Blood Drum Spirit

Blood Drum Spirit Artist: Royal Hartigan
Label: Innova Records
Category: Music



Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Format: Enhanced
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 2


UPC: 726708658021
EAN: 0726708658021
ASIN: B00017LVT6


Release Date: 2004-01-20

Related Categories:

General General
Related | Jazz | Styles | Music
General General
Related | Pop | Styles | Music

Listmania:

  1. Best Jazz You've Never Heard
  2. New Jazz Beat Elite, Part II

Tracks:

  1. Wadsworth Falls
  2. Wadsworth Falls: Epilogue
  3. Dagbamba Pilipinas Suite
  4. Dagbamba Pilipinas Suite: Solog
  5. Dagbamba Pilipinas Suite: Pilipinas
  6. Dagbamba Pilipinas Suite: Solog
  7. Caravan
  8. Tala Vadyam

Tracks:

  1. Apartheid U.S.A. Suite: Adzohu, Juba Handclaps
  2. Apartheid U.S.A. Suite: Rodney King Drums
  3. Apartheid U.S.A. Suite: Double Trouble
  4. Navajo Blood/Pontoosuc Waters/Springside Lands
  5. Tie Me Sufre
  6. Papago-Saguaro Song
  7. Eve

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Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Jan is right........2004-03-14

If you are like me, you have found that one of the best ways to learn about music is to listen to other music freaks. They will always know about lots of musicians that you never heard of. Jan P. Dennis (the reviewer below) is one of the music freaks I listen to.
And on this CD, he could not be more on the money. Hartigan is a great drummer and band leader. Prior to recording this he had spent about ten years studying ethnomusicology at Wesleyan and, more importantly, in his own words, investigating "with Master Artists, into the percussion traditions of West Africa, South India, Java, Sumatra, Philippines, China, Japan, Ireland, Persia, Turkey, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Native America, and the African-American Diaspora" (Quoted from his on-line resume). What is really amazing is not only how he has mastered and incorporated all of the traditional drums into his drum kit but also how he has brought that knowledge of traditional non-Western drum traditions and put it to use within the context of jazz drumming. He actually wrote the book on it (See the Amazon listings for Hartigan's drum textbooks). So Jan is right when he says that Hartigans work is a true world jazz.
But since I come from a different earset than Jan I contextualize what I hear differently. Where Jan hears world jazz I hear straight ahead post-bop. One of the things that most strikes me about this CD is the work on David Bindman on the wind instruments and Kevin McNeal on the guitar. McNeal had worked with Greg Osby and the M-Base collective before this recording. Bindman is a member of the Brooklyn Sax Quartet and has played with Kevin Norton, Joe Fonda, Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Braxton. So in both cases, you expect to hear modernist music.
And you do but I swear to you that when they are feeling soulful that Bindman sounds like Stanley Turrentine and McNeal like early George Benson. Sometimes this CD reminds me of a CTI date without all the hideous overproduction. Other times it sounds as thoughtful as 60s Wayne Shorter. And behind it all is that vastly powerful universal drum experiment that is Hartigan. In short this is the sort of powerful straight ahead jazz CD that makes people like me love jazz.
This is a superb CD and one that deserves to be more widely heard. These are first rate musicians playing with a passion, intelligence and a social purpose. Jan is right. This one is not to be missed.

5 out of 5 stars Why has this spectacular, revelatory music . . ........2004-01-29

. . . languished in record vaults for more than a decade?

Never mind why. Who can figure out the vagaries and vissitudes of the contemporary jazz scene?

Not me.

Let's just be thankful that the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts somehow found out about this incredible music and helped bring it to light.

Leader Royal Hartigan ranks among the absolute greatest of contemporary percussionists. Thoroughly familiar with nearly the entire scope of world drumming and percussion musics--everything from Native American, to East Asian, to South Pacific, to West African, to South Indian--Hartigan has found a group of players entirely sympathetic to his massive world music canvas and produced a landmark disk. Of course, it helps that he has spent a lifetime studying and playing everything from bebop to funk to blues to gospel to reggae to hip-hop to African to Afro-Latin styles.

Seeking to situate a varity of native percussive musics in their natural state, yet overlain with a sophisticated jazz-world vibe, Hartigan has produced a disc of uncanny depth and spirituality.

Weilding a startling variety of percussion instruments, including drums, cymbals, rattles, gankogui, axatse, dondo, kulintang, babandir, agung, and dabakan, Hartigan weaves a thoroughly mesmeric sound signature, which his playing mates--Kevin McNeal (guitar), David Bindman (tenor and alto sax, flute, clarinet), and Wes Brown (contrabass)--completely lock into.

Listen. This is one of the, if not THE, greatest music discoveries I've ever made. If you have even the slightest affinity for hip, sophisticated world-jazz, you MUST listen to this unbelievably transcendent music.

Absolute highest recommendation.

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