Don’t Explain

Aug.29 in Toronto:
A poetry/sound/multimedia performance–
cris cheek (London/US)
+ Barnyard Drama [Christine Duncan/Jean Martin] (Toronto)
8pm, at
Somewhere There
Live Creative Music in Toronto
340 Dufferin Street - one block South of Queen Street
** entrance from Melbourne Ave. **
www.somewherethere.org
$8 cover, or free admission if you purchase cris’s new book part: short life housing (specially priced for this event at $16!)
ABOUT CRIS [...]

Happy New Year, folks. My Xmas gift this year was… getting told by management that I’d be moved to the graveyard shift (10pm to 6:30am) beginning Jan 26th. Sigh.
In other news, pleased to see a few more notices for the Jim McAuley album:

Ben Ratliff in the NY Times: nice to see that Jim gets a [...]

Still keeping a watchful eye out for reviews of Jim’s The Ultimate Frog — here’s a recent pair:
David Adler’s review
Stef’s Free Jazz blog
Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning (in connection with the excellent Adler review) that “For Rod Poole” was actually recorded before Rod’s death — the titling is in honour (and memory) of Rod’s enthusiasm for [...]

A little writeup of Jim McAuley’s The Ultimate Frog by Brian Olewnick here. Brian’s more exclusively concerned with electroacoustic improv these days, so it’s nice of him to give the release a little love on his blog. (I think it helps that McAuley is not a dogmatic free improviser who avoids tonality or groove–Brian seems [...]

Yep, Jim McAuley’s new two-CD set is out, with a set of liner notes by yours truly. It’s a fantastic collection of duets with a variety of partners, including the late Leroy Jenkins, the Cline brothers (Alex & Nels), & Ken Filiano. Here’s the long version of my liner notes (I cut this in half [...]

Have just done a big reinstall of the site & am trying to clean up the nasty spamlinking that was added in here after it was hacked. Let’s see if this works, or if stronger measures are needed….. there’s a lot of cleanup needed on the posts, but I want to see if the spambot [...]

Ross Porter
The Essential Jazz Recordings: 101 CDs
McClelland & Stewart, 2006.
Can. $24.99/U.S. $16.95. ISBN 0-7710-7032-2
The best jazz record guides have something for all listeners. Newcomers gain a useful shopping list to help them navigate the deep waters of the jazz canon; along the way, they learn about the music’s history, its major figures and (most important) [...]

Eddie Gale Now Band with William Parker, Vision Festival X, NYC, 2005 (self-released) — Trumpeter Eddie Gale (born 1941, in Brooklyn) remains best known for his work on some of Blue Note’s most experimental albums of the 1960s. A sideman on Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures and Larry Young’s Of Love and Peace, he also made [...]

Dave Frishberg, Retromania (Arbors ARCD 19334) — Frishberg, like the great stand-up comics, is an expert at self-diagnosis: he is, he says, a sufferer from “retromania,” “fixated almost pathologically on the past.” But though it’s nostalgia that prompts Frishberg’s celebratory verbal flights around favourite touchstones (old-time ballplayers, above all), he’s too sardonic to quite fool [...]

Jack DeJohnette and Bill Frisell, The Elephant Sleeps but Still Remembers (Golden Dreams GBP-CD-1116) — This latest release from DeJohnette’s Golden Dreams is an off-the-cuff concert encounter with Bill Frisell from the 2001 edition of Seattle’s Earshot Festival. Both musicians brought a pile of instruments and fancy electronic gear to the gig, and they’re in [...]