WorldMusicMix: Billie Davies(USA)-Thinking of Marie Laveau

Billie Davies-Thinking of Marie Laveau

Billie Davies to release a single, recorded in 2016 in New Orleans at her Terrytown studio, scheduled for release on September 27, 2024.

“Thinking of Marie Laveau”
Closing of a series of original albums and mostly freely improvised music that was created in New Orleans: “Hand In Hand In The Hand Of The Moon”, “On Hollywood Boulevard”, “Perspectives”, “Whadeva” and “On Hollywood Boulevard (Live at The Mint in New Orleans), there was one that still had to be published and preserved for the future.
A piece of music, a work of art, created very spontaneously in 2016. It was created there with her very favorite musicians living in New Orleans and with whom she recorded many beautiful works of art and performed with many times as a trio/quartet/quintet. She wanted it published, she wanted it preserved for eternity.
Billie Davies decided to close of her time in New Orleans and the music that was created there with her magical trio with “Thinking of Marie Laveau”, one of the very first original works she recorded on her electronic drumset, they played and recorded it so very well in 2016. The same trio she later recorded “On Hollywood Boulevard” and “Perspectives” with, the same trio she performed with all over New Orleans.
While Billie and Evan were waiting for Oliver to get ready, Billie just suddenly started this play on her toms in a certain kind of a rhythmic/melodic way and a few beats later Evan got inspired and started playing the trombone and the keys… and a little bit later in the music you can hear Oliver joining in… as if everything was meant to be this way.
A totally spontaneous and freely improvised creation in the moment.
Billie was thinking and expressing her momentary feelings on the drums and as if Evan could read her thoughts he expressed an atmosphere and melodic accents as if it were meant to be, poetry. When one lets this music in, when one surrenders to it, one can see people dancing around a fire at midnight, one feels the secret inner belly of spiritual New Orleans, one feels the primeval and tribal spirits and energies that are still present today, it makes one think of Halloween and Mardi Gras… brought to your ears and fantasies by these very talented musicians in a very sultry, sensuous, rhythmic and magical way.

That is also why Billie ended up calling it “Thinking of Marie Laveau”, she felt her then, it made her think about her and about New Orleans and it still does.
She has finaly come around to publishing it to a larger audience as a single… Thank you.


Title: “Thinking Of Marie Laveau”
Release Artist: Billie Davies.
Release Date: 09/02/2024
Free Improvisation from the studio.
Genre: Jazz, Fusion.
Mood: Sultry, Sensuous, Tribal, Rhythmic, Spiritual.
Musicians & Composers: Billie Davies on electronic drums, Evan Oberla on keys and trombone, Oliver Watkinson on electric bass.
Recording: Mike Davies
Mixing: Mike Davies & Billie Davies
Mastering: Mike Davies
Label: Independent
Distributed in the US and Canada with ReverbNation
Published at ReverbNation, Bandcamp

09/02/2024
Billie Davies PR
http://www.billiedaviesmusic.com

WorldMusicMix

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2023: Florian Arbenz- Greg Osby- Arno Krijger – Conversation #9 – Targeted

Florian Arbenz- Greg Osby- Arno Krijger - Conversation #9 - Targeted

Conversation #9 – Targeted” is the latest release of the series of collaborations with like-minded felow musicians initiated by Swiss drummer Florian Arbenz. While the presence of the renowned American saxophonist Greg Osby is not new on these series, Dutch Hammond impressive organist Arno Krijger came on board for the first time, and it must be acknowledged that he succeeds greatly in making his mark.

We hear six pieces nicely integrated into the tapestry of the album, three of them are originals. The three musicians came together to form a solid band that transmits energy and enables their abilities to soar with crystal-clear clarity.

The opener, Eddie Harris’s Freedom Jazz Dance is once more revisited (it was already included on Arbenz’previous Comversations albums) receiving a powerful treatment, breathtaking saxophone and muscular organ solos powered by Arbenz’s solid, imaginative drumming. Sleeping Mountain, composed by Arbenz, takes listeners on a cosmic musical ride with the saxophone weaving intricate lines that glide through the atmosphere, while the organ provides a rich and textured backdrop sustained by Arbenz’s sensitive drumming, building energy just when it’s needed.
Vertical Hold brings forward Greg Osby as a composer while improvising in full swing backed by Arbenz’s galvanic beats. Seven Steps To Heaven by Victor Feldman, takes off with an energetic drum solo into which Arno Krijger‘s organ gradually slips, the fiery duet that follows has jazz-rock qualities. I Loves You Porgy receives a new sonic aesthetic due to Osby’s fluid lyricism to which the organ adds an enigmatic edge. Old Shaman ending the album a hyper thunderous three way improvisation played with the greatest finesse and beauty.

An album that will delight any listener willing to hear three virtuosos unleashing their imagination and skills.

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JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2023

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2022: Florian Arbenz, Jorge Vistel, Wolfgang Puschnig, Oren Marshall, Michael Arbenz-Conversation #8 – Ablaze

Arbenz- Vistel- Puschnig- Marshall- M. Arbenz - Conversation #8 - Ablaze

Swiss composer and drummer Florian Arbenz’s Conversations series continues with “Ablaze”, a new album where is joined by British tuba musician Oren Marshall, Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig, Swiss pianist Michael Arbenz and Cuban trumpet player Jorge Vistel.

As always his drumming spans a wide spectrum of tonalities and rhythms, ranging from organic, free-flowing beats to strong strokes, which offers this all-star multinational gathering of talents support and vitality.

Right from the start British tuba player Oren Marshall showcases his prowess giving strength and heart to the interaction. On the opening track, “Catch Me If You Can,” the tuba’s rich, resonant tones support Florian Arbenz‘s inventive drumming and the vivacious free discussion between the trumpet and saxophone.

“Rivulets” starts off gently with the tuba soloing an amazing “throat singing”-like intro, followed by saxophone, and trumpet playing in unison, building further into a jazzy blues crescendo with all players dancing gleefully, before making room for exuberant saxophone and trumpet solos.
The lyrical highlight of the set is “Choral,” a gorgeous impressionistic work in which the melodic piano unfolds with all its splendour.

In full force “The Mirror” follows, the entertaining melodic line sustained by tuba introducing thrilling saxophone and trumpet solos. Freedom Dance present on Arbenz’s previous albums, gets new clothes reaching a big band quality full of surprises with Puschnig playing hojok (a Korean wind instrument). On “Wild flower,” a minimalist velvety ballad with moments of brilliance from Vistel’s trumpet, the pianist Michael Arbenz shines once more.

The free-form “Insight Straight” rounds up the seven-piece performance with a creative tour de force in which all the instruments combine their creative forces to produce an amalgam of unexpected sonorities.
Strongly advised for jazz lovers open to a “burning” artistic adventure.

Bandcamp

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2022

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2023: Jean-Michel Pilc(France)-Album: Symphony (Justin Time Records)

Jean-Michel-Pilc-SYMPHONY
Jean-Michel Pilc
Nouvel album Symphony
Sortie le 17/02/2023 chez Justin Time Records
Le pianiste de jazz Jean-Michel Pilc est de retour avec son nouvel album Symphony qui sort le 17/02/2023 sur le label canadien Justin Time Records. Ce disque est né d’une séance d’improvisation en solo en 2021 au studio OJM au Portugal. Ce jour-là, sur un piano Steinway, Jean-Michel Pilc se laisse porter et emporter par un flux créatif, comme un voyage qui le fait quitter de son propre aveu le monde réel, et qu’il nous fait partager aujourd’hui.
Il n’y a peut-être pas de pianiste de jazz plus diversifié et imprévisible, d’une chanson à l’autre, que Jean-Michel Pilc” a déclaré Thomas Conrad de JazzTimes. 

Célébré depuis déjà de nombreuses années pour la qualité de ses improvisations, le pianiste et compositeur Jean-Michel Pilc s’est produit avec de nombreux géants du jazz. Né à Paris et aujourd’hui citoyen américain, il a joué avec de nombreux géants du jazz tels que Roy Haynes, Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman, Jean Toussaint, Marcus Miller, ou John Abercrombie pour n’en citer que quelques-uns. On découvre aujourd’hui un extrait de l’album Symphony avec cette vidéo live enregistrée à Montréal au Crescent.

 Pour regarder la vidéo de Symphony :https://youtu.be/djk4fjCqj-k
This is one of two short excerpts from the The Crescent Inc. – a Montreal based concert live-streaming and content production company catering to artists and musicians. Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5h5W… “There may be no more diverse, unpredictable jazz piano player, song to song, than Jean-Michel Pilc.” – Thomas Conrad, JazzTimes Born in 1960 in Paris, now an American citizen, self-taught pianist and composer Jean-Michel Pilc has performed with numerous jazz giants such as Roy Haynes, Michael Brecker and Dave Liebman to name a few.

“Jean-Michel Pilc travaille sans filet.  Pianiste-compositeur prolifique et improvisateur étonnant, il excelle par sa constante créativité et nous offre des spectacles en solo à couper le souffle” DownBeat Né à Paris, Jean-Michel Pilc a un talent qui est le fruit d’une grande imagination et d’une sensibilité intrépide dans la découverte musicale. Autodidacte, il joue avec liberté et clarté dans la palette sonore et harmonique. Riche d’une nombreuse discographie solo, Jean-Michel Pilc a également joué avec de nombreux musiciens comme Richard Bona, Aldo Romano, Martial Solal, André Ceccarelli et bien d’autres.

Dans son dernier album Symphony, Jean-Michel Pilc met en avant cette liberté et cette témérité. La naissance du projet remonte à novembre 2021 : “Juste après l’enregistrement de l’album Contradictio du saxophoniste espagnol Xose Miguelez, j’ai été inspiré par les conditions parfaites des studios OJM au Portugal – un magnifique Steinway, une acoustique et des paramètres techniques parfaits. J’ai alors décidé qu’il était temps de faire une session « mémorable » dans le cadre de mon projet solo. Alors Xose et José Trincado, notre ingénieur du son, ont eu la gentillesse de me laisser jouer et improviser librement sur ce piano et de tout enregistrer. Uniquement porté par la musique, j’ai alors commencé. Lorsque l’inspiration s’installe, vous quittez le « monde réel » et la musique vous entraîne dans un nouvel univers totalement unique. C’est exactement ce qui est arrivé, et la dernière note jouée, tout le monde était si enthousiaste qu’ils ont généreusement proposé de le mixer et de le remastériser avec soin pour une sortie ultérieure, qui selon eux, était inévitable.

Improvisateur surdoué, Jean-Michel Pilc a travaillé avec Harry Belafonte en tant que directeur musical et pianiste et a interprété un duo avec la légendaire chanteuse d’opéra Jessye Norman. Interprète solo actif sur la scène internationale, Jean-Michel a sorti quatre disques de piano solo acclamés par la critique. Il se produit régulièrement en trio avec des ensembles montréalais et new-yorkais dans les meilleures salles des deux villes L’album Symphony, né de cette séance miraculeuse d’improvisation en solo sort le sur le label Justin Time Records.


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JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2023

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2022: Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet(USA)-The Emissary

Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet(USA)-The Emissary
Composer Alex Coke
Album name: The Emissary
Label: PlayOn Records

Carl Michel guitar, Elaine Barber harp. Bob Hoffnar pedal steel, James Suter bass, Carolyn Trowbridge vibes
Performing compelling music with origins in jazz, classical, folk, extended technique, and improvisation, this unique ensemble is an outgrowth of Coke and Barber’s popular weekly Driveway Concert Series that ran from April 2020 through June 2021. The ensemble explores the compositions of Paul Motian, Hildegard von Bingen, Huddie Ledbetter, Alex Coke & Carl Michel.
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JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2022

World Music Mix: Tom Rodwell – Album: Wood & Waste (2021)

TOM RODWELL TO RELEASE WOOD & WASTE (Fireplace Recordings / October 22, 2021)

Writerly Taste And Crossover Vision Forms Decadent LP By UK Blues/Spirituals Guitarist

Tracked on tape At Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, New Zealand, via The Who’s old Neve Console, Wood & Waste is an entirely analog production with no digital conversion at any stage. Mastering and lacquer cut from 1/2” mixdown tapes. First run of 500 x 180gram LP’s by Pallas, Germany.

Auckland, New Zealand August 2021—Novelists famously use their day jobs for material—guitarist Tom Rodwell mines his crossover blues career with a writerly taste for the surreal on Wood & Waste, a decadent and charmingly outré collection, released on October 22 2021.

An English artist presently moored in New Zealand, Rodwell’s revival of blues music as a vehicle for dance has been supple enough to embrace rhythms from spirituals and calypso, and seen him support acts like Otis Taylor, C.W. Stoneking and Leon Russell. (“Beautiful tunes, beautiful groove—you don’t hear that anymore,” said Derek Trucks). A parallel career as a session player has seen him moonlight live and on record for artists as diverse as Lonnie Holley, Robert Lamm and Don McGlashan, and delve into a host of avant-jazz projects.

In his own songs, Rodwell’s secret weapon is feel. “All the clues to a song are contained in the first bars of a primitive rhythm guitar part, it’s my job to inhabit that space and gradually tease the rest out,” he says. “You just have to pay attention when a song makes a left hand turn.”

Consequently his songs resemble ragged short stories, cobbled-together genres from an alternate history. “The aim is to locate each song in a very specific room of its own, with contrasting feels like layers of paint or old wallpaper. That can result in a take that’s seductive and seasick all at once.”

Lyrically, the slip of the tongue is right at home on Wood & Waste – many of the numbers speak in a late-night jumble of double entendres and stream of consciousness. “I want to give the subconscious some legroom,” Rodwell says. “And to me a song is successful when the exact tone is hard to name, like the feeling of a strange dream you only half recall.”

The record opens with a slow-mo slab of ‘misanthropic gospel’—“Don’t Be a Fugitive All Your Life” finds a Randy Newmanesque unreliable narrator admonishing his buddies from beneath a hangover of overcooked reverb, slippery slide guitar, and ramshackle percussion.

The percussion is from Chris O’Connor and Jeff Henderson, notorious New Zealand free jazz multi-instrumentalists. They turn it loose on the absurdist one-chord freak-out “Touch Me Like a Teddybear”, with booming marching drum and splashing hi-hat pitted against Rodwell’s unhinged guitar. “It’s perversely satisfying having these jazzmen churn out this meaningless bubblegum,” Rodwell jokes. Meanwhile his own elaborate rig adds a shimmering polyphony—multiple amps and a revolving Leslie speaker creating the illusion of a bass player.

Improvisation is a key theme of Wood & Waste, where frequently a skeletal idea transforms into a fleshy dance rhythm. “Keep on Knockin’” subverts a determined Bo Diddley beat with dissonant Mellotron in praise of Edward Hopper and William Morris. “Plenty Time” is a species of prog rhumba set in Roman Britain, indebted to Nigerian giant King Sunny Ade. Elsewhere there’s satirical funk on “Small Town”, the Beach Boys-bossa of “Make Believe” and mythic doo-wop on “Carry On”.

The album’s centrepiece is “She Got Me Boiling”, a juggernaut of psychedelic calypso welded to mindless riffs on cannibalism that would make the Mighty Sparrow blush. Driven by a bass-heavy guitar pulse and animated carnival drums, it’s a fiendishly irresistible piece of music. Against that lusty fever-dream, a sickly waltz of slide and synth evokes the intergenerational nightmare of war—“Dead End Road” a reminder as the album closes that music is concerned with pain as much as pleasure.

Wood & Waste was tracked and mixed entirely on tape without click-track or edits at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, an analog sanctuary built around The Who’s old Neve console. The discipline in the studio sparked alchemy in the sessions. “Using tape means making decisions without a digital safety net, and living with the consequences,” says Rodwell. He produced Wood & Waste alongside the safe hands and cool head of Raphael Mann (Frizz Records, Mr Hudson & The Library), with engineering by Jordan Stone and analog mastering and lacquer from LA legend Kevin Gray (Blue Note, The Beach Boys). The first run of the LP (care of Pallas, Germany) is the end product of an entirely analogue signal chain.

Rodwell’s first full-length was 2012’s Live Humble, an inward-looking set of spirituals, work songs and self-described “oddball improvisations”. “Live Humble was a warping of tradition. The new record is liberated from it.”

Wood & Waste is what used to be called a cult record – a set of warmly anarchic influences and timeworn qualities that is Tom Rodwell’s trademark.

For more information: https://tomrodwell.com/
Press Contact: Kim Grant | KG Music Press | Kim@kgmusicpress.com | 626-755-9022
US Radio: David Avery Powderfinger | David@powderfingerpromo.com
Euro PR/Radio Peter Holmstedt, Hemifran | Peter.Holmstedt@telia.com
UK PR/Radio Joe Cushley, Balling the Jack | JoeCushley@yahoo.co.uk

World Music Mix

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2021: Big Space(Canada)-Album: In Relation To

Big Space(Canada)-Triptrap
Composer: Grant King, Ian Murphy, Ashley Chalmers
Album:  In Relation To

Big Space is an instrumental jazz-rock trio Newfoundland & Labrador featuring Grant King (guitar), Ian Murphy (bass) and Ashley Chalmers (drums). The band’s music blends jazz and improvisation with genres like post-rock, math rock and progressive rock. “Triptrap” is the first single from their upcoming album “In Relation To”, which releases October 22, 2021. The song is a good representation of the trio’s style, ranging from contemporary jazz fusion to instrumental rock and atmospheric soundscapes, with plenty of improvisation.
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JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2021