Four times per year, Silver Spring, Maryland based label Cuneiform Records usually releases four new titles of adventurous music. Latest bunch seems really strong.
Crazy times call for outrageous music, and few jazz ensembles are better prepared to meet the surreality of this reality-TV-era than the antic and epically creative Ed Palermo Big Band. The New Jersey saxophonist, composer and arranger is best known for his celebrated performances interpreting the ingenious compositions of Frank Zappa, an extensive body of work documented on previous Cuneiform albums.
But his fifth project for the label, The Great Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2, is a love letter to the rockers who ruled the AM and FM airwaves in the 1960s via successive waves of the British Invasion. Featuring largely the same stellar cast of players as last year’s gloriously eclectic One Child Left Behind, the 18-piece EPBB lovingly reinvents songs famous and obscure, leaving them readily recognizable and utterly transformed. The first installments in what he hopes to be an ongoing project, these two volumes give a whole new meaning to 'swinging London'.
You can hear demanding vocal or instrumental versions of songs by Cream, Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, King Crimson, The Beatles, ELP or Radiohead on this album.
Chicago / London Underground presents first meeting of core duo of Chicago Underground Collective, cornet player Rob Mazurek and drummer Chad Taylor (both uses also electronics) with prominent London improvisers, pianist Alexander Hawkins and bassist John Edwards, recorded live at Café OTO in London, April 2016. The result named A Night Walking Through Mirrors is an expansive sonic adventure whose every unexpected note and alchemical reaction runs counter to the limited imaginations ruling social media name-calling and clannish provincialism.
album on bandcamp
The other releases are new albums by another Americans, experimental jazz oriented The Microscopic Septet and avant-prog combo Thinking Plague.
more info and music to hear on each title bandcamp page or at www.cuneiformrecords.com
(Created with use of Cuneiform promo materials)
