The Lounge Lizards : "Queen of all ears"

(Strange & Beautiful Music, 1998)

John Lurie's so-called "non-jazz" approach is in full flower on this fascinating record. The ever-growing (nine-piece at this point) band builds layers of rhythm and melody with unique effect throughout. On "The Birds Near Her House," a serpentine melodic line weaves through a steady rhythmic bed, building to a frenetic climax. "Scary Children" is a foreboding dirge that still manages to exude true humor. Perhaps that is the most significant aspect of this music: it has real character and life. It doesn't just groove — it starts a conversation.

Tim Sheridan (Allmusic)

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The Foetus symphony orchestra : "York"

(Big Cat, 1997)

This recording was conceived by J.G. Thirlwell and Lydia Lunch as a travelogue and exploration of DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), site of the notorious Farragut Housing Projects. These projects have been called the most dangerous in New York City, and J.G. Thirlwell resides and works next to them to this day.
First Exit To Brooklyn (aka York, a reference to the nearby York Street subway stop, also a thematic link to J.G. Thirlwell's obsession with four letter one syllable LP titles) is a meditation and catalogue of DUMBO's crime, it's denizens, it's violence and oppression, it's industrial and human waste based on ten years of first hand experience.
It was performed from a lateral libretto consisting of emotive cues and descriptions of form, format and tempo along with pre-composed music themes, which were then fleshed out and improvisatorily elaborated on by an amazing and eclectic ensemble of musicians. Composed and conducted by J.G. Thirlwell, the musicians also took cues from 9 synchronized kitchen clocks - one per member - and each other.
The musicians involved encompass a veritable who's who of the New York music scene, including Foetus live band veterans Brian Emrich (Furnace), Vinnie Signorelli (Swans, Unsane), David Ouimet (Motherhead Bug, Cop Shoot Cop, Firewater) and Kurt Wolf (Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Loudspeaker, Emma Peel). Aided and abetted by the abundant talents of Steven Bernstein (Lounge Lizards, Spanish Fly), Oren Bloedow (Elysian Fields) and Marcus Rojas (Spanish Fly).
All involved were hand-picked for their empathy, musicality and sensitive, sensuous and swinging sensability; despite the fact that virtually none of them had ever met, the chemistry proved to be spot on. The narrative was written and performed by Lydia Lunch, who resided in DUMBO from 1987 until 1990 with partner-in-grime J.G. Thirlwell who composed and sang the lyrics. Both the narrative and lyrics are based on crimes committed on them, crimes observed, crimes against the neighborhood, criminals both reviled and revered and, in one piece, crimes Thirlwell commits upon himself.
York was recorded at the nearby Brooklyn Anchorage, one of the huge stone pillars which supports the venerable structure that is the Brooklyn Bridge. Within the cavernous pillar, which boasts fifty foot ceilings, are numerous vaults and ante chambers. While having previously being used to store discarded tires, it was taken over several years ago by Creative Time, a New York arts foundation, who have each summer been curating it to stage and display numerous amazing interactive installations, art exhibits, performances, concerts and raves.
Turn off the lights and hide the razor blades.

Enjoy!

(liner notes)

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Joe Gallant Illuminati : "Skin"

(Scratchy, 1990)

1- The Chilling tide (for Frank Smith)
2- Sacred heart (for Kathy Chambers)
3- Courtship
4- Metanoia (for prof. Lesh)
5- Centre street (for the Micros)
6- Belladonna (for Margaret Vititow)
7- Simulacrum (for Helen, Suzanne and Nina Gallant)

musicians :

Joe Gallant : bass
Tomas Ulrich : cello
Michelle Kinney : cello (1,3,5,7)
Phillip Johnson : sax (1,3,5,7)
Hagit Rosmarin : flute (1,3,7)
Steven Bernstein : trumpet (1,3,7)
Denise Puricelli : piano (1,3,7)
Ellen Christi : voice (1,3,7)
Tom Judson : accordion (1,3,7)
Vito Ricci : synthesizer & wrench guitar (1,3,7)
Dick Weller : drums (1,3,7)
Skip Reed : percussion (1,3,4,7)
Mark Feldman : violin (4,5,6)
Dennis Charles : drums (4)
Rashied Ali : drums (4)
Bern Nix : guitar (5)
Joel Forrester : piano (5)
David Hofstra : bass (5)
Richard dworkin : drums (5)
Suzanne Gallant : percussion (1)

Denise Cridge : viola (2,4)
Alex Zisk : violin (2)
Marina Zisk : violin (2)

HERE

When I first heard about Gallant's music, it was described to me as "avant-garde big band music." Although this cheeky description is in some ways accurate, like any label it fails to describe the breadth and flight of his compositions. Best known to Deadheads for his big band arrangements of the Grateful Dead albums "Blues For Allah" and "Terrapin Station," Gallant has also created several non-Dead related music projects of unusual beauty. With his band Illuminati, he released "Skin" in 1990, an early effort which evokes the tone poetry of the impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel and draws upon the thrills and difficulties of transforming one's life utterly, that period of transitional limbo and the entry into one's true destiny.

BS: How did music enter your life and consciousness?

JG: The big encounter was hearing a chamber ensemble when I was about 6 years old. They were playing a modern-sounding piece that was like an invitation from my future. I was completely transfixed. It was brilliant-sounding, like a laser lightsource. I took piano lessons at six, guitar lessons at ten, but I didn't hear those instruments inside me enough to embrace them. The next big encounter was my first rock concert: December 30, 1971, The Band at the Academy of Music on 14th street. It blew my mind. I was thunderstruck by the exotic, gypsy-circus vibe, the patchoulli/pot smell, the lights, the awesome hippy chicks! The Band just rocked that night. I knew I wanted to be a part of whatever magic was capable of happening on a stage full of musicians.

BS: And how did you hook up with the bass?

JG: I started "hearing" the bass in Freshman year High School and started playing upright and electric at the same time.

BS: Which bass players have turned you on and inside out over the years?

JG: Starting in 1972: The bass player with Steppenwolf, and Larry Taylor with Canned Heat. Then a few months later, Phil Lesh because I completely dug his approach and tone. He's the first of two bassists who changed and codified the course of my life, without a doubt. I had started trying to plunk out his bass lines on acoustic guitar the year before. Bruce Barlow, from Commander Cody is another important figure. On upright: Charles Mingus, Jean-Jacques Avenel, Alan Silva, Dave Holland, Ray Brown, George Duvivier, Charlie Haden. And, on electric, of course: Jaco Pastorius. What can you say? He changed it all up for all of us. In 1987 I heard my second most important bass influence: Anthony Jackson, a virtuoso who invented the 6-string bass. He's become a friend and teacher. I guess it's fair to say that if you want to hear where I really come from bass-wise, listen to Phil Lesh and Anthony Jackson.

BS: Which composers have particularly influenced your vision?

JG: First, Ingolf Dahl. His "Concerto a Tre" is my favorite composition of all time. Karlheinz Stockhausen, arch experimentalist, working in so many different genres. My favorite pieces are "Zeitmasse," "Telemusik," "Hymnen," and the remarkable "Adieu." I also like Schoenberg, Bartok, Berg, jazz composers like George Russell and Carla Bley and Cecil Taylor, a shimmering landing field of energy and ideas. Bach was a huge influence. Because I didn't study formally with a teacher for the first six years of playing, I would read through the Inventions and Cello Suites and try to imitate that contrapuntal, chordal style on electric.
...

BS: Why the name Illuminati for your band?

JG: I decided on the name in May of1982, while living on East 3rd Street, deriving it from the word "illumination," as used specifically in a text written by the philosopher Francis Bacon: "The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense. The last was the light of reason, and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of his spirit." I wasn't aware of the Robert Anton Wilson "Illuminati" books at that point. A friend turned me onto those books when I told him my choice for a name. I really didn't get much of an initial impression from the actual writing in the books. It seemed too pothead wink-wink for such a seemingly important subject. But I was very intrigued and went on to devour information about the history and legacy of those ideas, which led me through studies of the early Gnostic tradition, Rosicrucian, Masonic and Knights Templar philosophies, and lastly into a very deep and ongoing interest in Alchemy. I collect and read as much on the subject as I can, buying texts wherever I travel and ordering books from all over the US and Europe on a regular basis. Illuminati's music was always meant to be an expression of the spirit, at its metaphysical level, as well as being a continuing diary...
All of my solo CDs are very much about where I was at the time of their writing, gigging and recording. "Skin" (1990) was essentially a smaller-scale chamber writing/jazz disc, with a lot of melodic ideas and modernist string arranging, a bit on the poignant side, Ravel-esque, reflecting my love for my two French Impressionist heroes--Ravel and Debussy--in some of the harmonic aspects. Its music mirrors the period between 1987-90, when I was putting Illuminati back together relatively early in sobriety. It's sort of tenuous and fragile, but well-crafted.

BS: In your opinion what's the most interesting thing happening in the New York City music scene these days?

JG: There's no real high-octane launching-pad scene in NYC at the moment, where you feel swept up in a deep, spontaneous and fertile mission with people on similar explorations. Certainly nothing currently exists in Manhattan as an energy conduit, like, for example, Bebop in the '40s-'50s, or Abstract Expressionism in the '50s, or 1964-66 Warholesque, exploding-inevitable pop and happenings-into-the-free-jazz/'politics of revolution. Remember when there was sincere talk of necessary change for real, from a lot of different corners, in the national air? There's nothing now like the NYC Loft Movement of the late '60s or Punk/New Wave/'No New York in the '70s-early '80s, or the downtown, angular shriekback white hipster arrhythmia of the mid-'80s-The Present. These all began with ideas in fairly pure form, and became codified into scenes in a time of affordable housing (as necessary as laboratory Latin . . . work and prayer space, for committed working artists).
Astronomical rent increases in the mid-'80s, the arrival of yuppie-worship, Eurotrash and dotcom infection, the twisted cancerous fascism of the current mayor, and a generally distracted, disconnected national mindset (suffering from psychic hearing damage caused by the shrill desperate screaming hype of media) all helped kill or stultify anything as fragile (and potentially dangerous) as a new movement.
None of the truly important scenes of recent history would get very far if they were just beginning today, in this climate. I don't mean to sound like an old crank yelling at street signs, and I'm also not announcing anything that's unknown here. These scenes had a very multi-disciplinary mulch bed in which to cross-fertilize--painters, writers, musicians, poets, mixed-media artists, responding organically to the culture, politics and economics of their time, as do all ground zero environments of spontaneous artistic commonality and shared awareness defining a SCENE, as seen for example in the dazzling alembic of post-Beat San Francisco and its historic, never-to-be-repeated development, 1963-69.
...

article (excerpts) by Barry Smolin (2001/09/19 on www.jambands.com)

Aki Onda : "Beautiful contradiction"

(All Access, 1998)

... If anyone who deserves to inherit Ryuichi Sakamoto's role as rootless cosmopolitan, it's Onda. 1998's Beautiful Contradiction CD shares Sakamoto's aesthetic delicacy and networking capacity, with a cast list that includes Brixa Bargeld, French Improv guitarist Noël Akchoté, soundtrack composer Simon Fisher Turner, and on the extraordinary "Do You Remember?", singer Linda Sharrock, wife of the late electric jazz guitarist Sonny. "I was inspired by her voice for a long time," rhapsodies Onda. "It consists of strength and weakness, a fever and ice cold sadness - I thought her voice was a 'beautiful contradiction' in itself. Perfect voice for me. Normally it's not difficult to find someone to work with. If I listen to their sound carefully, I can know them immediately. I just follow my intuition. I saw Noël Akchoté in 1996 or 97, his music was so brilliant and I assumed this guy has a sense that is very close to mine. He knows how to reflect himself in music - he's not just a guitarist."
...
Onda's project sure clock up the air miles: he records in London, Tokyo, Paris, New York. Does he need be on the move to make music? "My imagination is developed in an imaginary space," he muses, "not in a physically existing city such as Tokyo, London, or Paris. Somewhere between two cities. A place maybe existing in a film. Milan Kundera, a Czech writer who now lives in France, his books gave me a good suggestion on this."
...
Escaping into an aesthetic universe revealed to him by his painter mother, and mindful of the hardships he witnessed in Nara's Buraku ghetto of displaced ethnic folk, he bypassed the plasticity 80s New Wave by taking refuge in the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Art Ensemble Of Chicago and Don Cherry. After a few years in London he moved to Osaka, had his mind blown by seeing Otomo Yoshihide's Ground Zero ("The furious sound was so desperate!"), and fell in with screaming singer Yamatsuka Eye (whose group, Boredoms, Onda had once photographed as a teenager) and electronics expert Nobukazu Takemura, forming Audio Sports in 1990. "The mood in Osaka was completely different from Tokyo's: more lively and crazy," he says. "It was a small society and everyone knew each other."
Audio Sports grew from the skewed HipHop of their 1992 debut Era Of Glittering Gas, to the psychotropic brew on 1996's mini-album Strange Emotion, which featured Otomo, rapper D-zine, saxophonist Greg Osby and gender-bending synth player Hoppy Kamiyama. By 1998 onda was ready to strike out on his own; his solo work opens out a space where musicians can spool their contributions into a sound pool. "When I work with musicians in the studio," he says, "I always bring a master plan and try to fix it with them. But sometimes the others have a better idea. And if it's better than mine, I definitely take it. i don't have an interest in a world where everyone has the same idea. I'm not an egoistic tyrant."
"The most important thing in my music," he continues, "[is that] I'm always describing 'personal politics' between individuals. My music exists where their gaze and my gaze cross. When it happens in a studio, I catch it quickly and record it onto a tape. I collect such fragments that really connect to our experience. I try to create a space where voices mingle and overlap. So I think I'm just describing our daily life. I'm always watching for something 'behind the sound'".
If the content of so much electronica refers back only to the tools that constructed it, Onda's poetic sensibility suggests a new expressive range. "I've been questioning whether music evolves from music itself. I stopped thinking about this possibility in 1996. That's why I stopped using the project name Audio Sports. I was playing musical experience and eclectic styles anonymously: a sound game, I think. But what I'm doing now is a mind game."

Rob Young (excerpts from an article in The Wire, September 1999)

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Steven Bernstein + Marcus Rojas + Kresten Osgood : "Tatoos & mushrooms"

(Ilk Music, 2008)

Featuring Steven Bernstein on trumpet & slide trumpets, Marcus Rojas on tuba and Kresten Osgood on drums. Multi-bandleader, arranger and trumpet hero Steve Bernstein never seems to rest. Besides running Sex Mob and the Millennial Territory Orchestra, he has four fabulous discs on Tzadik and has worked with Lounge Lizards, Kamikaze Ground Crew, Max Nagl's Big Four, Satoko Fujii and Mario Pavone. He was also a member of an early downtown trio called Spanish Fly with Dave Tronzo and Marcus Rojas, who still get together on occasion when Tronzo is in town. Since Mr. Tronzo has relocated to the Boston area, Spanish Fly plays gigs with guest members like Ned Rothenberg. Hence this new trio with Marcus Rojas and Danish drum wiz Kresten Osgood, who seems to get around and appears on more discs than I can count. It is Kresten who is the main composer on this disc.
The very first sound you hear on this disc is Marcus playing his tuba like a dijeradoo, making this spooky hum/growl. Besides four originals by Kresten, there are a few select and diverse covers by Charles Brackeen, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus and Hank Williams. Charles Brackeen's "Prince of Night" starts things off and is a perfect opening piece. It has a peaceful, spiritual vibe and a delicate, somber melody. Kresten's skeletal yet seductive "Hope for Denmark" shows how to set the scene with a minimum of notes. It reminds me of how the blues works best with a handful of select notes, where each one counts. Marcus Rojas is a master tuba player with his own distinctive sound and approach. He starts Monk's "Thelonius" by rubbing and tapping on his tuba while he hums of just plays a certain eerie notes. When he switches to the bass line, he sounds totally old school and filled with friendly swagger. "Scaramanga" is an eerie, spacy improvised trio that floats freely and thoughtfully. Kresten's drums are recorded with breathtaking care and are at the center of "Abington". His mallet use is sublime and works well with Steve's haunting muted trumpet and Marcus cosmic droning tuba. Initially I thought that there is nothing that connects Mingus' "Eastcoasting" with Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Both were written in the fifties and played next to each other, they both evoke a certain timeless quality, especially the way the trio turn Hank's song inside out and sent it to the outer space. The feeling that I get from this gem is that it is Kresten that called the shots and organized to session. This is indeed a wonderful job from all three members of this phenomenal trio.

Bruce Lee Gallanter (Downtown Music Gallery)

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Spanish Fly : "Fly by night"

(Accurate, 1996)

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Kamikaze Ground Crew : "Covers"

(Koch Jazz, 1999)

At the rate Kamikaze Ground Crew cranks out albums, we can expect the all-star band's next pit stop around 2006. That's OK, because there's enough musical and emotional content under these Covers to fuel high-altitude listening for years to come. Originally organized to accompany the acrobatic antics of the Flying Karamozov Brothers, KGC recroded its first LP in 1985. Before Covers the rambunctious septet had produces only two other cds, 1990's The Scenic Route and 1993's Madam Marie's Temple of Knowledge. In the meantime, the personnel has shifted about original members Gina Leishman (accordion, saxes, bass clarinet, Hammond organ, vocals) , Doug Wieselman (clarinets, saxes, electric guitar, balalaika, Hammond Organ), and Steven Bernstein (trumpet, slide trumpet). Since the last outing, tenor and soprano saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum has returned (replacing Ralph Carney), and trombonist Art Baron, Tuba player Marcus Rojas, and drummer Kenny Wollesen have come on board.
Whereas previous KGC recordings featured mostly original Leishman and Wieselman compositions, Covers showcases the brilliant way they and Bernstien arrange other people's material. Opening with a dreamy version of a pop tune from Bhutan, Covers turns pieces by Stockhausen, Hendrix ('Electric Ladyland"), Satie, Huey "Piano" Smith ( "Blow Wind Blow" and "Rockin' Pneumonia" ), Eisler and Brecht, and Los Lobos' David Hidalgo into vehicles for extended collective gliding and individual soaring, consistent with the idiosyncratic interpretive styles of other bands that have feartured the players, such as the Lounge Lizards, Spanish Fly, Sex Mob, Heiroglyphics Ensemble and the Carla Bley big band. A hybrid of jazz , modern classical, rock, avant-cabaret, and New Orleans R&B, KGC's music yields pleasure on its own terms, much like that of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Mothers of Invention, or Willem Breuker Kollektief, its bent but beautiful structures providing cover from the mainstream culture's hail of mediocrity.

Derk Richardson

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