#a-side

[cyanheria-bl]

Happy Valentine's Day (2024)

[nanaszx]

★. manquer cette nuit

a era das manip voltou com tudo neste perfil nada me abala parceiros. foi divino a forma que esse png do police encaixou no woo. foi deus.

19.10.2021

[debutart]

A collaboration between Jon Fox and A-Side Studio for Origin Coffee Roasters, for their new mainstay coffee, Beija Flor.⁠

[dustedmagazine]

Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake — The Newest Sound You Never Heard (A-Side Records)

Whether you do or don’t already own a copy of Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake’s classic duos The Newest Sound Around, you’re in for a treat. Half a decade after that classic vocal/piano release, Lee and Blake recorded two Belgian gigs, one in late 1966 and the other in early 1967. It’s an absolute joy to have new music from this pair of originals. And there is very little as odd and yet immediately satisfying as the blend of Lee’s lush tone and unpredictable phrasing with Blake’s arch harmonic sensibility and mischievous arrangements. 

Blake is long been renowned not just for his singular approach to harmony but for his propensity to combine interesting emotional or even theatrical elements. Lee, a vocalist who remains woefully under-appreciated, knew just what to do in almost every circumstance. She might play it straight, following a rhythm or a phrase unvaryingly. Or she could just as easily draw things out to improbable length and duration, or invest a lyric with unexpected dimensions. That they do this with material that is so very conventional, and has so many firm expectations, makes their music even more challenging and beautiful.  

There are plenty of places to study Blake, and sometimes Lee, alone. On “Honeysuckle Rose,” Blake really turns the piano canon inside out, all space and odd phrasing. He plays spiky and abstract on “The Frog, The Fountain, and Aunt June, and more Monkishly on “Smoke After Smoke.” “God’s Image” is spindly and spacious, while “Birmingham, U.S.A.” moves through extreme contrasts in register and dynamics, from brashly noisy to tensely silent. Lee’s lone solo piece is a lovely, soulful “Billie’s Blues.”  

But the main ingredients are elsewhere. There are wonders everywhere, but a few tracks best capture the intensity and wonder of this duo’s music. Take the evergreen “Caravan,” for example. With one of the most familiar themes and tempos in all of jazz, it’s a tune that might seem resistant to much innovation. Not here. Lee and Blake manage to turn it into a tone poem, somehow without obliterating the unmistakable rhythmic language. Blake is sly with tempo and harmony, elliptical where “Caravan” is usually emphatic, and Lee just glides through marvelously, nailing the low end and always, always floating beyond the pulse. “Blue Monk” is given a spiky, mutated opening, and becomes further unpredictable from there: weirdly florid in places and loping in others, the one constant being Lee’s extraordinary vocalese. It’s like that with the standards. They find unexpected darkness in Leonard Bernstein’s “Something’s Coming.” They coax discordance and disorientation from “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” There’s a riveting, elastic take on Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” And, perhaps wildest of all, they do a punishing version of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night.” (They also do a fine “Mr. Tambourine Man.”)  

It is spacious music, but also contains depths. It is lithe and lyrical, except where it is arcane and harmonically arch. It is whisper-soft, then declamatory. And oh, Jeanne Lee, who can conjure darkness, playfulness, regret, and sass in a single note. Francis Bacon wrote, centuries ago, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Lee and Blake didn’t merely understand this; it was the substance of their glorious music.

Jason Bivins

[fyeahkard]

A-SIDE | do not edit

[nanaszx]

★. don't want u to leave

só deus e charlie sabe o quanto eu tentei até sair algo minimamente aceitável. e eu só não desisti porque era pra você seu fdp. depois dessa mereço um queijo no espeto. adeus. me dá o queijo @hyukalopsia

18.10.21

[nanaszx]

★. blue rock

opa galera. comecei isso era 13:00, refiz umas 6 vezes e agora às 16:00 saiu algo decente. é sobre isso e os capistas não tão nada bem.

17.10.21