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Monday, 21 December 2009 06:00 |
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In my upcoming JazzBag column I discuss Kalle - Signals, the new release by New Haven resident Carl Testa. Carl is perhaps most known as an upright bassist--he's featured on several Anthony Braxton recordings and still tours with the master occassionally--but he also plays bass clarinet and percussion. However, on Signals Testa swings a new ax: The Nintendo Gameboy Micro. No, he's not doing a public Tetris workout, he's composing and performing what everyone else but me seemed to know already was called "8-bit" or "Chiptune." Using the program Nanoloop, which is built on one of those little grey Gameboy cartridges, Testa manipulates the Gameboy's internal soundchip and performs music in real time. Testa, whose new album is available for download at his website, is among many folks performing chiptunes these days. Just last weekend Testa and many other 8-biters attended the Blip Festival in New York. Testa's friend and 8-bit mentor little-scale blogged in detail about it and also posted some video of live chiptune performances, some of which were surprisingly rowdy. little-scale's blog also hosts an academic paper, AUTHENTICITY AND EMULATION: CHIPTUNE IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by Australian chiptuner Sebastian Tomczak. Tomczak suggests that chiptuners' reappropriation of outmoded gear "provides the musicians with a unique-sounding tool for the creative process. On the other hand, the hardware can hold a symbolic strength for many persons involved with chiptune music, from nostalgia to anti-consumerism." Testa performs live with his Gameboy, and some of his recent collaboration with Lou Guarino Jr. (trumpet, steinerphone, synths) and Brian Jarawa Gray (percussion, wiimote/synths, voice) is available for free download here. Some other 8-bit links of interest: Chiptune The 8-bit Collective, where fellow performers freely share their work
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 06:00 |
I've been reading up on Ethiopian jazz lately, and I stumbled into some activity in a new generation of Ethiopian musicians in the U.S. One is an October release by Thomas Gobena, who is known professionally as Tommy T. The Prester John Sessions (Easy Star) is Gobena's first solo effort after three years of playing bass with the theatrical New York gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello, where he is the lone African member amongst a majority of eastern Europeans. The opening track “The Response” has a little bit of a desert blues (a la Ali Farka Toure) vibe to it, but the rest of the album is full of Ethiopian chikchika rhythms crossed with reggae, and melodic horn arrangements that recall Mulatu Astatke's writing circa 1970.
For the unitiated, Astatke became the first Ethiopian musician to study abroad in 1959, when he left his home in Addis Ababa as a teenager to finish high school in the United Kingdom. He went on to study at Trinity College of Music in London, and Berklee College of Music in Boston. When he returned to Ethiopia in 1969, he began to flesh out his “Ethio-jazz” arrangements, which drew on the melodies and rhythms of his birthplace. Like Astatke, Gobena was raised in Addis Ababa. When he was old enough, he followed his elder brother to Washington, D.C. In an interview with musicremedy.com, Gobena indicated his intention to build on the sounds of the golden age of Ethiopian jazz: “In the 70s, funk, wah-wah pedals, and jazz had a huge impact on Ethiopian music. The Prester John Sessions... includes influences and ideas borrowed from the sounds of the 70's with the added bonus of up-to-date production values.”
The Prester John Sessions has given Gobena the chance to synthesize a unique global mix. (He discusses the three-year process of making the album here - with audio.) He taps into the mystical (though not historical) connection between Ethiopia and reggae culture, which grew out of his original D.C. band, the Abyssinian Roots Collective, featured on the new record. (For more on the mythology of Prester John, check this out.) “We’re mostly Ethiopian, so getting the music down was easy,” Gobena says. “I gave them the tunes, and then we improvised the arrangements so the music has an organic feel.” With the updated production and rich studio sounds, the Prester John Sessions sounds a little more like Afrobeat than Ethio-jazz, probably a sign that Gobena's American musical experience has been filled more with jazz funk and fusion, while Astatke's was defined in part by the Latin explosion in New York.
The prevailing consensus among Ethiopian music buffs is that the vitality of Ethio-jazz was stamped out after the 1974 government takeover by the Marxist Derg regime, as many musicians sought exile, mostly in the United States. Many Ethiopians have not returned to Africa, even with the fall of the dictatorship in 1991, and the musicians have either faded into other occupations or continue to perform only in Ethiopian cultural settings such as weddings and restaurants. This community can be very insular, making Gobena's global outlook a striking exception. We hope to hear more from him.
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 06:00 |
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Organ jazz occupies and interesting space in the pantheon of jazz, either the pumping heart of the tradition, sending blood out to various limbs, or the bastard cousin, depending upon whom you ask. Those who argue for its vitality (me, for instance) will point out that over the long history of the instrument's association with jazz, the musicians who played organ (first pipe organ, later Hammond B3) have usually somehow balanced experimentation with the trends du jour with a healthy dose of the blues that defines much jazz. Those on the other side make a similar argument but usually suggest that that experiementation with popular trends "cheapens" the jazz. Frankly, I don't really care about jazz's hifaluten-ness, I just want it to be a great experience. I hope to continue these posts with links to all kinds of great organists, so let's just start with the beginning. As far a my preliminary research shows, Fats Waller was the first person to record jazz on organ when he sat a pipe organ to record a few sides in 1926. Here's a Youtube clip of some of his solo pipe organ recordings from one year later. Great stuff!
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