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Recorded
Music
Reviews of new releases from Pete Krebs,
Jason DuMars, and Baaba Maal
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Live
at the Royal Festival Hall
Baaba
Maal
(Palm Pictures/Island Life)
http://www.palmpictures.com/maal/
Of related interest: Orchestra Baobab, Mansour Seck,
Youssou N'Dour |
Until quite recently, fans of Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal
had been waiting a long time for a follow-up to his phenomenal
breakthrough album, Firin' in Fouta (1995). Then all
of a sudden they were met with a flurry of releases--one studio,
one live, one a reissue. Like Firin' in Fouta, Nomad
Soul, the studio album, demonstrates Maal's vocal strengths
and his interest in combining the music and spirit of traditional
West African music with the rhythms and sounds of other cultures.
Three songs from Nomad Soul are on Live at the Royal
Festival Hall, which was recorded in London last year.
Of the album's four tracks (each about 10 minutes long) the
standout is "African Woman," an exuberant song from Firin'
in Fouta that reveals the influence of Cuban jazz, which
has been popular in Senegal since the 1940s. All of the songs
demonstrate the beauty of Maal's loud, thin voice, a gift
the singer attributes both to growing up with a lot of space
around him and to passing a certain stage in his vocal training
(the "voice exploding" or daandé heli in Fula).
The live album is a treat for those of us who missed the concert,
but the best news for fans of Baaba Maal is the rerelease
of Djam Leeli, the classic, mostly acoustic album Maal
recorded with Mansour Seck over a decade ago. Jonathan
Morrow
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Jason
DuMars, Chromatic Persuaders
Tugboat Brewpub 711 SW Ankeny St., 226-2508
8 pm Thursday, April 8
$3
Singularity
Jason DuMars
(Self-released CD)
http://www.saxophone.org/jasonbio.html
Of related interest: Sam Rivers, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe
Mitchell |
Propelled by the same eclectic New York avant-jazz tendencies
as works by Erik Friedlander, Marc Ribot and Anthony Coleman,
Singularity masterfully showcases the emotive modes
of Portland alto sax innovator Jason DuMars. His stark changes
and drastic sound shifts convey a wide array of moods and
feelings. "Prelude," the first of the album's 12 tracks, quickly
demonstrates how DuMars uses his sax to paint pictures: It
opens with a subtle passage that radiates a lilting feeling
of serenity, then strikes a more intense motif by building
into a massive wall of multi-saxed dissonance. That he's unaccompanied
on more than half of these songs is, considering the emotional
territory he treads upon, almost unbelievable. Added sounds
from guest contributors--notable free-music types like Ned
Rothenberg, Chris Cutler, Tom Dimuzio and Doug Theriault--serve
to further accentuate DuMars' already strong musical vibes.
All of this makes Singularity sound like something
one might find on John Zorn's hip Tzadik label, but since
the relatively unknown DuMars released this fine debut on
his own, few jazz snobs will take note. This should not be
the case. Seek out Singularity and do not miss this
local musician's live act. Jeff Fuccillo
The sweet strains of Golden Delicious pop up in this recording,
but Pete Krebs' new songs are closer to the puckish rock of
his former band Hazel than to his more recent bluegrass group.
This time out the prolific songwriter achieves a happy medium
between solo effort and group project. His current band, the
Gossamer Wings--which includes Billy Kennedy, the Maroons'
John Moen, Richmond Fontaine's Paul Brainard and Soundgarden
bassist Ben Shepherd--appears more to flesh out the lead guy's
songs rather than add its own weight. Nevertheless, this all-star
cast enables Krebs to cover a wider territory than he did
on his solo albums or with any of his previous bands. On a
number of songs, including "Ashes Back to Vegas," the plush
sound, rounded out by a western guitar, recalls the Nitty
Gritty Dirt Band. With its slow pace and singularly country
guitars, "Take Me Away" sounds like the Willie Nelson song
that the braided one never got around to writing. The title
song, with the poetic line, "Dance through the house like
a king and queen/to an orchestra of gossamer wings," is the
prettiest of the bunch.
Alyssa Isenstein
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 7,
1999
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