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Playing a French double manual harpsichord at the head of an ensemble, like gummy sap Léo Dupleix shapes pure intervals into sweet melodic patterns and shimmering harmonic planes. The clarinetist Harry Skoler assembles a winning rhythm section with Joel Ross on vibes, Dezron Douglas on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums as Red Brick Hill revisits childhood haunts and lingering traumas, with Marquis Hill adding his trumpet to the emotionally diminished ‘blue, mostly’ about the loss of a friend.
Oded Tzur emanates his unique tenor whisper on My Prophet, as the drummer Cyrano Almeida joins Nitai Hershkovits on piano and Petros Klampanis on bass to round out the saxophonist’s latest quartet. Well used to expanding the sound palette of their instruments through electronics, field recordings and other processes, the experimental cellist Lia Kohl and the guitarist Daniel Wyche dive headlong into the ephemera of the cinema, with Wyche describing their split album Movie Candy through a series of poignant reminiscences:
‘It’s about remembering what candy wrappers look like and how those carpets are kind of mesmerizing and the smell of slightly old popcorn and random small details that no one ever thought would matter much get stuck in your mind for years and take on lives of their own, and about how you can have an image of a scene or a line or a feel from a film you can’t remember and still can’t remember and probably will never recall the title but you watched it there on the couch in some half daylight as a kid while grownup life was going on around you and you can still smell the room but still can’t remember the title because it was an old obscure black and white anyway and decades of randomly searching the internet with a half baked description have never paid off so you just think of something else for a title but work with the description and how that all feels.’
The veteran trumpeter Frank London has played with everyone from Lester Bowie to Allen Ginsberg and from LL Cool J to Mel Tormé to La Monte Young yet he continues to stay busy at the intersection of klezmer and the downtown jazz scene, helping to revitalise the Jewish tradition through the formation of The Klezmatics in the mid-eighties and continuing to reside in the East Village with his wife Tine Kindermann, a visual artist and fellow musician.
Inspired by Jewish prayers and some of the jazz records which defined him, like Charles Mingus’s Changes One and Changes Two, Booker Little’s ‘Strength and Sanity’, Clifford Thornton’s The Gardens of Harlem and Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, the El Daoud, his latest record Spirit Stronger Than Blood with The Elders is dedicated to friends and colleagues who have died from blood diseases and other cancers, as London himself was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, a rare bone marrow blood cancer, four years ago. On the eve of his bone marrow transplant, a fare-well celebration was held for the artist at Roulette on Monday, while Spirit Stronger Than Blood finds him in fine fettle particularly on the stirring and cinematic title track, where he is joined by Hilliard Greene on bass, Newman Taylor Baker on drums and Greg Wall on saxophone.
The trio of Chris Corsano, Sylvie Courvoisier and Nate Wooley share salt as Catalytic Sound reissues a set from back in 2016, from Paris by way of Finland the Fusion mes Couilles founder Emma dj issues twelve effortless stabs of post-bloghouse electronics which skirt the margins yet might still find their way to the heart of the club, over warped bass and kicks the Infinite Quest co-founder AUCO revels in heady spring dreams, while Julian Lage delights in the crossing of wires between gospel hymnals and the rural blues.
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Léo Dupleix – ‘Resonant Tree I’
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Frank London – ‘Spirit Stronger Than Blood’
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Lia Kohl – ‘The Scene with One Tender Memory’
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Chris Corsano, Sylvie Courvoisier and Nate Wooley – ‘Tall Stalks’
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