Albums I Wish Existed

Alright, so here's the deal: I have not posted in this blog in about a week due to a faulty modem in my new apartment. The problem has not been fixed yet (hopefully it will be in the near future), but for the time being I am stuck piggy-backing on a terrible wireless connection that is too slow and fickle for me stream or download any of the music that I would later review here. The good news, however, is that I can at least continue to blog about news or write ridiculous entries like this one, which has nothing to do with anything. Hopefully somebody close to the people I mention here will see this and go "man, you should really make that record," but they probably won't. Either way, here are some albums that I desperately want to hear:

"Jazz Moves On to the Year 3000: Robert Glasper Plays the Music of Kool Keith"
Robert Glasper plays all of The Automator's beats from "Dr. Octagonocologyst" in much the same way he plays a bunch of Dilla beats on "J-Dillalude" from "In My Element."

"Bronenosets Potyomkin" by Dave Douglas
Dave Douglas' new project, featuring some brilliant young musicians- including acclaimed young tenor saxophone player Walter Smith III- and a healthy dollop of electronics, is an attempt at making music for the early silent-era films of the Soviet auteur Sergei Eisenstein. Douglas' long and well-researched liner notes contain a 20 page essay on Eisenstein's life and career.

"Everything" by Gary Burton's late-60s Quartet
All of those impossible-to-find-yet-apparently-brilliant records, starting with 1967's "Duster," that I desperately need to hear, are now being reissued in one neat little 10-disc (it includes plenty of out-takes) package. The kicker, of course, is that it only costs $10. Apparently guitarist Larry Coryell's work on this stuff is brilliant and influential, but of course I haven't heard it yet.

"Experimental, Thought-Provoking Music" by Jan Garbarek
The long-coming follow-up to 1974's "Witchi-Tai-To" that has only been hinted at in his discography since.

"Donny McCaslin Plays the Music of Chris Potter"
I know I know, I didn't notice when Chris Potter was replaced by Donny McCaslin in Dave Douglas' quintet, and you won't notice that it is in fact Downbeat rising star of the year Donny McCaslin playing Potter's solos- note for note- on this brilliant new album.

"Black and Proud: The Malcolm X Suite" by Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis' brilliant new suite, written about the great African American leader Malcolm X, was inspired by sources as eclectic as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and will be played at Lincoln Center for the predominantly white audience that can afford to go to view "America's Classical Music" before being released as a five-disc opus.

Yes, this whole entry was a stupid, nerdy joke. I promise I'll have a substantive review as soon as the comcast people come and give me a replacement modem. Until then, though, you can enjoy this interview with Donny McCaslin, whose new "Lift-" excuse me, "Recommended Tools-" is now out on Greenleaf.

Marilyn Mazur's Potent "Elixir"

The small handful of people who know of Marilyn Mazur (I can't really say that I did up until I read a review of this album in Downbeat and wanted to hear it myself) know her as a late Miles Davis sideman and as Jan Garbarek's longtime percussionist. Out of those two, her latest, "Elixir," falls closer to the latter's work, but mostly because Garbarek is her only collaborator on half of the album. The rest is made up of short pieces and improvisations for percussion, all of which manage to straddle the (very thin, in this case) line between creepy and ethereal. Mazur understands that space is an incredibly important element in any kind of percussion album, and each of the 21 tracks contains its fair amount of silence and lengthy tones.

The real draw of this album, admittedly, is the ability to listen to Mazur and Garbarek, two nearly telepathic collaborators, play together in ways that they never get to play together in Garbarek's current new-age ensemble. "Joy Chant" and "Orientales" in particular contain some amazing saxophone work, with Garbarek playing like he hasn't played since his seventies stint with Keith Jarrett's classic European Quartet or at least since his early solo work for ECM. Those two songs are treat to hear, as is "River," on which Garbarek plays some incredible (and, oddly enough for Garbarek, incredibly bluesy) soprano saxophone; on "River," as in all of the collaborative tracks, Mazur creates a colorful rhythmic and melodic backdrop that Garbarek reacts to in the foreground.

Each of the solo percussion tracks, of which my personal favorites are "Creature Walk" and "Bell Painting," follows its own logic. Each song sounds like its title; "Creature Walk" created by a quick, rhythmically complex series of motifs that create the aural equivalent of some sort of small reptile, "Bell Painting" a simple, 55 second long static work of art create by bells as opposed to brush-strokes.

Obviously "Elixir" is not an album for everybody. It is not a straight ahead jazz or fusion album, and it has virtually nothing in common with the work of today's great young innovators (Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Lionel Loueke) other than its search for something new in the jazz idiom. In all honesty, it has more in common with the quarter-tonal classical compositions of an artist like Jo Kondo or Lou Harrison than anything by, say, Charlie Parker (with the exception of Garbarek's startling bluesy bop licks on "River"). That said, though, for adventurous listeners who are interested in different approaches to improvisational music (and especially for non-drumset percussionists), "Elixir" is a must-listen.