Artist: BONOMO
Title: Phases
Label: self produced
Genre: Alternative-Folk, Gospel, R&B
Today award-winning Broolyn alternative folk duo BONOMO release their debut CD. Congrats!
BONOMO is a New York (Brooklyn) based family of musicians on a mission to unify musical traditions. Formed in 2015 by singer-song writer, keyboardist and composer, Adam Bonomo. On the CD he’s joined by Andrew Renfroe on guitar.
Artist: Christoph Irniger Pilgrim
Titel: Big Wheel Live
Label: Intakt Records
Genre: nu jazz
CD Review by Dawoud Kringle
A saxophone figure leaps forward with a texture resembling something like the marriage between a bongo and a plucked string instrument. It eases into its more traditional nature as a saxophone as the head of the song emerges. With the drums, bass, and piano flowing in and around each other like sonic arabesques, the saxophone played with Coltrane inspired melodies fitted into a very different aspect of jazz. The piano made its statement, while changing the direction the music went. The bass brought its say to the floor, and the guitar stepped forward and precipitated itself like raindrops in a gentle breeze before morphing into a series of distorted and processed textures that one rarely associates with jazz.
Artist: Baharat Band
Titel: Mosaics
Label: self-produced
Genre: Middle Eastern music/World/Belly dance music
CD Review by Dawoud Kringle
“Baharat” is an Arabic word for a spice blend that varies from different regions. As spices were traded along the trade routes so were musical instruments, which evolved in an original way to their respective culture. With this idea as conceptual foundation, Baharat Band is a band of Brooklyn based ensemble whose compositions and improvisations are influenced by music from various cultures from Africa to Asia, though primarily from the Middle East. They were founded by Michael Burdi (oud) and his brother Jerome Burdi (percussion), and joined by Jeff Campoli (percussion) and Enrique Mancia (bass). They are joined by guest musicians Adam Maalouf (riq), Hanna Madbek (guitar, vocals), and Cody Rowlands (trumpet).
Artist: M.A.K.U. SoundSystem
Title: Mezcla
Label: Glitterbeat Records (Germany)
Genre: Cumbia/Afro Beat/Club
Review by Dawoud Kringle
The self described “immigrant band from New York City” M.A.K.U. SoundSystem has released a new album; Mezcla. The members are Liliana Conde (vocals, percussion), Juan Ospina A.K.A Prodigio Arribetiao (vocals, bass), Camilo Rodriguez (guitar, gaitas), Robert Stringer (trombone), Felipe Quiroz (synthesizers), Moris Cañate (tambor alegre), Andres Jimenez (drums), and Isaiah Richardson Jr. (sax, clarinet). Since their beginning in 2010 M.A.K.U. has released two albums, an EP, and toured the U.S.
Text by Dawoud Kringle
Once in a while, a true musical visionary emerges whose work redefines our perception of music, and how and why we make it. As a writer I am challenged to dig deep into my thesaurus to find adjectives adequate to the task of qualifying the work of a unique artist like Mark Deutsch. It is quite difficult to describe with words the astonishing psychic energy and breathtaking beauty of this music. One must experience it for oneself.
Mark Deutsch is a classically trained contrabassist and sitarist. In the late 1980s, Deutsch began exploring North Indian Hindustani classical music. His pursuits of this music, and work on sitar, inspired him to explore the mathematics of sound, particularly music’s underlying frequency structure. His sitar teacher, Ustad Imrat Khan, had told him that a westerner needed 20 years of study to properly hear the subtlety of intonation within Indian raga. He refused to accept this. So, he began to work out the mathematics of the musical intonation. He augmented this by playing recordings of Indian music in his sleep; especially recordings of the sarangi. His work revealed nonlinear mathematical patterns that exist in natural sound, the overtone series, fractals, the golden mean, and the Fibonacci series.
One night, he had a dream that he was playing sarangi on the contrabass. This was the initial inspiration that led to the design and construction of the Bazantar; an acoustic bass with additional sympathetic and drone strings. The instrument would take advantage of the nonlinear mathematical patterns found in sound. He began work on the first prototype of the Bazantar in 1993, and a finalized version was completed in October of 1997.
