Reviews by kuvien

There are two Galicias. This must be understood if one is going to avoid bewilderment when one hears something like this and then also hears the Russian Night in Galicia. The Galician folk of Spanish origin displayed quite strongly at points on this album is the same explored in Milladoiro's 1981 classic, O berro seco. Bright, beautiful, sometimes inviting you to dance, always inviting you to stay within the music's torchlit halls. Harps and bagpipes are replaced with acoustic guitars and violins.

Yeah, pretty damn pagan in the vocals, especially. The instrumentation, however, sounds much more recent, like medieval. I can see Conan listening to this shit while traveling across the plains toward some distant mountains, with the red sun hanging low, obscured by dust. Quite ritualistic when you stop to camp for the night.

"I'm a strong, surviving black woman who don't need no man" in beautiful, traditional call-and-response girl music form. There's a part in the Bible where God makes a woman the leader of the Israelites because no man has the courage to do it. Give this album to any man you know to be a deadbeat or a coward.

Are you enjoying your astral projection? Comfortable? Good. Now get your face blasted off by the Horns of Chaos! I'm not saying anything new about this classic Sanders album at this point, but for anyone who doesn't want to go read a bunch of longwinded reviews or listen to lying-ass AI, here's what's what: we all know what a magnificent run of albums Sanders had in the 1960s and 1970s, and fans of the man also know that he is apt to lay down side-spanning tracks upwards of 20 minutes. He breaks that pattern here, though, with six normal-length tracks, and there's quite a variety of styles among the compositions, too. Not exactly but basically Side A was recorded in LA with one ensemble, and then half a year or so later Side B was recorded in NYC with another ensemble. Not sure if that matters, though, since Sanders is at the heart of it all. Among the delicious array of instruments employed, the Fender Rhodes electric piano and the upright bass are the standouts, given time to solo.

The vocals aren't good... and that's why I dig this!

More like... Side A is spiritual, Side B is free, but the progression tracks. The album is an acid trip without ever placing a tab on your tongue, starting out with the love mantra as you come up, but as you further ascend, you realize in a frightening moment of clarity that there's no stopping the climb. You're along for the ride now, and every fiber of your being cries out in ecstasy, in response to your brief window of cosmic understanding. And when you're ready to come down, you fall backwards with utter confidence onto the comforting sounds of a mellow piano.

This is the kind of music that makes my heart happy, makes me dance inside even when I cannot physically get moving. Those vocals, too, when they get warbly and freaky, remind me of something Tim Buckley does. I consider myself a spiritual person, and this is what spiritualism is to people who aren’t spiritual. I love this album for its musical qualities, not its “spiritual” ones. Sometimes being spiritual means sitting in complete silence, but for some reason in the jazz world, spiritual means losing your shit. (Does it annoy anyone else that his name is a misspelling of “pharaoh”? Like Oprah being a misspelling of Orpah, a Biblical character.)

It's got a Side A composition, and it's got a Side B composition, and that's all this album needs. This is a spiritual jazz album that cannot be ignored, not only for its place in the chronology of spiritual jazz releases (this recording helped the subgenre take root and burgeon) but also for its connections to Islam and its resulting call to action, not to be deaf, dumb, and blind to the divine reality. Africa is all over this album, but that's not a surprise to anyone with ears. In a delicious conflation of religion and politics, this is the music of a people struggling against colonialism, freeing not only the spirit but the body. The strength of these recordings is that you can dance to the music or you can meditate to it, and both are valid responses.

What this album is about is right there in the title, and it's as black and as 70s as music gets, especially in intent. Obviously because it was pressed to vinyl, there had to be two parts to this composition, but when the CD re-release came about, the music was combined into one 37-minute track. Unified. Quite a propos that technology brought the music together, just as the proponents of Afrofuturism were dreaming of a future where technology would unite and empower black people everywhere.

The unity sought after in this recording is not a social or political one, per se, but rather a musical one, moving away from the idea of different jazz musicians showing off and soloing within a composition and instead embracing a communal approach to artistic expression. One of the tenets of Zen Buddhism is "no-self". Not that a person doesn't exist, but rather that he is not eternal, not unchanging, not independent. He is part of the overall community, and this concept is what Sanders is trying to actualize on this recording.

The saxophonist lightly wrestles with the ghost of his mentor Coltrane and succeeds in weaving the tendrils of the legend's shadow into some easy-listening 80s jazz, demonstrating maturity in not needing to prove anything.

Fetch me my six-shooter.

Indie folk so bad it could incite a folkhead to shave his beard, get a mohawk, and trade his Wellingtons for some Dr. Martens.

This one will hypnotize you with its playfulness. The amusement park is staying open despite the thunder, so take another ride on the carousel. Some people complain about the fucked-up vocals, but for me it's a feature, not a bug. I love that weird screaming falsetto shit, especially when you're suddenly in unexpected labor. Who knew a man could give birth? Side B opens with such a beautiful, evocative demonstration through music what a sleepy yet hectic morning feels like. Humming to yourself, getting the coffee on, yawning, shuffling around the house, waking up. Things just continue to unfold in a wacky way, trilling nonsensical vocals and silly electric piano shenanigans.

Måltid being one of my favorite albums, I wasn't expecting this as the follow up. This is hardly RIO, in my opinion, because, frankly, it's too playful, too carnivalesque. This isn't a criticism of the album--I like it!--but it's more humorous in the Canterbury Scene vein than anything else, especially moments like the yodeling on the fourth track or the clown bicycle horn on the fifth track. The turn towards jazz fusion the band takes here connects this album to a lot of similar-sounding music in my collection.

The debut album of a five-piece avant chamber prog band who made quite a splash opening a Rock in Opposition festival back the same year this album was released. Piano joins contrabass, violin, accordion, and, of course, guitar (from Bondage Fruit) to make some zany, fiery avant-prog that follows very closely in the trailblazing tread of the RIO bands that turned the 70s and 80s on their ear. The accordion adds the special panache that will either delight or weary the listener, depending on how one feels about the instrument. Most of this album is acoustic, but the electric guitar gets plugged in and played a couple times here.

You know when you finally disconnect yourself from that emotional-vampire girlfriend and find another girl who's actually kinda boring and not that great, but at least she's chill? Well, this album is that rebound skank.

This album opens with quite the religious bent, but the next couple tracks veer away from that, even telling stories about the romantic notion of meeting vampires at night. And yet, the narrative is brought back to the Rosary. "Adam" and "Suffer the Little Children" continue the religious motifs, but I guess that goes with the territory of late 60s psychedelia, what with the conflation of magic and religion, the confusion of dreams and drug use, as displayed in the final track. All in all, a gentle, pleasant folk album with a touch of social commentary.

A woman of two worlds, an evocative singer, a contrabassist, a composer, and an artist with an ear for poetry and a mind open to her ancestral past, Sélène Saint-Aimé dives into Caribbean folklore and interprets through the lens of her own experiences as an Afro-French jazz artist.

An incredible debut album in which the artist explores the meaning of her given name, her voice and her double bass weaving their way together along moonbeams, revealing how all the moments of her life are like craters in the moon's surface, this music being the expression of all those indelible marks.

This is everything Yoko Ono wishes she had been. The mysterious wailing, screeching vocals are perfect, reaching out to define the spaces around it. It is authentic, beautiful, and frightening... if you stare too long into the naked flame. Take a spirit journey across high, frozen plains where the warm, soft percussion sets your pace and the xomus (jaw harp) leads you like a diviner's wand back home.