2006/07/20
Lounge Radio
Nas minhas longas noites de trabalho tenho a companhia de uma net radio Suiça, e que potenciou a criação deste blog... apenas e só porque faz o que não é feito em Portugal, divulga apenas e só as sonoridades lounge.
Visitem... acho que vale uma audição mais apurada!
ENJOY THIS LIGHT SUMMER-PLATE CONSISTING OF FRESH BEATS OF NUJAZZ - DIPPED INTO THE WARMTH OF BRAZIL ELECTRO AND FINALLY SERVED WITH A BREATH OF AMBIENT
http://www.lounge-radio.com by Frederico Dinis [00:23] 1 comments
Visitem... acho que vale uma audição mais apurada!
ENJOY THIS LIGHT SUMMER-PLATE CONSISTING OF FRESH BEATS OF NUJAZZ - DIPPED INTO THE WARMTH OF BRAZIL ELECTRO AND FINALLY SERVED WITH A BREATH OF AMBIENT
http://www.lounge-radio.com by Frederico Dinis [00:23] 1 comments
2006/07/08
Relaxing with The Cinematic Orchestra
Playful. Complex.
Reflective. Intimate.
Elegant. Classic.
The spring sunrise...
Welcome to the nu-jazz audio painting by The Cinematic Orchestra.
Bio
The brilliantly-named Cinematic Orchestra is led by British arranger/composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe, who formed his first group, Crabladder, in 1990 as an art student at Cardiff College.
Crabladder's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms inspired Swinscoe to further explore the possibilities of sampling, and by the time of the group's demise in the mid-'90s, he was DJing at various clubs and pirate radio stations in the UK.
The music he recorded on his own at the time melded '60s and '70s jazz, orchestral soundtracks, rhythm loops and live instrumentation into genre-defying compositions, as reflected on his contribution to Ninja Tune's 1997 "Ninja Cuts 3" collection and his remixes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Coldcut tracks.
The project's full-length debut "Motion" arrived in 1999 to great acclaim, which culminated in the Cinematic Orchestra's performance at the Directors' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony for Stanley Kubrick later that year in London. Whether to categorize "Motion" as a jazz or electronica album is an intriguing conundrum, because it truly turns out to be a combination of both musical forms, and it is an unequivocally brilliant combination, at that.
Swinscoe gathered samples of drum grooves, basslines, and melodies from various recordings and artists that have inspired and influenced him (spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone and Roy Budd's spy film scores, '60s and '70s jazz and soundtrack scores from musicians such as Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Andre Previn, David Rose, and John Morris).
He then presented the samples that he had collected to a group of musicians, the core of which consisted of Tom Chant (soprano sax, electric and acoustic piano), Jamie Coleman (trumpet, flugelhorn), Phil France (bass), and T. Daniel Howard (drums), to learn and then improvise. Those tracks, in turn, were sampled and rearranged by Swinscoe on computer to create the tracks that make up this first Cinematic Orchestra album.
The album bears all of the atmospheric hallmarks of ambient electronica, as well as Swinscoe's soundtrack inspirations and all the improvisational energy of jazz. Most of the songs are built with wave upon wave of repeated loops and instrumental phrases that work into a groove. Yet it feels at any moment as if the music is about to explode, like a steam whistle boiling to its screaming point. On "One to the Big Sea," for example, the same four-note bassline plays over and over with the same ride cymbal rhythm, but instead of seeming rote or mechanical, the riff just seems to continually bubble up and throb, slowly building anticipation and pressure.
Regardless of how they were made, though, the songs on "Motion" are by turns eerie, lush, edgy, expansive, gritty, intensely powerful, and gorgeous. Sometimes an album comes along that forces you to reconfigure and re-evaluate all of the assumptions you had previously made about music in order to realize how vast and endless the possibilities are; this is one of those albums.
Featuring a mix of jazz charts, DJ culture touches, and soundtrack-level layers of sound, Cinematic Orchestra's "Remixes 1998-2000" includes seven reconfigurations of electronica gems from the likes of Kenji Eno, DJ Krust, and Piero Umilani.
Atop their own core sound of bass, drums, and keyboards, the band deftly mixes in samples from the original tracks. The result is a loose-sounding mix of lengthy wide-screen pieces, which conjure up thoughts of Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, Herbie Hancock, and King Tubby.
With "Every Day", Cinematic Orchestra move beyond the electro-jazz fusion of their debut to make a record more natural, more paced, and, surprisingly, better than the justly hyped "Motion". J Swinscoe is more the arranger/conductor here than the producer, but of course, there's little need for samples or effects with such an accomplished band sharing the burden.
For the opener "All That You Give", Swinscoe and Co., plus harp player Rhodri Davies, spend a few minutes delicately paving the way for a deeply felt vocal by soul hero Fontella Bass. "Burn Out" is a lush, meditative track with a pleasantly ambling solo from Phil France on electric piano, a few appropriately cinematic-sounding horns, an age-old vocal sample, and occasional creaking static phasing through. Bass returns for another splendid track ("Evolution"), and the mighty Roots Manuva appears on a magisterial, spoken-word quasi-autobiography, "All Things to All Men".
Except for a pair of detours into highly programmed "broken beat" production, "Every Day" is a textured, acoustic work.
It was just a matter of time before the Cinematic Orchestra received a commission for a film score, but this 2003 release actually dates from 1999.
The genesis of "Man With a Movie Camera" lies in the selection committee of a Portuguese film festival, which asked Cinematic Orchestra to score their re-airing of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film of the same name, a silent Soviet documentary focused on a day in the life of an average worker.
Performed live by the orchestra, "Man With a Movie Camera" doesn't allow Swinscoe to indulge in his usual post-production magic, but it is a surprisingly adept score, with occasional bursts of on-the-one jazz-funk wailing to break it up. Scattered moments of brilliance abound, and at one point, someone on sax comes up with a brilliant foghorn recreation. The Cinematic material lies in '70s astral jazz, with evocative, tremulous work from soprano sax and violin.
Discography
- Motion (1999)
- Remixes 1998-2000 (2000)
- Everyday (2002)
- Man With a Movie Camera (2003)
The sounds and styles heard may not be revolutionary, but instead of simply pushing stylistic boundaries, Cinematic Orchestra display a real gift in making emotional, artistic music.
Playful. Complex. Reflective. Intimate.
Elegant. Classic.
The spring sunrise...
Welcome to the nu-jazz audio painting by The Cinematic Orchestra.
Bio
The brilliantly-named Cinematic Orchestra is led by British arranger/composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe, who formed his first group, Crabladder, in 1990 as an art student at Cardiff College.
Crabladder's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms inspired Swinscoe to further explore the possibilities of sampling, and by the time of the group's demise in the mid-'90s, he was DJing at various clubs and pirate radio stations in the UK.
The music he recorded on his own at the time melded '60s and '70s jazz, orchestral soundtracks, rhythm loops and live instrumentation into genre-defying compositions, as reflected on his contribution to Ninja Tune's 1997 "Ninja Cuts 3" collection and his remixes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Coldcut tracks.
The project's full-length debut "Motion" arrived in 1999 to great acclaim, which culminated in the Cinematic Orchestra's performance at the Directors' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony for Stanley Kubrick later that year in London. Whether to categorize "Motion" as a jazz or electronica album is an intriguing conundrum, because it truly turns out to be a combination of both musical forms, and it is an unequivocally brilliant combination, at that.
Swinscoe gathered samples of drum grooves, basslines, and melodies from various recordings and artists that have inspired and influenced him (spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone and Roy Budd's spy film scores, '60s and '70s jazz and soundtrack scores from musicians such as Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Andre Previn, David Rose, and John Morris).
He then presented the samples that he had collected to a group of musicians, the core of which consisted of Tom Chant (soprano sax, electric and acoustic piano), Jamie Coleman (trumpet, flugelhorn), Phil France (bass), and T. Daniel Howard (drums), to learn and then improvise. Those tracks, in turn, were sampled and rearranged by Swinscoe on computer to create the tracks that make up this first Cinematic Orchestra album.
The album bears all of the atmospheric hallmarks of ambient electronica, as well as Swinscoe's soundtrack inspirations and all the improvisational energy of jazz. Most of the songs are built with wave upon wave of repeated loops and instrumental phrases that work into a groove. Yet it feels at any moment as if the music is about to explode, like a steam whistle boiling to its screaming point. On "One to the Big Sea," for example, the same four-note bassline plays over and over with the same ride cymbal rhythm, but instead of seeming rote or mechanical, the riff just seems to continually bubble up and throb, slowly building anticipation and pressure.
Regardless of how they were made, though, the songs on "Motion" are by turns eerie, lush, edgy, expansive, gritty, intensely powerful, and gorgeous. Sometimes an album comes along that forces you to reconfigure and re-evaluate all of the assumptions you had previously made about music in order to realize how vast and endless the possibilities are; this is one of those albums.
Featuring a mix of jazz charts, DJ culture touches, and soundtrack-level layers of sound, Cinematic Orchestra's "Remixes 1998-2000" includes seven reconfigurations of electronica gems from the likes of Kenji Eno, DJ Krust, and Piero Umilani.
Atop their own core sound of bass, drums, and keyboards, the band deftly mixes in samples from the original tracks. The result is a loose-sounding mix of lengthy wide-screen pieces, which conjure up thoughts of Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, Herbie Hancock, and King Tubby.
With "Every Day", Cinematic Orchestra move beyond the electro-jazz fusion of their debut to make a record more natural, more paced, and, surprisingly, better than the justly hyped "Motion". J Swinscoe is more the arranger/conductor here than the producer, but of course, there's little need for samples or effects with such an accomplished band sharing the burden.
For the opener "All That You Give", Swinscoe and Co., plus harp player Rhodri Davies, spend a few minutes delicately paving the way for a deeply felt vocal by soul hero Fontella Bass. "Burn Out" is a lush, meditative track with a pleasantly ambling solo from Phil France on electric piano, a few appropriately cinematic-sounding horns, an age-old vocal sample, and occasional creaking static phasing through. Bass returns for another splendid track ("Evolution"), and the mighty Roots Manuva appears on a magisterial, spoken-word quasi-autobiography, "All Things to All Men".
Except for a pair of detours into highly programmed "broken beat" production, "Every Day" is a textured, acoustic work.
It was just a matter of time before the Cinematic Orchestra received a commission for a film score, but this 2003 release actually dates from 1999.
The genesis of "Man With a Movie Camera" lies in the selection committee of a Portuguese film festival, which asked Cinematic Orchestra to score their re-airing of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film of the same name, a silent Soviet documentary focused on a day in the life of an average worker.
Performed live by the orchestra, "Man With a Movie Camera" doesn't allow Swinscoe to indulge in his usual post-production magic, but it is a surprisingly adept score, with occasional bursts of on-the-one jazz-funk wailing to break it up. Scattered moments of brilliance abound, and at one point, someone on sax comes up with a brilliant foghorn recreation. The Cinematic material lies in '70s astral jazz, with evocative, tremulous work from soprano sax and violin.
Discography
- Motion (1999)
- Remixes 1998-2000 (2000)
- Everyday (2002)
- Man With a Movie Camera (2003)
The sounds and styles heard may not be revolutionary, but instead of simply pushing stylistic boundaries, Cinematic Orchestra display a real gift in making emotional, artistic music.
Etiquetas: downtempo, lounge, nu-jazz
by Frederico Dinis [23:57] 0 comments
2006/07/03
orbit.experience
Durante os anos, alguns dos trabalhos que adquiro, têm uma história associada...
Por exemplo, um dos melhores albuns da minha colecção foi comprado só porque, durante umas férias vi, repito, vi, num qualquer num bar de praia e num qualquer canal de tv por satélite, um video de um grupo que tinha um trio de baixo, guitarra e trompete, um tipo na "maquinaria" electrónica e um grupo de cordas.
Lembro-me que, como estava num bar, não ouvia o que tocavam, mas o nome chamou-me a atenção: Orbit Experience... fácil de decorar porque gosto muito dos trabalhos de William Orbit, dos Orbital e dos The Orb!
Nessa noite procurei informações na net sobre o projecto, cheguei ao site deles em www.orbitexperience.de e no dia seguinte adquiri o album: orbit.experience - "space.beat" (2000).
Oriundo de Estugarda, na Alemanha, este projecto encaixa-se bem na vanguarda do Nu Jazz europeu.
O virtuosismo dos solos de Sebastian Studnitziky (trompete e rhodes), a alma do baixo de Marküs Kössler, as batidas explosivas de Flo Dauner e o "ambiente" criado pela guitarra (e barulho) de Markus fazem deste album um dos melhores dentro do nu jazz e um marco na produção de jazz alemã.
Destaco dois temas, o tema de abertura "ddr" pelo excelente diálogo entre a trompete e o rhodes, a fazer lembrar o tempo dos grandes "duelos" jazzísticos e o tema bonus "orbit.phase 2", com a participação da Orquestra de Câmara de Estugarda, e que cria um dos melhores temas de Nu Jazz alguma vez produzidos... tema este que foi o tal que me chamou a atenção.
Um projecto a seguir com muita atenção e um album com nota máxima!
Durante os anos, alguns dos trabalhos que adquiro, têm uma história associada...Por exemplo, um dos melhores albuns da minha colecção foi comprado só porque, durante umas férias vi, repito, vi, num qualquer num bar de praia e num qualquer canal de tv por satélite, um video de um grupo que tinha um trio de baixo, guitarra e trompete, um tipo na "maquinaria" electrónica e um grupo de cordas.
Lembro-me que, como estava num bar, não ouvia o que tocavam, mas o nome chamou-me a atenção: Orbit Experience... fácil de decorar porque gosto muito dos trabalhos de William Orbit, dos Orbital e dos The Orb!
Nessa noite procurei informações na net sobre o projecto, cheguei ao site deles em www.orbitexperience.de e no dia seguinte adquiri o album: orbit.experience - "space.beat" (2000).
Oriundo de Estugarda, na Alemanha, este projecto encaixa-se bem na vanguarda do Nu Jazz europeu.
O virtuosismo dos solos de Sebastian Studnitziky (trompete e rhodes), a alma do baixo de Marküs Kössler, as batidas explosivas de Flo Dauner e o "ambiente" criado pela guitarra (e barulho) de Markus fazem deste album um dos melhores dentro do nu jazz e um marco na produção de jazz alemã.
Destaco dois temas, o tema de abertura "ddr" pelo excelente diálogo entre a trompete e o rhodes, a fazer lembrar o tempo dos grandes "duelos" jazzísticos e o tema bonus "orbit.phase 2", com a participação da Orquestra de Câmara de Estugarda, e que cria um dos melhores temas de Nu Jazz alguma vez produzidos... tema este que foi o tal que me chamou a atenção.
Um projecto a seguir com muita atenção e um album com nota máxima!
Etiquetas: downbeat, electro, nu-jazz
by Frederico Dinis [00:15] 0 comments
2006/07/01
Bugge Wesseltoft - "Live"
Como qualquer gosto que se tenha...
...gostar de alguns tipos de sonoridades pura e simplesmente não se discute!
Isto passa-se comigo relativamente às novas sonoridades provenientes dos países nórdicos, no caso especifico deste post, o Nu Jazz Norueguês, representado (e bem) por um dos seus expoentes máximos, Bugge Wesseltoft e o seu album "Live".
Quando vi, no site da Jazzland Rec, o lançamento de um album ao vivo de Bugge, com um alinhamento muito aproximado ao trabalho anterior ("New Conception of Jazz"), pensei que seriam "apenas" mais umas versões das sonoridades de que tanto gostava... e não quis arriscar!
Mas, com o passar do tempo a curiosidade aumentou e decidi arriscar... afinal o catálogo desta editora nunca me tinha falhado.
Quando o recebi ficou-me logo na retina a participação de John Scofield... guitarrista de renome no jazz mundial... e companheiro de Pat Matheney. Mas, o melhor ainda estava para vir... é que não são "apenas" umas versões, são temas com uma alma e uma roupagem totalmente nova, com introduções fantásticas e solos excelentes.
É tensão, é calmia, é dor, é alegria... sem regras e com muita improvisação.
Isto é o (nu)jazz no seu estado mais puro... mas, talvez não o seja para os mais puristas!
