Wake Up with the Birds

Artist: Carlos Actis Dato
Label: Leo Records
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1
EAN: 5024792028528
ASIN: B00003NHA9

Release Date: 1999-12-14

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Avant Garde & Free Jazz

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Listmania:

The beauty of one or two saxophones
Great Japanese jazz

Tracks:

Mad Chickens
Wild Shells
Malicious Ladybirds
Afrocats
Nice Turtles
Pretty Pigs

Customer Reviews:

An infectious romp........2004-09-21

Saxophone duets usually produce toward music that is dense, microtonal or of ambiguous tonality and is unrelentently serious. That can be very good when well done. I refer the reader to Monkey Puzzle with Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg, to Parker with Anthony Braxton on Duo (London) 1993 or to some of Sonny Simmons' recent work with Brandon Evans (unavailable on Amazon).
But this delightful recording by Kazutoki Umezu and the whirlwind known as Carlo Actis Dato is of a different spirit entirely. These two have never put away childish things. They come to play in every sense of the word. For the most part, Actis Dato inhabits the bottom range of the sound and Umezu the upper.
Actis Dato's playing on this CD is fairly straightforward post- bop and hard bop. He is smacking out riffs with great rhythmic vitality and variation. Umezu plays more densely and atonally on top but is working very closely at the same time with the materials that Actis Dato is giving him.
The compositions are credited to both men which would usually mean they are free improvs but the pieces are so structured that that is hard to believe. On some of the pieces, like the tour-de-force opener, Mad Chickens, there seem to be very distinct sections. It is too bad that there are no notes that explain the method of the session a little.
But that is really my only complaint about this CD. It is beautifully recorded and the playing is consistently amazing. Sometimes it seems that there are three or four saxs being played but upon close listening there are only the two. They are just being played with such projective force that each one sounds like a sax section.
There are few if any extended techniques being utilized. Just lots of inventiveness from a couple of guys having a lot of fun.
There are so many ways of being human. All too often, in contemporary jazz that is worth anything, the assumption is that you have to be serious in order to be taken seriously. The music has to reference the big questions of humanity- justice, God, politics and high art. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded that great music can exemplify the play of children, the delight of two old friends giving each other a hard time.
I say give this music a listen and see if you don't find your spirit lightened. Actis Dato and Umezu have given use a small good thing (to steal from Raymond Carver). Let us enjoy it.

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