Music Reviews

This is a site featuring Nate Dorward’s
music journalism. Click here for the ever-expanding

What’s New

7 June 06: I bit the bullet and updated the music reviews at last. Still not anywhere close to current, but at least all the stuff from Paris Transatlantic, Exclaim and Cadence has been brought up to date (in the case of Cadence, that means early 2006, since I usually wait a few months before posting reviews from that source). The Exclaim pieces are rather curt, I’m afraid, because I was trying to make them sufficiently short they wouldn’t attract the attention of editorial scissors. Anyway, check out the right sidebar for a quick tour of the new stuff.

25 October 05: Started a new job in September so it’s taken a while to get around to the update. The good news is that I’ve posted up the Thom Gossage and Don Palmer articles, some of the earliest fruits of my recent determination to do more article-writing and interviewing rather than just short reviews. There are also plenty of reviews too: check out the sidebar for a quick rundown. Many of them are offsite, written for Paris Transatlantic.

17 August 05: The biggest thing lately has been a feature on Randy Sandke for One Final Note. Somehow my review of Dave Burrell’s Expansion got left out of the index, so here it is. And there are various new things – the Natto Quartet, Vijay Iyer, Greg Burk, Joel Miller, &c. There’s also an unpublished piece on Dave Young which was intended for Coda but never appeared there.

13 July 05: A kenspeckle bunch of reviews this month. The best are probably the Brötzmann, Perry, Easton, Douglas, & Braxton/Bauder.

I've been busy updating my blog every so often. Check out the lengthy screed about how to go about writing music reviews, which I put together after a couple correspondents asked me for advice. Any suggestions for inclusions or modifications are welcome.

4 June 05: A few miscellaneous reviews added, notably the James Finn & Scott Fields pieces. Check the sidebar for links.

The other big thing is that I just added a blog to the site so I can add less formal commentaries on music, poetry & life in general.

29 Apr 05: A few more things added to the site, nothing too earth-shattering but there’s a decent piece on Simon Nabatov and another on Pandelis Karayorgis among other things (see sidebar for the full list). The pieces on Von Freeman and Sam Rivers’ recent discs are a bit dodgily written but the discs themselves are excellent, esp. the Rivers. Also a roundup that contains reviews of interesting discs by Geoff Goodman and Tom Lawton. Plus a stray unpublished review – nothing exciting, but, well, waste not want not. There’s a couple things of mine at Paris Transatlantic this month but I haven’t indexed them yet.

12 Apr 05: I have stirred myself to index all my Paris Transatlantic and Bagatellen contributions up to the present date (I’d gotten a few months behind). Go to the Master Index and take a look!

7 Apr 05: Long time no see. I’ve finally gotten round to adding a pile more stuff here – dig in! The best of the bunch is probably the Matchless roundup, the ErstLive piece, the Butcher/Nakamura, & the Bik Bent Braam. I haven’t got around to cataloguing my contributions in the past few months to Paris Transatlantic but visit the site & you'll see I have a few pieces in just about every issue. I’ve also started doing the odd thing for Bagatellen.

Part of the reason for the long gaps between updates is because this is a pretty low-tech site & it can be awkward to update (too much hand-coding). Time to look into getting decent CMS software....one of these days!

16 Feb 05: At last an update! See the sidebar above for the newest stuff. My favourite review of the bunch is the tripledecker Erstwhile piece, just because it cost so much darn effort and I think it came out OK. The pieces on Frank Hewitt and Noah Rosen draw attention to good pianists who ought to be better-known.

This is perhaps the occasion to note that the venerable Coda magazine, to which I’ve been a frequent contributor, is undergoing a change of ownership and editorship in May. This has been the source of much outrage in the avant-jazz community because the new guy (Daryl Angier) has expressly said he’s planning to make it a much more mainstream journal. I’m currently taking a let’s-wait-and-see attitude about the switch. In any case, I have a few pieces due to appear in its pages (most of them commissioned by the previous editor, Stuart Broomer), including a feature on the Montreal drummer Thom Gossage.

More in the sic transit dept.: the fine French label Sketch Records just went belly-up. Here are reviews I did of Sketch releases by Mal Waldron and Oliva/Raulin.

12 Jan 05: Nothing new on the music part of the site (though the poetry part is quite active), but I’ve been quite busy offsite. I’m pretty pleased (if I do say so myself) with this long piece on Anthony Braxton’s Charlie Parker project; & you’ll also find new things of mine in the January issue of Dan Waburton’s Paris Transatlantic: brief writeups of discs by Evan Parker, John Abercrombie, Joost Buis & Rudresh Mahanthappa. Enjoy! I’m currently at work on something on Larry Ochs et al’s Fly Fly Fly & the really nice Acrobati folli e innamorati by Less of Five (an Italian band). In the interim, let me just recommend both of them highly. . . .

2 Jan 05: A new batch of reviews posted up for the new year: check out the links to your right for a sampler of things on Lloyd/Higgins, John Gruntfest, Geof Bradfield, Dead Cat Bounce and more. I've put new reviews in blue caps in the music index.

In further news, the poetry section of this site is now up: go here for details.

14 Nov 04: I’ve been trying to be good & update this site on the first of the month but I get a little lazy. But at last I've done it! Try out the Derek Bailey Ballads review, a pair of Simon Fells, something on William Parker’s Fractured Dimensions, and Joe Hunt’s very nice trio disc. Among others (take a look at the master list for the NEW flags or the sidebar above . . .).

Of course what I really should be doing is getting Allen Fisher’s Entanglement up online. Maybe tomorrow . . .

29 Sep 04: The question of what to make of late Evan Parker (consistently masterly or just tiresomely predictable?) continues to nag at me. I remain ambivalent about it, even once unkindly referring to late EP solo music as “bagipe music for eggheads”; here’s a piece on a recent Parker disc which tries to be a little more evenhanded. The new batch also a write-up of the wonderful Wilde dans in een afgelegen Berghut by the Dutch band Bite the Gnatze. There are also a few other new things (now cleverly flagged as NEW!) in the index. Some of the better ones are linked to in the Featured Reviews sidebar.

PS: I have discovered that the setup I have on this site makes no sense for updates (each update of the sidebar requires all the pages to be uploaded). So I’m going to teach myself to use interactive webpages. This only concerns users of the site insofar as the links to the reviews are likely to change once I switch over. I’ll keep you posted.

1 Sep 04: Inspired by Ken Vandermark’s gassy ruminations on AAJ I’ve put up the only two reviews I’ve ever written of his work: a pan of the first FME disc and a lukewarm review of the recent KVDM5 disc Airports for Light. There are also a few other things, including a long piece on Anthony Braxton, a slightly underwhelmed review of a Lee Konitz disc, and a piece on Fredi Luescher's wonderful Dear C.: The Music of Carla Bley. Staffan William-Olsson very kindly wrote in about the piece on his fine Pop!, and I took the opportunity to get him to explain what Karius Og Baktus was (see the comments at the end of the review).

22 August 04: Mostly prettying up the site-design: see what you think, & tell me if anything looks screwy on your browser (I’m still figuring things out). Only incremental additions to the reviews . . . dig around & you’ll find a few new ones. (Once I actually start flagging new reviews with little symbols this will be easier – be patient!). Nothing too exciting, but there’s one of my better damning-with-faint-praise pieces here, on a disc by Matt Lavelle.

18 August 04: A few more things posted up, of which the best are probably the pieces on Patricia Barber’s Verse, Evan Parker and Joe McPhee’s Chicago Tenor Duets and Mal Waldron’s One More Time. If you like pans there’s possibly the harshest thing I’ve ever written here. There’s a decent thumbnail sketch of Lennie Tristano’s music in the review of Sept Variations sur Lennie Tristano. – Thanks to Derek Taylor for the shout-out on the Bagatellen website!

7 August 04: I’ve begun to post up old Cadence reviews: of those I’ve put up so far I’d draw your attention to the big Splasc(h) review with notices of two Paolo Birro discs and a Stefano Battaglia, and the weird and wonderful Quatre by Hiroaki Katayama.

29 July 04: the whole site’s new, of course. Here’s the MASTER INDEX OF REVIEWS (or click on the alphabetized links above) and here’s a few of the better pieces:

About This Site

This section of my website features my old music writing. I’ve usually waited six months from publication to post things up. I currently write for the print journals Coda, Cadence, Signal to Noise and Exclaim, and the online journal Paris Transatlantic. Reviews have also appeared in the past in The Squid’s Ear and One Final Note. Most of these pieces are as published, though I’ve made the odd fix.

Many thanks to Stuart Broomer and Bob Rusch for permission to reprint pieces from Coda and Cadence. In the latter case, copyright remains with Cadence. All other pieces on this site are © Nate Dorward. If you wish to reproduce more than brief extracts from them, or for that matter have any comments, drop me a line at ndorward AT ndorward DOT com (my apologies for the spam-avoiding kludge).