Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
Traditional Japanese instruments meet rare groove?? Yes, please!
From Wamono’s Bandcamp site:
Following the already classic Wamono A to Z trilogy, we are delighted to present an exceptional collection of jazz funk / rare groove tunes recorded in the mid-seventies at the Nippon Columbia studios by three giants of Japanese music: arranger Kiyoshi Yamaya, koto legend Toshiko Yonekawa and shakuhachi master Kifu Mitsuhashi.
The album is slated for release on January 28, 2022.
What a beautifully bleak, baroque piece of pop-music. You don’t hear too much of the Tindersticks‘ soul-inflected sound on this album, What you get, instead, is music that pulls from folk, goth (yes, if you can believe it), and even hints of work from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. The orchestration is deep, Stuart A. Staples‘ voice is filled with pathos, and as heartbreaking as the songs feel, it makes for a glorious listen.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne is a fine cellist from Canada. He weaves together contemporary classical music, post-rock, post-metal and even some hints of ambient. From Raphael’s Bandcamp site:
“Realizing Worlds Within in the studio was more of a process of discovery rather than one of conscious creation. Long after its release, I felt that I was still getting to know the music and understand its nature. Learning to recreate the album live was an extension of this process which has taken me full circle, back to the initial impulse from which this music took seed, much in the same way that the record itself has a cyclical journey that ends where it started, rather than a linear path.”
Lotus are an instrumental post-rock/post-metal band out of Pune, India. They have a pleasantly heavy groove that has a lot of more modern progressive rock influences. A solid EP.
Andrey Vasilyev (Piano, Guitars, Effects) recorded a sublime lo-fi drone folk album in February 2021. It’s a wispy album out of Russia that remind me of a grungier take on relaxing psychedelic music.
Our dear friends at CPL-Musik released quite a gem of an album from 2016 that I am only now digging into. Bube Dame König is a German folk group which was founded in 2013. The band mixes German-language folk songs with traditional Irish and Swedish music as well as their own songs, some of which are based on local legends from the group’s hometown, Halle (Saale). From Wikipedia, “The group itself describes its style as new folk music, based on the genre of new folk music.” It seems to be rather perfect Christmas music, or at least wonderful for this chilly winter season.
Antonovka Records have had an astounding year releasing not only music from Russia’s hinterlands and Central Asia, but even from places like Georgia. This album documents music by Kurdish-speaking Yezidis, who suffered horribly over the past few years in places like Iraq and Syria. Koma Stark play traditional Yezidi folk songs, and they currently reside in Tbilisi, Georgia.
I can’t say for sure if Evgeny Ponomarev’s 2021 release, Clockwise, counts as spiritual jazz, but it is holding it’s own as one of the best jazz releases of the year. Ponomarev plays piano, and is solidly supported by a large cast, incuding:
Andrey Polovko — tenor saxophone (1-6), soprano saxophone (2) Grigory Voskoboynik — double bass
Peter Mikheev — drums (1-6), percussion (1,4)
Pavel Ilushin — guitar (4)
Peter Vostokov — cornet (2)
Anton Gimazetdinov — trombone, tuba (2)
Davy Spillane is now the reigning undisputed champion of the uillean pipes, Ireland’s most iconic instrument, after the passing away of the legendary Chieftain, Paddy Moloney. This was a fine tune to wake up to.
Land Of Waves, the 6th album by French electroacoustic composer Bérangère Maximin, came out in June of 2020, and when I first heard it, was was left utterly impressed, but I have not had a chance to review it until today. Maximin has an incredible talent to blend together nature, minerals, plant life, animal life, city life, and make it speak in one warmly organized opus. I will have to check if she has released something since then, but, as this is the latest work I can find from her, I can say with some measure of confidence that she’s coming ever-closer to the peak of her creative powers. When all is said and done, her body of work will be looked at with the same regards as Henry, Bayle and Schaeffer.
From her Bandcamp Site:
“Land of Waves”: three words evoking territories of plains and curves connected with each other by canals, footpaths, tunnels. The four parts of the album lead the listener into a hybrid land where the jungle meets the city … a succession of reliefs, surfaces, textures, layers create a large mosaic as if on a concrete wall which seems solid and definitive but is in fact penetrable, alterable.
For “Land of Waves”, BÉRANGÈRE MAXIMIN took inspiration from recordings she did in various city parks, abandoned properties and limits with the suburbs during her travels in Europe, the diversity of sources, the variations of events and the contrasts between day and night they offered, and reinterpreted them in the studio.