I can only get one jazz station in L.A., and they don’t have much to do with the electronic thing. Really. It’s as if Bitches brew never happened. And even though both Ordinari & Associati (also reviewed in this review) and Louis Guarino both have clear ties to Miles’s music, they use it as a starting point for pursuing entirely different aesthetic directions. Peter Avanti and Alessandro Palmitessa take a more playful and prickly approach. Guarino goes for something heavier, more serious, and, well, darker. As a trumpet player, he’s worked with a number of forward-looking improvisers, including Carla Bley, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Amina Claudine Myers. On pieces like “A Conversation with the Spirits of the Mountain,” Guarino plays alternately languid and sputtering lines on his horn. And as with Miles, there’s “the cushion.” But in this case, it’s more of a throbbing, swirling, pulsing, and dreamy electronic haze rather than the groove-oriented backdrop of Miles’s later recordings. There’s range and variety throughout his recording Spiritual Awakenings, but the whole release has a focused and aural effect. “I picked these pieces because they’re in a mood, “ he says. ( he goes on to discuss Ordinari & Associati’s music for a short time before going on to others in the column) |
