Artist: Magnetic Ear
Title: Alien of Extraordinary Ability
Label: self released
Genre: New Orleans style second line and funk, Eastern European brass band music and African music
CD Review by Dawoud Kringle
Magnetic Ear is part of the new scene of music coming from New Orleans. An ensemble led by Martin Krusche. Born in Germany, and currently living in New Orleans, Krusche is in addition to being an accomplished musician/composer/band leader, he is also respected saxophone repair man.
Text by Dawoud Kringle
On the night of Thursday, April 11, 2013, Justice for Jazz Artists held a demonstration and rally to begin its Jazz Built This! protest against jazz club owners who refuse to make modest pension contributions on behalf of the musicians who play in their clubs and make these club owners rich.
New York City is a Mecca for the best jazz musicians in the world. It was here that jazz became one of America’s greatest artistic and musical achievements. At the same time, many older musicians have little economic security and often retire in poverty. Broadway and symphony orchestras are protected by union contracts; jazz musicians are not. To add insult to injury, owners of prestigious and expensive jazz clubs (such as the Blue Note, Birdland, Jazz Standard, Village Vanguard and Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola) have prospered from the musicians who play in those clubs; while the musicians are not guaranteed minimum pay standards or benefits. Many of these clubs record the musicians with no remuneration (Some clubs have argued that players have de facto agreed to the clubs’ recording and use of their work simply by agreeing to play there; which is absurd. Under any basic union contract, musicians would receive compensation for work they create. Club owners already make ample profit from the live performance, and do not have the right to perpetually profit from the product that musicians create simply because the owners possess the space where the musicians play).
Text and photo by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
The reason for my trip to come to Tokyo, as you already know, was to attend my wife’s mother funeral who passed away recently. As usual I took one of my horns with me, this time it’s my soprano saxophone, which is smaller and lighter than my tenor saxophone. I had no idea, how my sax would get involved in my life in Tokyo. Of course no concerts were planned by me and playing on Tokyo streets was out of question.
In the morning of the day when I was going to say my farewell to my mother-in-law before the cremation, I went to the Sozen-Ji Temple near by. I took my soprano with me. When approaching the temple the Kannon worship ceremony had already started. I did my prayer which was dedicated to my wife and her mother. After the ceremony I took a walk in the temple site and sat down on a bench on the east side of the temple complex. It was a lovely morning, around 6:30am. I just observed the people around me who were mostly elderly people, some joggers and young Chinese women who seemed to live and work here.
After a while I got the impulse to play my sax…a musical ode to my mother-in-law. A piece of music which would take off the fear from her and would make her “hot” trip to the other world easier and faster. I recorded the music with my iPhone.
Text by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
#1 Two movies: James Bond’s You Only Live Twice and Akira Kurosawa’s The 7 Samurai. Both movies inspired me to make my own research about this country and its people: about the old and modern Japan of that time. Before watching these movies I had already started to practice Japanese martial arts, such as Judo, Karate and Kendo. At that time Germans and Europeans in general had no interest in Japan. During my school days nobody taught or talked about the country “of the rising sun.”
Review by Jim Hoey
A flurry of activity has reached us here in NYC from Dutch-based sound artist Pascal Plantinga. Three releases from the Ata Tak label have come out recently, featuring Platinga’s production and bass work, as well as vocals, with his moody pop sensibility the constant on all of these recordings. One features a collaboration with a traditional Japanese samisen player, another, a found-sound pop project, and the third is a live album, recorded at The Stone in NYC in 2009, with sax, and electronics. Bundled with this release is also a short film, entitled Learn To Speak Your Language, which is his visual and musical interpretation of what goes through a person’s mind in the seconds before they die.
A so-called “pop-eccentric”, Plantinga seems to be pretty damn busy right now, churning out these different recordings, showing off different sides of his approach to music. From Holland he seems to get around, working with a singer in Okinawa, Japan, downtown scene musicians in NYC, and his hometown crew in the Netherlands. What remains constant though, is his ability to capture the feeling of a moment and craft it into a slow-boiling song that rides out the emotion, checks through a number of possibilities, and eases into the most appropriate vein of expression.
