Malicool
ASIN: B000086B9B
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Mali's one of international music's most fascinating zones, a place where the blues went home to help stir a music that blew the world's mind with Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, and Boubacar Traore in the 1990s. Then Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame) rekindled the flame in 2002 with Mali Music.
And now, free jazz's greatest trombonist, Roswell Rudd, has created another masterpiece. His horn--wide-bore and fatly swaying blats--mixes magically with Toumani Diabate's kora, Lassana Diabate's balofon, and Basseko Kouyate's ngona to make a wonderland of strings, percussion, and resonant color. Sayon Sissoko's guitar and Henry Schroy's bass lend a structural foundation over which the marimbalike plunks dance and Rudd's horn pliably fills space with broad, full-blown clouds, an ideal, unexpected expander of all that's going on around the trombonist. Monk's "Jackie-ing" has a structure that Toumani's kora thrives in, with canyons where the strings make a phenomenal, rich showing. It's the more traditional stuff that has Rudd thriving, always with such sureness that he sounds as if he's played Malian music all his life. But still: you won't believe the adaptation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony's "Ode to Joy" as it forms the launch pad for the set-closing "Malijam." --Andrew Bartlett
Malicool,Roswell Rudd,Toumani Diabate,Sunny Side,Avant-Garde Jazz,Jazz,Jazz Music,Pop,World Fusion
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Roswell Rudd , and Toumani Diabate Manufacturer: Sunny Side ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD  General
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ASIN: B000086B9B Release Date: 2003-02-04 |
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Amazon.com
Mali's one of international music's most fascinating zones, a place where the blues went home to help stir a music that blew the world's mind with Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, and Boubacar Traore in the 1990s. Then Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame) rekindled the flame in 2002 with Mali Music.And now, free jazz's greatest trombonist, Roswell Rudd, has created another masterpiece. His horn--wide-bore and fatly swaying blats--mixes magically with Toumani Diabate's kora, Lassana Diabate's balofon, and Basseko Kouyate's ngona to make a wonderland of strings, percussion, and resonant color. Sayon Sissoko's guitar and Henry Schroy's bass lend a structural foundation over which the marimbalike plunks dance and Rudd's horn pliably fills space with broad, full-blown clouds, an ideal, unexpected expander of all that's going on around the trombonist. Monk's "Jackie-ing" has a structure that Toumani's kora thrives in, with canyons where the strings make a phenomenal, rich showing. It's the more traditional stuff that has Rudd thriving, always with such sureness that he sounds as if he's played Malian music all his life. But still: you won't believe the adaptation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony's "Ode to Joy" as it forms the launch pad for the set-closing "Malijam." --Andrew Bartlett
Customer Reviews:
Trombone and kora? It works!.......2005-09-04
Completely blew my mind.......2003-02-08
With Malicool, however, I believe we have something truly new. Whereas on Peace Pipe, the brilliant "downtown world jazz" album by Ben Allison, Malian kora player Momadou Diabate is thrust into a hip Western jazz setting, with generally very satisfactory results, on Malicool free jazz maestro Roswell Rudd does the opposite--he travels to Mali and inserts himself (and his jazz aesthetic) into traditional Malian string music. In his liner notes Rudd observes that he had to radically adjust his trombone playing, from a chromatic concept to the natural octave setting of Malian music, from a drum-oriented understanding to a more naturally flowing percussive direction, but especially from a sound-impact standpoint. The tonal weight of the trombone could have easily overwhelmed the delicate string interaction typical of this music. Thus, he had to totally redesign his approach tonally and spatially.
Does it work? Magnificently. It strikes me that this is almost some new kind of music--a unique blending of Malian and jazz sensibilities into something greater than the sum of its parts. What we've got here is the timeless, static-like quality of West African music joined to the restless exploratory character of jazz to produce a music that is at once meditative and ecstatic, mournful and joyous, still and dynamic.
This is perhaps best illustrated by two tunes: "Jackie-ing" and "Ode to Joy," the first a well-known jazz composition by Thelonius Monk, the second, of course, the famous Beethoven composition. Each sounds totally natural, even familiar, though surely like nothing else one has ever heard before. There's an inherent playfulness to Monk's music which this cross-cultural amalgam perfectly captures, all the while maintaining what can only be described as a completely alien--to jazz, at least--musical aesthetic. "Ode to Joy," here called "Malijam," is something else again. Reharmonized, rhythmically deconstructed, it still manages, somehow, to perfectly capture the essence of Beethoven.
Highest praise to Roswell Rudd for even attempting such music. Kudos to all involved for bringing it off so spectacularly.
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ASIN: B00005QVL2 Release Date: 2006-05-02 |
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