died from bone cancer, while “The Grudge” references the classic novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The track “Mantra” is the slowed-down sound of Maynard James Keenan gently squeezing one of his cats.
Cover Art
The insert is translucent and flips open to reveal the different layers of the human body. Disguised in the brain matter on the final layer is the word “God.” The artwork was done by artist Alex Grey, who also designed the 3-D cover for 10000 Days.
Just as Salival was initially released with several errors on the track listing, early pressings of Lateralus had the ninth track incorrectly spelled as “Lateralis”. The original title of “Reflection” was “Resolution” before being changed at the last minute.
You need time to deal with Lateralus – a lot more than the seventy-seven minutes it takes just to play the whole disc. And for much of that time, you will wonder: What the fuck is going on here? Drums, bass and guitars move in jarring cycles of hyperhowl and near-silent death march. The mix is inside out – roiling percussion and grunting bass to the fore; the singer bellowing from the far back of the band’s black roar. And where is the melodic and narrative resolution in this crushing darkness? Do these asymmetrical chunks of distemper – one-minute sound games, jumbo two- and three-part suites – even qualify as songs?
So much of Tool’s third full-length studio album – five years in the waiting, due in part to extended legal turbulence – makes so little sense at first. But that is one of Lateralus’ most endearing qualities: It rolls out its pleasures and coherence slowly, even stubbornly. Most of the so-called new metal has the dramatic heft of thin air. But the L.A.-based Tool – guitarist Adam Jones, vocalist Maynard James Keenan (back from his other band, A Perfect Circle), drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor – are obsessed with weight, the cumulative force of muscle, imagination and immaculately wrought suspense. Tool have everything it takes to beat you senseless; they proved it on 1993′s Undertow and their 1996 Grammy-winning beast, Aenima. Here, Tool go to extravagant lengths to drown you in sensation.
The prolonged running times of most of Lateralus’ thirteen tracks are misleading; the entire album rolls and stomps with suitelike purpose. In “The Grudge” (8:34), “Schism” (6:43) and “Lateralus” (9:22), the episodic swerves are compressed under single titles. Other numbers run together like connective tissue. “Parabol” and “Parabola” are basically distorted reflections of each other, twinned images of the same nightmare. In “Parabol,” Keenan’s voice is bathed in wet, gray echo and crawls like a wounded man through the implied devastation of Carey’s hissing cymbals and Chancellor’s gaunt bass lines. “Parabola” is the emotional remix, an explosive rescoring of that agony with the additional payoff of hard-won deliverance. Carey goes into jungle-telegraph overdrive, and Jones’ guitar is a colossus of distortion; his break just past the midway point is so broad and dense with fuzz that it doesn’t seem to have any notes – or air. You could die of suffocation in there.
“Ticks and Leeches” needs every one of its eight minutes to reach its bloody apogee. The song is an opera of nervous tics: the vicious chop of the central hook; a sudden drop into virtual nothing; the cleaving effect of Keenan’s charred screaming; a final triple-time freakout. Some sections stop on a dime, in mid-rage; the quiet bit is a serious test of patience, a long veil of faint strum and smothering peril. But each of those changes is a potent, necessary link in a snowballing indictment of parasitic evil. When Keenan goes into his climactic seizure (“Suuuck! Meee! Dryyy!”), he sounds like he’s truly up to his neck in harpies and lawyers.
In another era, Lateralus – co-produced by Tool and engineer David Bottrill – would have been considered progressive rock, ten tons of impressive pretension. Jones’ hairpin riffing in “The Grudge,” the cool, dreamy intro of “The Patient” and Carey’s frenetic Afro-Zeppelin drumming all over the record suggest a grand mutant blend of vintage Jane’s Addiction and King Crimson circa Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. The only things separating Pink Floyd’s spacewalk “Echoes” – which ate up Side Two of 1971′s Meddle – and the twenty-two-minute sequence of “Disposition,” “Reflection” and “Triad” on Lateralus are thirty years and Tool’s impulse to cram every inch of infinity with hard guitar meat and absolute dread.
But in this heavy-music century, awash in masks, turntables and Ming the Merciless goatees, Lateralus stands for a vanishing common sense in hard rock: that the only extremes that matter are those in the music. Indeed, the most amazing thing about Lateralus is Tool’s extraordinary restraint. One reason why these songs seem to go on forever is that the band never rushes a good idea: the soft, protracted tension of “Disposition”; the Arabic-metal jamming in “Triad.”
But the reason you don’t keep checking your watch is because Tool never play like they’re just killing time. “I know/The pieces fit,” Keenan swears repeatedly against the rolling thunder of “Schism.” Lateralus is a monster of many parts, made to be swallowed whole.
The Real Music Forum loves Tool – Lateralus (2001). A true masterpiece of an album. We hope you do too.
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Cake is an indie-rockband from Sacramento, California that has a devoted fanbase and loyal following for their unique blend of indie, funk, jazz and countrymusic. Fashion Nugget, Cake’s second album, became the album that brought the band into the public eye and gave them their first radio success with the song “The Distance”. After another five albums, a bounty of TV snippets including having written the theme tune to Chuck, and a number of hit singles has made them one of the most popular bands on the AlternativeRock scene.
In 2008 the band removed their studio (Upbeat Studio) from dependence on Sacramento, California’s power grid by installing a system of solar panels. The band subsequently announced that their upcoming studio album will be “recorded using 100% solar energy.”
Although Cake’s music is often classified as alternative rock or indie-rock, it combines elements of multiple musical genres, such as funk, rockabilly, jazz, rap, and country. Cake’s music features droll lyrics rife with word play and syncopation, catchy distorted guitar riffs (courtesy of guitarist Greg Brown until 1998, and bass player Victor Damiani until 1997), prominent use of a Moog, and a solo trumpet (played by Vince DiFiore).
The laconic and rap-like style in which lead vocalist/guitarist John McCrea brings the lyrics is sometimes called sprechgesang.
In the summer of 2002, Cake headlined the Unlimited Sunshine Tour festival among such varied bands as Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, De La Soul, Latin techno fusion band Kinky and bluegrass group The Hackensaw Boys. Cake brought back the tour in 2003 with Cheap Trick, country singer Charlie Louvin, garage rockers The Detroit Cobras and a return performance from The Hackensaw Boys. The tour returned in 2007 with the Brazilian Girls on the East Coast dates, return of The Detroit Cobras for the West Coast dates, and Oakley Hall, Agent Ribbons and King City for all the shows.
In June 2008, lead singer John McCrea told music publication REVUE that he is thinking seriously of quitting touring to become a farmer.
On June 11, 2009, Cake played at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2009 bash in San Francisco, California.
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Tokyo-based instrumentalists LITE formed in 2003. Their debut “Filmlets” received great critical acclaim, and since then the band have toured Japan constantly, embarked on their second UK & Ireland tour last September and they have appeared at the Fuji Rock Festival.
LITE’s sound combines the precision and musicianship of prog rock with the emotionally charged cinematiccompositions of art rock, in a heavier, more modern package that they describe as “math rock”. Nowhere near as heavy as mathcore or prog metal, but more so than your average prog rock band.
Shortly after that appearance, the Japanese quartet released a split CD with Funanori (Go! Team guitarist Kaori Tsuchida and Mike Watt from The Minutemen) and teamed up with Mike Watt again in February this year to host his Brother’s Sister’s Daughter tour of Japan.
With the release of their second full-length album, “Phantasia”, the intense gigging schedule has obviously paid off. The band have improved their songwriting skills and their ability to translate their energetic live performances into an impressive studio album. Their instrumental prowess comes across in splendid fashion and the result is a varied and satisfying album.
Darker in parts to its predecessor, “Phantasia” contains many influences, from King Crimson-esque jazz-rock to full-scale guitar assault as on “Contra” or the opener “Ef” which has been re-recorded and reignited with the fury of its live rendition.
Throughout, there are stories woven into these grooves; the sea-faring tragedy “Shinkai” and the melancholic “Solitude” illustrate the band’s maturity as “storyteller” songwriters.
With “Phantasia”, LITE is set to cement its reputation as one of the most exciting bands to have emerged from Japan in recent years.
The album’s working title had been “Nighthawk Postcards from Easy Street” but they shortened it to Nighthawks at the Diner.
The album was recorded “live” in Record Plant Studios, in front of a small invited audience. This gives the record an intimate feeling as Waits spends time telling stories, jokes and explaining the stories behind his songs through seven separate introductions.
Bones Howe, the album’s producer, on the recording of the album:
“We did it as a live recording, which was unusual for an artist so new [...] Herb Cohen and I both had a sense that we needed to bring out the jazz in Waits more clearly. Tom was a great performer on stage [...] So we started talking about where we could do an album that would have a live feel to it. We thought about clubs, but the well-known ones like The Troubadour were toilets in those days. Then I remembered that Barbra Streisand had made a record at the old Record Plant Studios, when they were on 3rd Street near Cahuenga Boulevard [...] There was a room there that she got an entire orchestra into. Back in those days they would just roll the consoles around to where they needed them. So Herb and I said let’s see if we can put tables and chairs in there and get an audience in and record a show.”
Howe was mostly responsible for organising the band for the “live show”, and creating the right atmosphere for the record:
“I got Mike Melvoin on piano, and he was one of the greatest jazz arrangers ever; I had Jim Hughart on upright bass, Bill Goodwin on drums and Pete Christlieb on sax. It was a totally jazz rhythm section. Herb gave out tickets to all his friends, we set up a bar, put potato chips on the tables and we had a sell-out, two nights, two shows a night, July 30 and 31, 1975. I remember that the opening act was a stripper. Her name was Dewana and her husband was a taxi driver. So for her the band played bump-and-grind music – and there’s no jazz player who has never played a strip joint, so they knew exactly what to do. But it put the room in exactly the right mood. Then Waits came out and sang ‘Emotional Weather Report’. Then he turned around to face the band and read the classified section of the paper while they played. It was like Allen Ginsberg with a really, really good band.”
Dewana was an old-time burlesque queen whom Tom had met on one of his jaunts to the Hollywood underworld. She warmed up the crowd – which was largely made up of friends and acquaintances of Waits and crew – and everyone was primed for a drunken voyage into an Edmund Hopper painting or a Charles Bukowski poem. Waits didn’t plan on disappointing them. Bones had put together a live band from the session musicians who had worked on The Heart of Saturday Night.
Jim Hughart, who played upright bass on the recordings recalled the experience of preparing for and recording the album:
“Preparing for this thing, we had to memorize all this stuff, ’cause Waits had nothing on paper. So ultimately, we spent four or five days in a rehearsal studio going over this stuff. And that was drudgery. But when we did actually get it all prepared and go and record, that was the fastest two days of recording I’ve ever spent in my life. It was so fun. Some of the tunes were not what you’d call jazz tunes, but for the most part that was like a jazz record. This was a jazz band. Bill Goodwin was a drummer who was associated with Phil Woods for years. Pete Christlieb is one of the best jazz tenor players who ever lived. And my old friend, Mike Melvoin, played piano. There’s a good reason why it was accepted as a jazz record.”
Born on August 17th 1960, Maria Pia De Vito is an Italian vocalist, composer and arranger and is a standout of the contemporary European jazz scene.
She studied opera and contemporary singing and began her music career in 1976 as a vocalist and musician (plectra, percussion, piano) in research groups committed to ethnic music as well as ethnic and non-ethnic polyphony, mostly related to the Mediterranean, Balkan and South-American areas.
After 15 years practicing the great American jazz songbook of scat and be-bop, in 1994 she begins a new phase of her work with the project Nauplia, conceived and directed together with Rita Marcotulli, her first trespass into free form and the crossover with European jazz. The vocal textures form the basis of the sound, which will see the encounter between the hybrid of jazz and the peculiarities of Neapolitan singing (”Nauplia”, “Fore Paese”, “Triboh”).
The concept of improvisational possibilities of the voice in contact with several cultural contexts becomes the basis of her new direction, whose first release is “Phonè”, a work about the voice preceding the language and about rhythm and dance in their different cultural inflexion. It is a project that marks the beginning of the collaboration with John Taylor.
At Umbria Jazz ’98 she presented the Phoné project, which featured John Taylor, Gianluigi Trovesi, Enzo Pietropaoli and Federico Sanesi. Among their most important performances, the group played in Weimar, in occasion of WEIMAR 1999.
Since 1996 she has collaborated with British composer Colin Towns with his Big Band, The Mask Orchestra. She played live at the major festivals in England and Germany including the remarkable exhibition at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of London with the “Mask Symphonic” (70 musicians) and the participation of Norma Winstone.
In 1997 the Maria Pia De Vito / John Taylor / Ralph Towner trio is born, marked with the release of the album “Verso”.
In 2001 the name of Maria Pia was critically lauded by the most celebrated signatures of American jazz press as she is in the category “Beyond Artist” of the 49th Down Beat Critics Poll. In this list, her name appears alongside outstanding artists such as Caetano Veloso, Joni Mitchell, Cesaria Evora, Olu Dara, Carlos Santana, Uri Caine and Marisa Monte.
This very important acknowledgement was to be her stepping stone into the international market.
In 2001 she also imposed herself on the Italian scene, winning the POSITANO JAZZ prize.
In 2002 she released the CD “Nel Respiro” with the John Taylor and Ralph Towner trio, with the participation of Steve Swallow and Patrice Heral, with whom she begins a profitable artistic collaboration.
2003 is the year for the project and the release of the CD “Tumulti” which represents her most experimental work to date. Oriented to interaction between voice, improvisation and electronics, co-leading the project with Patrice Heral and collaborating with cello player Ernst Reijseger and Austrian pianist Paul Urbanek, multi-awarded in his country for his “reverse composing” works.
“Tumulti” received enormous critical approval and was performed live at jazz festivals in Italy and abroad.
On “So Right” (2005) together with the co-leaders Danilo Rea and Enzo Pietropaoli and the contribution of drummer Aldo Romano, she reflects on song form through the reinterpretation of seven songs by Joni Mitchell and five of her own compositions.
Over the last few years she has been a leading player in projects including “Il Brutto Anatroccolo” (The Ugly Duckling) with music by Giorgio Gaslini, “Gesualdo on Gesualdo da Venosa”, by (and with) Tino Tracanna and Corrado Guarino, “Oltre Napoli”, “La Notte” and “Lettera da Orsara” by Bruno Tommaso, and “Il Celeste Specchio” by Carlo Boccadoro.
She regularly collaborates with the sculptor and video-maker Marisa Albanese with whom she has produced three videos which were presented in art museums and galleries.
2009 has seen the release of her latest album, “Mind The Gap”, a further exploration of the crossover territory between freeform jazz, traditional European music and abstract electronica, and contains a reinterpretation of the Bjork hit “Hidden Place”.
Discography:
Maria Pia De Vito / John Taylor / Ralph Towner Trio: Verso – 1997
Nel Respiro – 2002
Phoné (Maria Pia De Vito, John Taylor, Gianluigi Trovesi, Enzo Pietropaoli, Federico Sanesi):
Phoné – 1998
Nauplia (Rita Marcotulli, Maria Pia De Vito):
Nauplia – 1994
Fore Paese – 1996
Triboh – 1997 (featuring percussionist Arto Tunçboyaciyan)
Solo:
Tumulti – 2003
So Right – 2008
Mind The Gap – 2009
If you speak Italian, you might find this interview interesting (regardling Tumulti), or if not, you might just want to skip to the bits where she’s playing with her band…
Unfortunately it’s the only Maria Pia De Vito video I can find on YouTube that has even remotely decent sound quality.
In 1961 he moved to Denmark, at a time when several other American jazz musicians had moved to Europe. He gained a wide following across Europe, although he sacrificed much of the interest of the American jazz audience in the process. He recorded many sessions with the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and became a well known figure on the Copenhagen jazz scene.
On his passing (August 4, 1993), Kenny Drew was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen.
His son Kenny Drew, Jr. is also a jazz pianist.
To discuss Kenny Drew or this article on the Real Music Forumuser forums, click the following link…
A new poster on the RMF has recommended a new pop artist to our readers. If you’re a regular reader of the RMF then I’m sure you’ll know already how I feel about the pop industry, (and if not, you should start by reading my “Recent Music Releases” article). So a word to the wise… if you’re here to deliver SEO spam, be prepared for your link to be reviewed in true RMF style.
I’ve got to say, compared to a lot of pop artists, she’s not too bad… there’s certainly a lot of potential there, but it appears to me that the label and producer had too much say in her “sound” for my liking. They seem to have placed the emphasis on making her fit in with modern pop trends and ignored her actual strengths.
Voice: This is a case-in-point for me. She’s reasonable enough in the bits where she stops putting on The Whinehouse Effect – you can hear that under the neuveau-pop surface she can probably actually belt them out with the best of them. It’s a shame that her label / producer have forced her to sing in that Winehouse-esque pseudo-Anastasia post-Gabrielle half-throaty-and-half-nasally style, because it’s certainly not her natural voice – you can tell in the bridge sections where she almost lets herself sing properly. Macy Gray opened a door a few years ago, showing the labels that this kind of voice had a market, and since then every other “alternative pop” vocalist seems to have this same croaky edge. The majors are doing the same thing to this sound that they did to indiemusic in the mid-90′s – taking a tiny part of what makes it “good” and exploiting it by papering over the cracks of bad pop music with this new sound to market the same tired old crap with a new wrapper. Such a shame. Such is the modern pop industry.
The band:Real instruments played by decent session musicians, but the whole thing’s just a bit too… “poptastic” for my liking. With the wealth of talent at her fingertips, having a band full of session musicians of obvious skill, and yet the song is a formulaic 4-chord stumbler. She probably has to kick them during performances to keep them awake.
Hit / Miss? Miss for now, but a definite “wait and see”…. if she gets enough limelight from this album, she will have more sway with the label for her “sound” for the 2nd album, and hopefully she’ll let her musicians have more input for the song structures and start singing with her real voice, and who knows, maybe, just maybe she’ll fulfill her Real Music potential and leave the mindless pop thing behind.
P.S. Cilmi? This surely isn’t her real name, is it? How is it pronounced? “Kill me”? A cry for help perhaps? Cynical and jaded about her own project from the outset?
Do the right thing, Gabriella, sack off the major label pop chart thing and start playing jazz clubs for a few years. Start hanging out with Donavon Frankenreiter too. It’ll make all the difference. Trust me.
Funkmusic is easily recognized by its distinct musical style of repetitive beats and driving bass lines, with clear roots in jazz, blues, gospel and soul music. By the late 70′s, funk had its tentacles in just about every genre. The funk infusion with the worlds of rock, jazz, soul, and motown had given us progressive rock, jazz-funk, fusion, acid jazz and disco, and would eventually find itself firmly responsible for a large amount of hip-hop and electronica
Going back to the 1960s, in amongst all the rock and folk -oriented popular music of the time, there was an artist who arrived on the music scene who would be held widely responsible for this explosion. A man who changed the face of music forever, the Godfather Of Soul, James Brown.
James Brown was one of the first artists to use funk as a main distinguishing feature of his sound. The result has been not only an astonishing career and many great recordings, but also the funk legacy that grew with him, a genre that would eventually visit places that Brown himself could not even have imagined.
So where did he get the idea? What are the origins of funk music?
The Rock’n'Roll hall of fame claims that “James Brown and others” credit Little Richard’s 1950′s road band to be the first to inject funk into the rock’n'roll sound. Praise indeed, or so it seems, but where did funk originate? Specifics seem difficult to track down.
The first known appearance of the word “funk” in a formally-written piece of music was Buddy Bolden’s “Funky Butt” in 1907 but before that it was already a word of encouragement, shouted to bands by enthusiastic audiences in African American clubs.
So… here it is… my first ever “quest of the moment” on the RMF is The Search For Funk.
Who were these “African American” bands playing underground funk to exclusive club audiences pre-Little Richard?
When was the first time someone laid ears on what we now know as funk?
Dewana was an old-time burlesque queen whom Tom had met on one of his jaunts to the Hollywood underworld. She warmed up the crowd – which was largely made up of friends and acquaintances of Waits and crew – and everyone was primed for a drunken voyage into an Edmund Hopper painting or a Charles Bukowski poem. Waits didn’t plan on disappointing them. Bones had put together a live band from the session 
After 15 years practicing the great American jazz songbook of scat and be-bop, in 1994 she begins a new phase of her work with the project 
In 2001 the name of Maria Pia was critically lauded by the most celebrated signatures of American jazz press as she is in the category “Beyond Artist” of the 49th Down Beat Critics Poll. In this list, her name appears alongside outstanding artists such as 
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