Tag: Adam O'Farrill

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Like a trickster or shapeshifter the bassist Mali Obomsawin slips easily between popular and jazzier forms. As a composer she can be fierce and incantatory, erecting songs that are defiant and accusatory while leaving the listener in their thrall. A citizen of Odanak First Nation, an Abenaki community located near the mouth of the Saint-François River in Quebec, on Sweet Tooth her debut as a bandleader she blended traditional music and indigenous mythology with contemporary chants and squalls of free improvisation...

For roughly half of the year I listened to everything, almost or near enough. Then I wilted, or the opposite of that, for come the summer I perked up in my stool and began to listen to summer ambiances like the chirping of birds, the splashing of hose pipes and water pistols or the sizzling of a barbecue. As...

Already this year Mary Halvorson has starred alongside Sylvie Courvoisier for the spellbinding and spine tingling Bone Bells where she trifled whimsically with flamenco strums and dove headlong into grungy riffs round and about her familiar circuitous matter while Courvoisier on her piano rose steeply or dashed off runaway keys. Widely experimental, meditative and even moving amid all of...