Friday, March 4, 2011

More Vandermark

My current passion is the DKV Trio: Hamid Drake on drums; Kent Kessler on bass; and Ken Vandermark on reeds.  DKV Trio discs are not easy to come by.  The eMusic folks have never heard of em, and there is nothing on Amazon.  I was able to order a couple directly from the label: Okka Disc.  They arrived by mail in less than four days. 

Trigonometry is a two disc set documenting a live performance in Rochester, New York and Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Although the discs are broken up by titled "index points", the liner notes inform us that each performance is really one long stream of music.  It works pretty much the same.  I wouldn't rank this quite as high as the Live at Chicago and Wels disc I reviewed recently, but it is superb anyway.  A lot of the music is abstract, as one would expect, but this morning when I listened to the first twenty minute cut I found myself slapping my knees and groovin down to the bedrock.  This is free jazz with a feelin. 

DKV Trio/Fred Anderson adds a tenor sax to make one mean quartet.  It is, frankly, more accessible than some of the stuff on the Trig disc.  It is very solid free jazz. 

I added a couple cuts from Trigonometry and one from the Fred Anderson disc to my Live365 page.  I also added a cut from the Vandermark 5 album, Elements of Style


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