The father and son team of guitarists Sonny Greenwich, Sr. and Jr. brings straight-ahead experience and alternative rock sensibility to the excellent Canadian quintet, Meantime, bridging the gap between two creative jazz generations. The band’s complex, barrier-breaking Welcome: Mother Earth (Justin Time 80-2; 60:05) offers engaging art-rock soundscapes with soul. “Tortoise Shell Sky” stacks a grainy-grunge percussion backdrop and noteless, plucked percussive string layer, with light guitar and droning guitar effects, building to a beautiful burst of sound without a trace of sappiness. “Down By the Farm,” marked by a freaky, X-Files worthy introduction, finds bassist Al Baculis singing a twisted stalker song deadpan beside a big dance drum march (sample lyric: “I will bury you down by the farm/I will bury you right beside my mom”). Papa and son Greenwhich also face off in direct stylistic contrast on the gutty-deep “Cruisin’ the Hood,” alternating solos between Sonny Jr’s wailing rock licks and Sonny Sr’s more spacious, explorative tone. Whether in skittering, knuckleball fusion (“Detour”) and earth sound-sample driven soundscapes (“Welcome: Mother Earth”), the tight quintet always maintains a strong point-of-view, crafting pieces which are never cliched.
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Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
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Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
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Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time