Gato Libre - Live at the Seven Arts Club
![Gatolibre[1]](http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-11/1227628/gatolibre[1].jpg)
Capturing the essence of folk music, Natsuki Tamura creates an acoustic session on “Strange Village” that lets him tell the stories vividly and completely. Through open trumpet, guitar, bass, and accordion, he communicates tales that stir the imagination and let the listener interpret accordingly. Each tale comes with rounded textures that belie humble surroundings where people know that they can feel at home. Slowly and deliberately, the music walks you through the streets and welcomes you with open arms.Tamura's soulful trumpet opens wide as he improvises over pretty melodies. He emphasizes passion without being overbearing about it. The focus for the album remains its casual four-part message that roams free as a bird (or cat). Each artist pours heartfelt emotion into the cauldron that represents Tamura's tale, and the mixture heats up from within.
Stress? This village has none. Its music simmers peacefully on the shoulders of Tamura's open horn, Satoko Fujii's soothing accordion, Kazuhiko Tsumura's crystal-clear guitar, and Norikatsu Koreyasu's proud bass. Together, they create a picture of serenity and unity. Celebrations come and go as the quartet explores free jazz with timeless sonority.
Gato Libre's free association over timeless textural territory gives this highly recommended album a warm embrace. Tamura's open trumpet seals it. His quartet has found a formula that connects the music of our ancestors with the freedom that we enjoy in today's modern society.
Line-up:
Natsuki Tamura - trumpet
Satoko Fujii - accordion
Kazuhiko Tsumura - guitar
Norikatsu Koreyasu - bass
Set-list:
Morning Mist
Journey Again
In Krakow, In November
Strange Village
In Barcelona, In June
Reconcile
| SOURCE | DAB | SOUND QUALITY | A+/- | FORMAT | Mp3 | BITRATE | 224 | TRACKS # | 6 |
| LOCATION / VENUE | Leeds | Seven Arts Club | DATE | 6/02/08 | |||||
| NOTES: | First track has some interferences… Any one got better version??? | ||||||||
Labels: Gato Libre, JAZZ
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posted by zazafromjohor at 5:09 PM
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![RApressphoto1_1[1]](http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-11/1227628/RApressphoto1_1[1]_small.jpg)
Since 1991, trumpeter/composer/educator Ralph Alessi has been an active member of the New York jazz and improvised music scene as both sideman and leader. Called “...a highly-in-demand, adventurous virtuoso who can handle just about anything” (L.A. Weekly), Alessi has performed and recorded with the likes of Steve Coleman, Uri Caine, Don Byron, Ravi Coltrane, Sam Rivers, Drew Gress, Fred Hersch and many other of the great innovators in improvised music.
Though the instrumental voices and material are quite different, Herbie Hancock more or less picked up here where he left off on the same stage with the 2001 Davis/Coltrane tribute band. Like his contemporary and former Miles Davis partner Wayne Shorter, Hancock confirmed that he has adopted a collectively expressive approach, much like the modus operandi of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet, whose intuitive sensibilities still hover around this music. In a two-hour unbroken set in the company of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, classic tunes were slyly hidden, hinted at or played only after they had been improvised upon.
It was as if Hancock knows that he can do what he likes with anything he plays, however far stretched from a groove or a song. The roar that went up when he came on stage proved it.
After twelve years of working together and eight critically acclaimed albums, Scott Henderson and Gary Willis of Tribal Tech, have proven they are visionary composers, as well as world class players. In recent years, Henderson has been named the #1 Jazz Guitarist, by both Guitar World and Guitar Player's Annual Reader's Polls. Bass Player magazine referred to Willis as "one of the most vital bass voices of the 90's", while Guitar Player's Annual Reader's Poll has listed Willis among the top three bassist in the Jazz Bass category for the last two years in a row. While they've always had the following of loyal jazzers, the band has steadily attracted the attention of rock and rollers, as well, seducing them with their sometimes big, dark wall of sound and their bad boy attitude toward "happy jazz". Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith says that Tribal Tech "kicks ass!". Packed houses in the U.S., Europe and South America show he is obviously not the only one who thinks this. Rounding out the dynamic foursome is the awesomely talented, turbo-driven Kirk Covington on drums and the improvisationally-gifted Scott Kinsey on keyboards. The coming together of such talented players could only result in the creation of a band like Tribal Tech. A band that grabs you by the throat and won't let go until they've shaken you out of your musical complacency with a roar of energy. 
Belgrade, November 3, 1971: This is a bootleg with legs, being the rare and mostly well-recorded snapshot of Miles’ late 1970-1971 band, near the end of its life. It was the last band sans guitars Miles ever put together. This music is built from the ground up, and Michael Henderson held the keystone. (Try playing the bass line to “Yesternow” or “Honky Tonk” without losing your place or speeding up, and you may begin to appreciate Henderson on a new level.) By this concert, he’d dropped the Holland emulations and gotten back to his rock-solid rhythms, but he was not yet a player to look to for keeping things interesting and evolving, except perhaps by accident. Keith Jarrett, holding down two keyboards, ably takes on the mid-ground role of colorist. With so much space in the music and no guitars to fill it, it’s a big job. His organ playing here is subtle; so much so the CD producers list only electric piano. (Jarrett’s tenure lasted just a week or two past this concert.) Gary Bartz doesn’t get a chance to add much to his resume here, which is a shame (Miles’ post-1970 concept tended to treat saxophonists as an optional feature—in for a solo, then out again, never initiating a change in direction, always following Miles). The two-percussionist plus drummer setup—Leon Chancler, Mtume, and Don Alias—works well enough, but without guitar the rhythm sounds thin and at times a bit tenuous. The recording balance doesn’t help, being somewhat light on the bottom end (the engineers no doubt thought they were mic’ing and mixing a “jazz” gig—but the mix is clear as a bell).
At 23:44 Miles ushers in that stuttering, march-like bit which, after nearly four minutes of neither-here-nor-there-ness, begins to take form as a hard-driving “What I Say”. Too fast to funk hard, as the Live-Evil version does, the whole thing gets so frenetic it’s kind of silly. Jarrett’s post-bop arabesques fit the music a little better than the sax wails. The tempo turns fluid, halving and doubling ambiguously, before a conga duo takes center stage, backed by Chancler’s discreet hi-hat locomotion. This two-percussionist band with Mtume and Don Alias, with five or six congas onstage, is among the least-documented of Miles’ multitudinous incarnations. It’s gratifying to hear them take the spotlight in tandem so winningly. “Sanctuary” receives an atmospheric theme statement, before Miles screams a few times, turning up the juice.
Belgrade, November 3, 1973: Miles opens the ‘73 Belgrade set with a freaky-deaky phrase scarred by distortion—a herald of the lousy engineering that tarnishes the concert. Neither the horns nor the guitars sound very settled in the mix. For a good long while, there seems to be a didgeridoo player hooting whenever Miles takes a solo—it’s a feedback gremlin. At 18:24 (frustratingly, no index numbers are employed on either Belgrade disk) the leader cuts the band out, unleashes one of those avalanches of plunging notes (accompanied by the feedback) and the music opens up and out. Mtume gets a good feature on congas at this point before a solo from Cosey, then Miles, and Foster kicks up his ride cymbal again. They subside, and again Mtume comes into the foreground, with Liebman tootling a tentative flute. When the band finally starts cooking on “Calypso Frelimo”, the guitars again come out overripe and punishing. If you can get beyond that, Miles gets worked up into an outstanding solo, and at 31:44 does a duck-and-weave with the “Calypso” theme, shadowed by Liebman, now on soprano sax. At about 40 minutes, Cosey dances in, sounding for all the world like Prime Time-era Bern Nix. (Ornette’s bands were always naturally jangly.) A few minutes later, after some haunting conga vocalizations, the ordeal is over.It’s a jangly time overall, mostly due to the engineer’s, shall we say, choices. Twenty-first century Miles scholarship posits that very few engineers or producers of that day, including Teo Macero, really knew how to mix this music, a problem compounded by the limitations of the live setting. Even the 1973 Montreux sets suffer many of the same ills: Mic’ed and mixed as a “jazz” set, the mix doesn’t put forth the essential tidal waves of bass, drums, and guitar. Miles’ own Nagra portable recorder was responsible for capturing the superior board mix on Another Unity (see below). 
As Chris Murphy relates in his road memoir, Miles To Go, the two-track Nagra had a direct feed from the hall engineer’s mixing console. For the European concerts, the documents we have are most likely the result of broadcast tapes. Whoever was at the board in Belgrade ‘73 does a spiffy job bringing the guitars front and center, at the expense of the horns; and, as too often happens, the lower-frequency range is threadbare. Liebman’s flute passages sound thin and unsupported, his opening sax bit distorted and ugly. The more exciting experiments come from Cosey and/or Lucas, both still working out their guitar sounds, tunings, and effects. During the opening minutes, one of them (probably Cosey) takes off on a solo with a sound so close to Miles’ amplified trumpet sound, the ear is fooled. (Cosey’s range of experimentation is truly astounding, his ideas never-ending, and his success rate astonishingly high. He brought numerous guitars onstage with him along with his own tuning systems. On a 1973 Vienna concert, he can be seen for much of the set working a mutant twelve-string which has the doubling strings tuned in thirds.)
Restless innovator, sampling wizard, classically trained pianist and superstar collaborator, MATTHEW HERBERT is one of electronic music's most versatile and prolific figureheads. Recording under his own name as well as Doctor Rockit, Wishmountain, Radio Boy and others, Herbert has also produced and remixed artists as diverse as Björk, REM, John Cale, Roisin Murphy, Yoko Ono and Serge Gainsbourg.
Another chance to discover the diverse talents of the superb American jazz drummer and composer Bobby Previte, through two of his favourite projects, recorded at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham.
Georgie Fame's swinging, surprisingly credible blend of jazz and American R&B earned him a substantial following in his native U.K., where he scored three number one singles during the '60s. Fame played piano and organ in addition to singing, and was influenced by the likes of Mose Allison, Booker T. & the MG's, and Louis Jordan. Early in his career, he also peppered his repertoire with Jamaican ska and bluebeat tunes, helping to popularize that genre in England; during his later years, he was one of the few jazz singers of any stripe to take an interest in the vanishing art of vocalese, and earned much general respect from jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic.
Finally, in early 1965, Fame hit the charts with "Yeh Yeh," a swinging tune recorded by Latin jazz legend Mongo Santamaria and given lyrics by vocalese virtuoso Jon Hendricks of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. "Yeh Yeh" went all the way to number one on the British charts, and Fame started living up to his stage name (although the song barely missed the Top 20 in America). His 1965 LP Fame at Last reached the British Top 20, and after several more minor hits, he had another British number one with "Getaway" in 1966. After one more LP with the original Blue Flames, 1966's Sweet Thing, Fame broke up the band and recorded solo; over the next few years, his backing bands included drummer Mitch Mitchell (later of the Jimi Hendrix Experience) and the young guitarist John McLaughlin (Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra).
In 1989, Fame played organ on Van Morrison's Avalon Sunset album, which grew into a fruitful collaboration over the course of the '90s; Fame played on all of Morrison's albums through 1997's The Healing Game, received co-billing on Morrison's 1996 jazz album How Long Has This Been Going On, and even served a stint as Morrison's musical director. Meanwhile, Fame's own solo work during the '90s received some of his best reviews since the '60s, starting with 1991's jazzy Cool Cat Blues, which featured a duet with Morrison on "Moondance." 1995's Three Line Whip featured his sons Tristan and James Powell on guitar and drums, respectively, and 1996's The Blues and Me further enhanced his growing jazz credibility. In 1998, Fame split with Morrison to record and tour with former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman's new group the Rhythm Kings, contributing organ and vocals to several albums. In 2000, now signed to Ben Sidran's Go Jazz label, Fame released the acclaimed Poet in New York, which established him as an impressive student of jazz's vocalese tradition.
For the past few years Kennedy has been living in Poland, exploring the country's rich musical heritage - and he has also been teaming up with some of Poland's finest jazz musicians, the fruits of which you can hear now.
Mixing classical music, free jazz and legendary pop songs, the Bad Plus display an irresistible impetuosity, and no hint of calculating eclecticism. The group's regular fans cheer the opening bars of familiar pieces, but they cheer its tumultuous journeys into improv outlands, too. Both kinds of acclaim were fervently expressed on the trio's single London performance at the end of a three-date trip to the UK.
Fred Frith (guitar) and Chris Cutler (drums) spent eight years together in the now-legendary British underground group HENRY COW, then founded ART BEARS with Dagmar Krause, completing 3 records of songs before they all moved on to other projects in 1981. While on the first and only tour with this group (completed by Peter Blegvad and Marc Hollander), they performed as a duo for the first time at the soon-to-be-banned Jazz Festival of Prague in 1979, a concert which had a lasting and controversial impact in the then-Czechoslovakia and was released as part of the LP (now CD) Live in Prague and Washington. 
