v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

David Murray Quartet in Hamburg 5.2024

From the Charm City Django Fest 2024

I was fortunate to be a part of this festival in Baltimore so spent two days in the company of musicians taking photographs.

Copyright- Vallejo Nocturno 2024

Some Recent Photos

From my music focused photography:

Copyrighted=Vallejo Nocturno 2024

Digitized Finds

For Christmas my daughter got me a new scanner. A Plustek OpticFilm 8200 that is small and portable. I can recommend it highly as it makes the scanning task easier and faster than the traditional Empson scanners that can do negatives (both large and small) and also actual photos. The Plustek handles negatives and slides. Here are my initial scans.

Vallejo Nocturno 2024 -Copyright

Best Music of 2023- Gwen Cahue & Babtiste Bailly

 

Surprisingly I had never heard of this talented duo and it appears from what I could find on the Internet neither has the majority of the world. No reviews are available in English though there ,ight be one behind a French paywall. But perhaps, I so much hope so,  that will change as their music has a popular appeal that a lot of my annual selections do not. Comprised of classical and jazzy components the execution of this music is precise and flawless and the "tunes" are very attractive to both to young and old. It's appeal may be that it's difficult to categorize it with some of piano descending from a Keith Jarrett vein and the guitar has some Gypsy jazz components but that would be putting them in a box that they ultimately do not inhabit. I'm hoping that more comes from this duo but if not each has a wonderful cache of excellent music with other musicians. I really like this stuff. A fabulous find!

 

Best Music of 2023- Rajna Swaminathan

 

A testament of how music is ultimately a single language that transcends many of the cultural boundaries imposed by other forms of communication. A true unification of styles, yet i sense there is lots of room for improvisation at the time of performance. This music deserves more attention.

From Harvard Gazette:

Another reason that Swaminathan came to Harvard was Professor Vijay Iyer. She had first met the MacArthur “genius grant” winner when she was 8 years old and Iyer was collaborating on a project with her old teacher, Sivaraman. The two reconnected when Swaminathan was in college. After Iyer founded the Department of Music’s Program in Creative Practice in Critical Inquiry, Swaminathan became its first student.

“It’s been a unique opportunity to balance between research — the history and theory — and the actual practice. I can ask a question, do the reading, and then the answer can be found somewhere in the music. It’s a constant back and forth of experimentation and reading and trying new things. That’s been the process for me over the past six years.”

Iyer calls Swaminathan “a groundbreaking 21st-century composer-performer and thinker.” He says that one of the things that makes her music so exceptional is the way it reaches out from its south Indian foundation to engage with other forms, such as jazz and Black American experimental music, and to move beyond traditional categories.

“Rajna is creating a body of original, innovative, stirring work that extends and complicates the traditions she carries, imagining new possibilities for community, ethics, and collective creation,” he says. “From her unique vantage as a South Asian/American queer experimental composer-performer, Rajna is creating exquisitely imagined, beautifully executed music that transcends classification.”

With Swaminathan in the vanguard, the program has grown and shifted, embracing live performance and developing a rich culture of collaboration and improvisation that includes students at the College, GSAS, and faculty as well. Outside of Harvard, however, she has faced challenges. The mrudangam has traditionally been an instrument for men in Indian culture. Female virtuosos like Swaminathan are rare. Throughout her life, she’s had to deal with gendered expectations and assumptions about whether women had the strength and stamina to play the drum — and whether it is culturally appropriate for them to do so.

“In India, there are layers of ideas about gender and caste purity when you’re dealing with an instrument that is made in part of cowhide,” she says. “It’s a very deep and complicated story. Some people say that drumming has an association with healing traditions and as we’ve come into modern society, that power to heal through rhythm has been taken away from women.”

 

Dexter and the Drugs

 

From a review of a new biography of Dexter Gordon Sophisticated Giant by Maxine Gordon-the insidious influence on drugs and the societal trap to put these creative musicians in jail:

Formed by the same jazz lineage, Gordon and Wardell also shared a heroin habit. The warm, sustaining culture of the Los Angeles prewar jazz scene had, by the 1950s, become a recurring nightmare of crime and punishment. It was a lost decade for Gordon and many jazz musicians, who were often targeted by the authorities: he was busted for drugs in 1952, paroled in 1954, rearrested in 1956, and paroled again in 1960. Like jazzmen Lee Morgan, Elvin Jones, and Tadd Dameron, Gordon had to undergo the dire detox treatment at the US Narcotic Farm (detailed by William Burroughs in his 1953 novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict ). LAPD could jail and hold musicians for nothing more than needle marks on their arms or “signs of the presence of drugs” via a dubious test. As saxophonist Hadley Caliman estimated,

[s]eventy-five percent of the musicians in L.A. were trapped there because of drugs. […] They were on parole and because of the law that allowed them to be busted for tracks and internal possession, they could never get out. It was a crime. Their careers were ruined. Their lives were stopped. For nothing.

Gordon spent his incarceration in Chino prison in San Bernardino, California, reading all day and trying to clean himself up. “[W]hen you see the same shit happening over and over again to your life, you finally say, Wow, man, this gotta stop. Bird and Fats and the other guys, it was continuously downhill. But jail saved my life.”

Los Angeles, the place first of Gordon’s discovery and then of his disintegration as an artist, became the site for his rebirth. On parole from Chino prison and back in Los Angeles, he recorded the aptly titled album The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon (1960).

Best Music of 2023- Raphael Roginski

Powerful and emotive solo guitar music unlike other guitar music. It's uniqueness gives it a foreign flavor but with a distinct familiarity that grips your soul. Well worth getting a copy via Bandcamp. A musician who should be known accross the musical world.

From Pitchfork:

Raphael Rogiński was supposed to be a sculptor, but his guitar got in the way. He practiced more than he slept; blood “was pouring” from his fingers, he told the Polish publication Polityka in 2015. He tore at his instrument “like wild meat, shamelessly and greedily.” These days, there’s not a trace of aggression in the Polish guitarist’s music. His playing is considered, graceful, meditative. Every effortless run is followed by a contemplative pause; his rubato sensibility suggests someone treading on uneven ground, deliberating over their next footstep. If you were him, you might pause too, because there is a numinous power in his instrumental songs—enchanted, uncanny, swarming with ghosts. His music is a dark forest inhabited by shadows and sprites and unseen forces. His playing feels like a spell designed to keep a forager safe while honoring the wild unknown.

Before he ever picked up the guitar, a pre-teen Rogiński, who grew up on the wooded outskirts of Warsaw, played an Uzbek kemenche, a three-stringed lyre, given to him by his grandmother. He played it without the bow, pulling and plucking as though it were a banjo. You can detect traces of that initiation in his playing still; he often sounds like he is manipulating some other, stranger instrument than his Gibson ES-335. Maybe his grandmother’s kemenche unlocked something in him. She was Tatar, a Turkic ethnic group with roots around Lake Baikal that is today found across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, all the way to the Black Sea. Rogiński once recalled of his grandmother: “As we ate raw meat, I timidly looked into her eyes, and saw the Scythian steppes and beyond. It was my first experience of meditation.”

Much of Rogiński’s music has concerned itself with channeling spirits from the past. His group Shofar—named after the ritual horn blown on Rosh Hashanah, and associated with the resurrection of the dead—is dedicated to the excavation of traditional Jewish music, particularly the Hasidic mystical songs called nigunim. His finest album until now, Raphael Rogiński Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes. African Mystic Music, distilled its inspirations into an ethereal and otherworldly form, a kind of anti-gravity blues. His new album Talàn picks up the spare, beguiling style of that recording and extends it. The record is dedicated to the Black Sea; many of its songs were written in Odesa, a Ukrainian port city defined by its historical mixture of cultures, and the gateway from Asia to Europe for some of Rogiński’s own ancestors. Across Talàn, that history of exchange plays out in eerie runs, folk melodies that feel like ancient wisdom, textures of dusty pages and worn stone.

From Downbeat:

Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski discusses creativity with the same type of idiosyncratic, poetic aesthetic informs his stunning music.

“I recognized that playing an instrument should be like playing on veins or your hair,” he said. “It must be part of your body. Most of my guitar sounds are like an instrument made from ribs and veins.”

Through the use of different tuning systems and a largely self-taught practice that privileges scrabbling tangles of notes over familiar melodic flow, Roginski indisputably makes his guitar sound like something other than a conventional instrument.

When he was a young boy, his grandmother gave him a traditional spike fiddle, known as a kemenche.

“It was to make my dreams come true,” he said, referring to his grandmother’s gift and his childhood desire to own a guitar. “This gesture is still the basis for my music, how to create culture.”

Before eventually picking up an actual guitar, Roginski approached the kemenche like it was a guitar, eschewing the traditional bow and developing a singular style wherein melodies where shaped in gnarled clusters.

He first started reaching fans outside of Poland through his work in jazz-related ensembles, such as Hera, a wide-ranging internationally flavored ensemble led by clarinetist Waclaw Zimpel, and Shofar, a wildly careening trio with fire-breathing saxophonist Mikolaj Trzaska that brought a free-jazz intensity to traditional Jewish music, particularly nigunim.

But his music reaches much further, whether he’s playing art-rock in Wovoka, instrumental surf music in Alte Zachen or moody, richly atmospheric post-klezmer with the wonderful Cunfukt. In each context his playing stands out, just as it did in more jazz-related settings. In Hera he injected a brooding intensity that articulated melodies in a bizarrely non-linear fashion that made each solo an adventure.

From The Free Jazz Collective:

On African Mystic Music, Rogiński reworks eight Coltrane compositions and offers up two of his own as accompaniment for text by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes (sung by Natalia Przybysz). But “covers” would certainly be the wrong word here. Rogiński’s interpretations of Coltrane, compared for instance to Mary Halvorson’s new Meltframe, are at times quite abstracted from their source material. While the purists may be disappointed, though, the rest of us will marvel at Rogiński’s musical alchemy.

The opening rendition of “Blue Train” sets a very high bar for the tracks to follow. Eschewing the self-possession of the original, Rogiński builds his take from starts and feints, gaining momentum with gorgeously elastic and permutating finger-picked arpeggios that dig down, rise up, and then resolve into perfect gifts of sound. The balance Rogiński cultivates is expert—the music manages to be light but not delicate, dense but not muddled, intense but not frenzied. And because of the intimacy of the recording itself, the friction of the guitarist’s fingers on the strings and the sounds of his breath become complicit in the devastating beauty of the playing. The ultimate result is more head-nodding than foot-tapping as we find a center in the nest of rapidly woven notes.

Track by track Rogiński redeploys variations of this same basic strategy, but the effect across the album is unity, not repetitiveness. After versions of “Equinox” and “Lonnie’s Lament” (appropriately plaintive), “Walkers of the Dawn” introduces a new element as Przybysz delivers Hughes’s poem over an almost mbira-like guitar. Again, rather than any performative extroversion, it’s the closeness of Przybysz’s singing, as if we were overhearing a prayer, that lends intensity to the performance. Together with the darkly manic “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Przybysz’s contributions offer a worthy complement to the Coltrane interpretations and qualify among African Mystic Music’s several highlights—two of which round the album out. “Seraphic Light” matches the agitation of the original, the guitar somehow capturing the blistery, stuttering quality of Rashied Ali’s drums. And “Naima” closes the album, sublime melody intact, a dynamic meditation full of bent notes and pregnant hesitations. It’s obvious that Rogiński knows just where to stop, but as the final notes fade it’s hard not to start the whole thing over.

 

Best Music of 2023- Phi-Psonics

Pensive and brooding with a touch of Tyner on a Fender Rhodes this music is something to wake up to, or perhaps while one reads their favorite novel during a mid-morning interlude. A welcome addition to the tranquil, yet turbulent music of your soul.

From UK Vibe:

It was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who first coined the phrase “music is the food of the soul”. And listening to this latest release from the LA-based jazz quartet Phi-Psonics, rarely has that phrase been so appropriate. Led by bassist Seth Ford-Young and featuring Sylvain Carton on woodwinds, Mitchell Yoshida on electric piano, and Josh Collazo on drums, their beautiful music draws on jazz and classical influences together with Ford-Young’s own musical experiences, relationships, and his introduction to spirituality, yoga and philosophy at a young age. Their unique brand of fully immersive, meditative jazz can’t help but soothe the soul and lift the spirits.

Originally from the Washington DC area, Ford-Young moved to California in the early 90s and fell in love with the sounds of the upright bass and the music of Charles Mingus, John and Alice Coltrane, and Duke Ellington along with Bach, Chopin, Pärt, and Satie. These influences can clearly be heard throughout “Octava”, with the group’s combined expression soaring in a quietly contemplative way. Their music glides effortlessly like a beautiful bird spreading its wings and catching the sunlight as it drifts from one gentle slipstream to another.

“Octava” is the group’s second album and like their debut “The Cradle” and its somewhat introspective approach to meditative jazz offers a welcoming space for uplifting contemplation. The warm melodies and thoughtful musical exploration take the listener on a lovely journey, one which offers a deep reward. Ford-Young shares a few thoughts on the recording: “This album is about change and evolution to a higher version of ourselves. Understanding this journey through the idea of ascending a musical scale and arriving at a new, higher octave is natural, especially for a musician. We move, struggle, and work through the various steps or tones and arrive at the octave a new version of ourselves, still the same person, but vibrating at a higher frequency.”

From Marlbank:

Cast your minds back to 2022 and in the same Pharoanic slipstream The Cradle that maxed out on the sheer feeling of space engendered on 'First Step' pivoting between the bass playing of Seth Ford-Young of US West Coast outfit Phi-Psonics to the floaty flute-playing of Sylvain Carton who also plays tenor saxophone on the album.

On the upcoming Octava clearly the balladic 'Green Dreams' dedicated to Ford-Young's wife is the best track with the slow tick of drummer Josh Collazo a human metronome that has somehow ceased being an inanimate object to deftly choreograph the dance that develops. But most tracks work in terms of a long play listen. Carton is all over the record and the tasteful Wurly playing is the work of Mitchell Yoshida.

Even more relevant since the passing of Pharoah Sanders last September. And even long before. Again the sax titan was at the heart of the awakening. What goes around coming around all the years on since his classic Karma all the way up to his last great statement, the incredible Promises. It is a circle that remains unbroken and the solar ripples span ever outerwards.

Maybe it says in its best expression a poetic commentary on the malaise of Western society more than any news cycle can even make a motion towards. Manchester label Gondwana is the original spiritual jazz label for the 21st century in the UK and while others may dabble at the style and frequently do, there is always a deep sense of exploration with the Halsalls & Mackness heads at the label even when they change tack.

From Goldmine Mag:

In modern days and times, when it comes to the pure and unadulterated genre of Jazz music, although it doesn't seem so, there are a plethora of recording artist's and musical ensembles who exemplify the pure and genetic coding of the roots of the genre of Jazz (in all of its classic sub-genres).  Whether it be Bebop, Hard Bop, Post Bop, Soul Jazz, Modal, Vocal Jazz, Jazz Funk, and even up to the mid-'70s incarnation of Jazz Fusion, respectable homages to those varied styles of classic traditional jazz music are alive and very present, today.  Phi-Psonics, having recently entered this realm with their debut album The Cradle (2020)—which we hope to review in the near future—have resurfaced in 2023 with their sophomore album, Octava, given to us via the very notable and respectable avant-garde and eclectic UK record label, Gondwana Records.  Aside from the Phi-Psonics, Gondwana's artist roster includes other phenomenal and note-worthy acts such as Chip Wickham, Allysha Joy, and Caoilfhionn Rose, to name a few; and the Phi-Psonics are right at home, fitting right in the musical mentality of the record label. Headed by the incredible writer, composer, producer and bassist, Seth Ford-Young, and completed with his line up of exceptional musicians: Sylvain Carton (saxophones and flutes), Mitchell Yoshida (Wurlitzer and electric piano), and Josh Collazo (drums), Phi-Psonics are a quartet of modern ethereal post bop and modal jazz, that has no choice but to garner respect from even the most discerning of Jazz music aficionados.  And all of this, out of Los Angeles, the 'music capital of the world', where Rock, HipHop, Pop, Soul/R&B, Punk, and even Smooth Jazz reign supreme ... come Phi-Psonics.

Octava is a brilliant sophomore effort if there ever was one.  And although I do not own their debut release, I have sampled it online, and I will say that, even as incredibly impressive as their breakthrough album The Cradle is, their sophomore release stands out even if just a hair more, than their debut does.  Boy, does the opening track,  "Invocation," immediately stir up mid-'60s post bop offerings from some of my most notable favorites.  It immediately threw me back to some of my favorite Eric Dolphy, Ron Carter, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane recordings.  Moving through the track-listing to "We Walk in the Gardens of Our Ancestors," I came to a place of the meditative Jazz ethers, where the minimalistic infusion of brilliant musicianship and composition met the sonic fingerprint of psychedelia, which was lead specifically by flute and Rhodes piano, and carried me through a pure Jazz dream state, reminiscent of circa ealy-'70s CTI label Hubert Laws.  "Green Dreams," is yet another 'beyond reality' work of art that invokes feelings of supernatural peace and subconscious self-reflection, yet in the midst of contemplation, all in a slightly more than five minute composition, which ends much to soon.  

Photo: Bobby Gordon

Best Music of 2023- Anja Laudval

Music that feels like it emanates from my youth-when electronic keyboards could elicit the newest and the most nostalgic emotions I experienced. Through the years this type of music in my ears has been lost, but here it's been found. Tranquil and ruminative. A spring in cool, fall air.

From The Quietus:

Pianist and synth player Lauvdal is a prolific collaborator. Her roots are in jazz, playing in countless ensembles in Oslo’s scene. She is one third of the shape-shifting improvisation trio Moskus, and also played on Jenny Hval’s 2018 EP, The Long Sleep. It’s only recently that she ventured into recording solo. From A Story Now Lost, produced with Laurel Halo, is a suite of woozy electronics and keys. Intricately layered, the tracks unfurl in gauzy webs and ebbs rather than marching out of the speakers.

Farewell To Faraway Friends is less layered, more hand-crafted, recorded at home with nothing more than two mics and a Wurlitzer keyboard. It’s an album that feels simultaneously itinerant and domestic, exploratory and private. Lacking the augmentation of her debut, it retains the knack of tumbling out the speakers like leaves twirling through the wind, with trickles of notes dancing through their own sustains. A sense of intimacy, that you’re listening in on a private ritual, is only amplified as you hear the creaks and soft clunks of the Wurlitzer as Lauvdal’s fingers move across its keyboard.

This feeling of being both homely and placeless, settled and roaming, makes sense when Lauvdal speaks about her life over the last decade or so. Years of touring internationally also meant years of travelling alone. Thanks to the generous parental leave available in Norway, after she had her first child, she opted to bring her family with her.

“When you’re away for longer periods, it’s strange, you change. At least I did,” she admits. “You get into this different way of being in the world, of travelling and seeing a lot of things. When you get home there’s a friction with that – who am I in this place? You need to adjust. When I was travelling with my daughter and partner we were more adventurous. We wanted to stay longer in each place and see more. We didn’t need that readjustment when we got back.”

From DJ Mag:

“I think that for a long time, I didn’t really need it,” Lauvdal says, explaining why it took so long to put out her own music. “I really enjoy collaboration, and I have a very social relationship to music. It’s hanging out with friends and playing together, which is a really nice way to be in the world. But maybe six months before the pandemic, I was extremely tired from touring a lot and from being sort of dragged in a lot of different directions with all the many different projects, and so I sort of needed to gather my thoughts.”

Lauvdal decided to take a bit of time off — then Covid came along, and she had a lot more time off. “I suddenly found myself sitting in a room and playing alone for myself,” she says, “not having an audience and not having anybody at all, not even somebody recording it. I was completely alone, and that was a super-weird and intense feeling for me. Like, who do I do this for? It was a very, very new experience, but also sort of what I needed to get back the joy.”

The album was produced by Laurel Halo, the Ann Arbor-born, Berlin-based artist who, like Lauvdal, has a penchant for aural experimentation. The process, true to Lauvdal’s background, was a collaborative one, initiated by sending sketches over to Halo. “We found some mutual favorites,” Lauvdal recalls, “and we talked a lot about process, and then she asked, ‘Do you ever improvise with your own improvisations?’ That was really a door-opener for me, because up till then, I’d only sampled other people and other instruments.”

From Crack:

There’s something to be said about full-length debuts from artists some years into established professions. There’s often an eagerness from all manner of fans and critics, who await such releases with an additional air of excitement. Prospective listeners may well ponder how the creators of these highly-anticipated, long-awaited projects will make sense of colourful careers and reconcile the various offshoots of their work into a singular album, after extended spells of time spent honing a craft, working closely with peers and experimenting across a diverse spectrum of musical landscapes.

Anja Lauvdal is a Norwegian musician and composer who released her solo debut From a Story Now Lost last year via Smalltown Supersound. Hailing from the small town in the south of Norway where label founder Joakim Haugland started the imprint in the 90s, the record was a full circle moment for more than just Lauvdal. Created with LA-based producer and Awe founder Laurel Halo – who herself shared a remarkable album, Atlas, just a few weeks back – From a Story Now Lost was exquisite and transportive, and chronicled an artist in a clear moment in both time and place. A graduate of the prestigious Trondheim Conservatory of Music, the release marked the latest stop in a musical odyssey that has seen her particulate in various ensembles and collaborate with renowned artists like Jenny Hval both in the studio and on stage over the past decade or so.