(Photo by Micahmedia at en.wikipedia)
Text by Dawoud Kringle
There was almost nothing that could have prepared us for the news, when, on Thursday, April 21st, 2016, the news of the death of Prince was announced. At a time when he was riding the wave of yet another rise of success, suddenly it all ended.
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.
Artist: 3.5.7 Ensemble
Title: Amongst the Smokestacks and Steeples
Label: Milk Factory Productions
Genre: jazz
Review by Dawoud Kringle
Chicago’s 3.5.7 Ensemble (Nick Anaya – woodwinds, James Davis – trumpet, Richard Zili – clarinet, Jim Baker – piano, Tim Stine – guitar, Chris Dammann – Contrabass, Dylan Andrews – percussion, and Mabel Kwan – prepared piano) has compiled an aggregate of compositions spanning a three year history. Most of these are originals the ensemble composed, but “Wandering” by the Chicago tenor sax player Fred Anderson, and “Dangurangu,” a Zimbabwean folk song featuring Mabel Kwan’s prepared piano are included.
Artist: Dahlia Dumont & The Blue Dahlia
Title: The Blue Dahlia
Label: self produced
Genre: Pop-Reggae/French Reggae-Ska
CD Review by Dawoud Kringle
The second decade of the 21st century ushered in an unforeseen phenomenon: pretty young women with ukuleles. Those of us who were born in the 60s and 70s sure didn’t see this coming! And with such women who seek a serious professional career, they have a lot of preconceived ideas to get past. So, with as much of an open mind as I could muster (suppressing the subtle sexism I was programmed with in my native culture), I wondered what The Blue Daliah had to offer.
Text by Dawoud Kringle
Musicians in the USA have often been the victim of political candidates appropriating their music for the purpose of campaigning and propaganda. This is always done without the artist’s permission.
