#ari brown

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[dustedmagazine]

Cleveland Eaton – Plenty Good EATON (Black Jazz/Real Gone)

Erstwhile bull fiddle fulcrum for both the Count Basie and Ramsey Lewis bands, Cleveland Eaton also eked out a fair shake at Black Jazz Records. Plenty Good EATON, his sole effort for the label recorded in 1975, is leagues distant in both style and comport than those earlier esteemed assignments. Jazz elements are extant, but often subsumed in a disco funk salmagundi that sags, shuffles and stymies rather than inspires. The tortured pun used as placeholder ends of feeling like wishful thinking instead of a menu promise made good.

Eaton had an illustrious pedigree, having studied with the educator John Whatley, who also mentored Sun Ra and Erskine Hawkins. He gigged voluminous both prior and after his two most prestigious posts, appearing on sessions with Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Black Jazz was home to a roster of artists ardently intent on wedding musical chops with progressively-canted charts that drew as much on the core idiom as more populist-minded African American musical forms. These credentials make the lackluster aspects of the album all the more puzzling.

“Chi-town Theme” does double duty as both opener and anthem, chugging along on a wah-wah saturated vamp lifted directly from Isaac Hayes “Shaft.” A staccato female chorus exhorts the titular phrase as mantra to the point of merciless monotony. “Keena” steers into saccharine ballad territory with high thread count strings answered by easy riffing horns and the leader’s rubber cement electric bass. “Mo, Let’s Have a Party” is more aw shucks funk, with title once again serving as shallow lyrical fodder against a slinky, but ultimately hollow bass-grounded ostinato.

“Are You There Somewhere Caring” and “All Your Lover, All Day, All Night” find Eaton going full amatory crooner with cumulative pedestrian musical impact fully prognosticated by the titles. Perhaps most egregiously, the bass is buried once again in a sticky sediment of strings, horns and cloying keys. The latter even shamelessly cops the bassline to The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” as chassis for more centripetal noodling, although violinist Ed Green’s aggressively barbed solo does win back some lost favor.

“Kaiser 405” and “Hamburg 302 are cases of too little too late, actual jazz compositions with Eaton’s overly amplified, but animated strings at the center and exhilarating solos from a circle of ensemble members including tenorist Ari Brown, violinist Ed Green and trombonist John Watson stoking the momentum in competition with the strings. If only Eaton had opted for that direction consistently rather than erring into the steeply diminishing returns of flaccid AOR funk and blinkered lightweight soul.

Derek Taylor

[dustedmagazine]

The Awakening – Hear, Sense and Feel (Black Jazz/Real Gone Music)

Established around a core tenet of community consciousness, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) begat a long and varied lineage of Chicago-based musical aggregations. The Art Ensemble of Chicago was arguably the most influential among that family, but there were others like The Awakening that also drew deeply on such collectivist impulses. Co-led by pianist Ken Chaney and trumpeter Frank Gordon, the band had strong connections to regional academia. Their activities attracted the notice of the Black Jazz label out of Oakland and two albums followed, of which Hear, Sense and Feel released in 1972 is the first.

Steeped in the spiritual jazz ethos of the era, Chaney and Gordon also brought an emphasis on sturdy writing and diligent rehearsal to their project that set them apart from some of the more spontaneous-minded of their contemporaries. Saxophonist Ari Brown had roots as a pianist in the several city’s R&B and soul combos prior to his AACM membership while trombonist Steve Galloway did duty with the Count Basie band. Bassist Reggie Willis and drummer Arlington Davis, Jr. were similarly plugged into Chicago’s overlapping musical scenes, the former also a founding member of the AACM.

Chaney and Gordon frame the album around a spoken invocation and postlude that evinces the band’s emphasis on spiritual empowerment. The horns trade off solo statements on a bright and effervescent line on the opening piece, backed by the warm contours of the rhythm section. Brown’s “When Will It Ever End” darkens the lens, augmenting a chorus of doublebass, whistles, bells and luminous electric piano with melancholy unison line by the horns. The composer shapes a pair of downcast improvisations on tenor that ply equal parts pathos and persuasiveness in the guise of a keening, cathartic cry.

Gordon’s “Convulsions” and “Jupiter” delve into the group’s freer leanings. The first gallops forth on a propulsive united vamp that’s perfectly suited to Brown’s aggressive blowing over a comping sprint by Chaney stamped by Davis, Jr.’s accelerated sticks. On the second, a waterfall of modal energy opens into tightly wound exchange between instruments and pithy solos by Chaney, Brown and Davis, Jr. that thrive on the marshalled momentum. John Stubblefield’s “Kera’s Dance” and Chaney’s “Brand New Feeling,” which adds Richard Evans’ electric bass feel like opposite sides of the same coin in their electric piano powered grooves.

Part of an inaugural salvo in a reissue series of Black Jazz titles by Real Gone Music, the program has reportedly already run afoul of legal trouble regarding licensing agreements with original producer Gene Russell. It’s a deep catalog of some two dozen titles, making the situation all the more regrettable, but producers Gordon Anderson and Zev Feldman were wise to include The Awakening in their first run of releases. It was the only working band to record for the label and there’s a level of cohesion and consensus apparent in the players extended association that shows.

Derek Taylor

[dustedmagazine]

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society—Simultonality (Eremite)

Photo by Jason Lazarus

Simultonality by Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society

Dusted, and particularly this writer, stands corrected. The last time we dealt with Joshua Abrams and the Natural Information Society was in a review of Anemometer, the group’s summit with the Bitchin Bajas. That review suggested that the Bajas brought the krautrock influence while Abrams was responsible for the Gnawa and world jazz references, but we were too binary for our own good. On Simultonality's “Sideways Fall,” which takes up half of side two, drummers Mikel Avery and Frank Rosaly lean into Jaki Liebezeit’s beat pattern for Can’s “Vitamin C.”  

The aforementioned tune connects the dots between Can, James Brown and Moroccan trance grooves, and that’s by no means the whole story.  While Abrams and his group may confine themselves to natural information, that doesn’t mean that they can’t cast a wide net. The cascade of resonating electric strings and staccato harmonium that opens “Opiuchus” is like a neon-lit refraction of Steve Reich’s “Music For Eighteen Musicians,” and the swinging, cross-hatched rhythm workout that follows combines electric and acoustic sonorities like a banner woven from sky and earth. “Maroon Dune” uses another Can-derived rhythm as the foundation for another celestial-terrestrial dance; while most of the band keeps loose reign on a bucking beat, bellows-driven and electric keyboards glide overhead, evincing the paradoxically slow appearance of fast-moving clouds. Musical and elemental forces converge harmoniously without losing their essence. It’s a soul-warming response to the agents of fracture at work in America and other places.  

On all of these pieces, Abrams plays a Moroccan bass lute known as a guimbri, which infuses the music with a ceremonial vibe.  But he sets it aside on two others. He plays harp and messes with the tape speed on “St. Cloud,” a brighter-toned study of motion within motion. And he switches to double bass for the slow-burning closer “2128 ½.” The titular number refers to a now-empty patch of South Indiana Avenue that was once occupied by Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge. The Velvet’s jam sessions and out of town bookings provided essential schooling for both musicians and audiences, and Abrams played there many times. The piece starts out free and agitated, courting chaos, but then segues into a walking bass line over which Ben Boye lays down a carpet of cosmic electric piano chords and saxophonist Ari Brown blows a blues that blends the yearning of early 1960s John Coltrane with the sandpapery grit that Pharoah Sanders brought to Alice Coltrane’s music a decade later.  

One might get the idea from all these historical references that Abrams is just another guy who wants to show what he knows. But that misses the point that all of these antecedents used rhythm and tone to heal, enthuse, and mesmerize. This music was fashioned with similar intentions in mind, and it uses the recognizability of past intentions to help put its point across.

Bill Meyer

[sinceileftyoublog]

Natural Information Society & Drum Divas Live Show Review: 8/23, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago

BY JORDAN MAINZER

For an event called Preservation of Fire, it was only fitting that Natural Information Society would be joined by who band leader Joshua Abrams called “the tenor flame of Chicago,” saxophonist Ari Brown. Together with percussion collective Drum Divas, Natural Information Society played the event curated by Alejandro Ayala (aka King Hippo) and presented by The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), a night of slow-building, cosmic grooves, acoustic instrumentation that called you to dance by daring to resemble swaths of other music.

The headliners, Natural Information Society, were celebrating their latest album,  descension (Out of Our Constrictions) (eremite), recorded live at London’s Cafe OTO in 2019. (It’s their first album to be recorded live and to feature a single composition, though the album is separated into four tracks.) Many of the record’s key players were part of last night’s incarnation of Natural Information Society: Abrams (giumbri), of course, Lisa Alvarado (harmonium and whose paintings adorn the album cover and the backdrops of last night’s set), Jason Stein (bass clarinet), and Mikel Patrick Avery (drums and cymbals). But while the album was recorded with legendary English free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker, last night’s concert featured Brown, along with Nick Mazzarella (saxophone) and Mai Sugimoto (saxophone and flute) for some added depth. As descension is a very defined composition, built around a specific theme with Parker’s improvisational flourishes on top, I was blown away by how the performance struck the perfect balance between faithfulness to the material and allowing the individual players’ unique expressions.

As on the record, the ensemble started with Abrams leading the way, Alvarado and Stein providing some harmonic pulsations, and Avery’s four-on-the-floor drumming propelling a Chicago house-like beat. Quickly, Brown, centered on stage, began his tenor wails. For those who hadn’t yet heard the record but had seen Natural Information Society before, I imagined their reaction similar to mine when I first heard descension, that this ebullient sax-led forward march was closer to Sons of Kemet than to the hypnosis of Mandatory Reality. Brown’s playing was perhaps a steadier shade, a more consistently soulful bastion of joy as compared to Parker’s all-over-the-place proclamations of celebration and mourning. There is certainly an aspect of solemnity and sociopolitical resistance in descension, whether projected in context or intended. In the liner notes of the record, Chicago artist and professor Theaster Gates writes, referencing Parker’s circular breathing, “Breathing in the wake of George Floyd’s death then takes on a new dysfunction – a new tonal idiom. To be choked or to be unbalanced, for a note to be held back or a sound to be silenced, no longer feel like jazz devices, but rather, a reaction to the complexities that occur on our streets & in our cities.” It was, then, extra reflective to hear this composition outside in downtown Chicago; whereas you can really only tell the recording is live after hearing the crowd cheer following a particularly skronking Parker solo, hearing woodwinds in conjunction with everything from street chatter to sirens was thematically consonant rather than tonally dissonant.

Of course, all the wonderful aspects of the recording--Avery’s thumping cowbell gallop, Alvarado’s polyrhythms, the lead tenor saxophone and Stein fluttering in tandem or in a call and response--were still there. There’s a playful quality to descension, too, as it threatens to quiet only to build back up, convincing you it’s about to emphasize the harmonium and saxophone before Abrams’ twangy guimbri comes full circle. That Natural Information Society continues to defy expectations on a composition like descension is simply astounding.

And Drum Divas came to, in the words of lead vocalist Dorothy Sunshine Lyles, “lift the vibrational frequency.” As the entire 8-piece band came out gradually, their songs emphasized the rewards of patience. They had peaks and valleys, sure, but it was the almost ecstasy of their percussive and vocal harmonies, fully formed, that was the highlight of their set. They fed off of each other’s energy as much as the crowd’s, swiftly changing tempos, adding and subtracting as skillfully as someone with a loop pedal. Like Natural Information Society, they aimed to spread joy almost to combat the current state of seemingly ever-present turmoil. For every gentle, woodwind-imbued moment, the band would pick the crowd back up with dynamism. The faint vocals and distant trilling of Lyles and Sapphire and assorted djembe, frame drum, and mallet percussion playing and even clapping made the beats sound ever-more expansive, making you believe that these women could, actually, journey to the cosmos and back.

[mistersenorlovedaddy]

v/a “soul jazz 7 islam”

[gustojazz-blog]

Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio - Where do you want to go. From  Alika Rising!, 1990.

Bass – Malachi Favors

Drums – Kahil El'Zabar

Saxophone – Ari Brown

[mollusksurfshop]

This week we'll be featuring some photos from Jack Coleman's recent trip to Australia during the making of his new film, The Zone. The Zone, centered around the utopian placement of ones self on a wave where one is positioned on the power source of a wave, not necessarily in the barrel but definitely in the pocket, compressed, preferably on a board that doesn't require much dilly-dallying to produce speed, while traversing across the ocean's surface at the same rate as the wave... http://mllu.sk/1wrUolj