Kazhargan World is a cooperative unit made possible by the internet. Wonderful Times (Dewey Records) is the product of the cooperative project. The members discussed and arranged the music via electronic communication, then presumably recorded each part singly and synched them together as a finished product. The group consists of Stan Zaslavsky on piano, Hans Peter Salentin on trumpet, Cheryl Pyle on flute and recitation/poetry, Max Ridgway on guitar, Brian Mitchell Brody on sax, Sean O'Bryan Smith on the electric bass, and Tony Cimorosi on doublebass. And finally on drums and percussion is Alesandr Zaslavsky.
The album goes from a contrapuntal chamber jazz with interlocking piano, trumpet, flute and guitar against a swinging walk to more contemporary jazz-lyric-exotica, longing poetics from Ms. Pyle, and an overarching aesthetic of creativity.
The soloists work together well and sound quite good; their interchanges are most certainly a high point of the disk. The compositional elements are quite interesting and worth hearing too.
In the end you have a disk with some strikingly new ways to get somewhere, a lot of ground covered, excellent musicianship, good writing and arranging. The four-horn front line of Zaslavsky-Salentin-Pyle-Ridgway impresses.
It's a very pleasing album with plenty of substance to it. Give it a listen.
No comments:
Post a Comment