​On Wednesday, Spin magazine announced that they would be launching a new Twitter account dedicated to providing 140-character reviews of records, doing away with most (but not all) long-form album reviews associated with the magazine. According to his introductory essay about the undertaking, Senior Editor Christopher Weingarten (who himself tweeted reviews of 1000 different albums via his @1000TimesYes twitter handle) explained that this would free their writers up to put more work into the 20 extended reviews per month that will still be found on Spin's website, as well as tackle many more obscure albums that perhaps would not have been mentioned otherwise.

While I certainly applaud the forward-thinking ambition of Spin, I have to question the fairness and depth of a cursory twitter review of music that a band or musician dedicated so much time and effort towards, and reducing it to the mere equivalent of a catchy sound-bite.
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​With the dust of the just-completed Woodstock festival still settling, Miles Davis was on his own idiosyncratic trip on this date in 1969, as he settled into Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio in Manhattan to begin the three-day recording sessions that would produce his groundbreaking jazz-rock record, Bitches Brew. The album features a stellar cast of musicians who came to the studio with little knowledge of what they were getting into or what songs they were going to play. Davis thrived on playing in the moment, giving very little direction to the players or demands for what directions he wanted the songs to go, while also knowing exactly what type of style and sound he was searching for. More >>

​From local business paper Finance & Commerce comes some sad, if not entirely surprising, news about the Uptown Bar's planned relocation.More >>

Dizzy's Mark K. Johnson

​Once upon a time in America, hip and funky were synonymous. But somewhere in the last twenty years, hipster went from being a term to describe jazz fans to being a term to describe waif-ish twentysomethings in Brooklyn--people who wouldn't know a swung eighth note if it came up and knocked the PBR out of their ironic koozie. I blame the drum machine.More >>

​The music on Orange Mighty Trio's sophomore release, Infrastructure, ranges from the quiet, contemplative mood of opener "Point A" to the propulsive, restless urgency of "Driving With Your Eyes Open" to the chugging, train-inspired jump blues of "Orange Line," but no matter the tempo or approach, their music is always shot through with a tinge of Old World nostalgia. Part of it is down to the instrumentation: a piano, a violin, and a bass playing together without rhythm instruments are inevitably going to sound a little wistful, a throwback to simpler times. But a lot of it comes down to their gentle, way with a fragile melody, as on standout track "Convergence."
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​On a Monday night last year, I went to the Clown Lounge for Jazz Implosion. I go fairly regularly now, but at the time, I'd only been a handful of times. More or less hosted by Fat Kid Wednesdays (unless someone is on tour), Jazz Implosion has been a Twin Cities' mainstay for years. It's an establishment, and so we more or less don't think about it.

But on this particular Monday, sitting in a booth tucked alongside the stage left wall (if you could even call it a stage--the musicians just move the couch and coffee table out of the way and set up), I found myself thinking about what it means to have Jazz Implosion here in the Twin Cities. I though about it while I watched Fat Kid Wednesdays (Michael Lewis on saxophone, J.T. Bates on drums and Adam Linz on bass) and munched on the homemade Sloppy Joe I'd gotten from a crock pot brought by Bates' wife. The bun was the soft, perfect, generic kind you get at Rainbow; the meat was warm and smokey. And I thought of everyone who leaves.

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It's often said that nature abhors a vacuum, but it seems like it abhors an outdoor movie and music event when it comes to the annual Square Lake Music and Film Festival. Rain and thunderstorms seem to bedevil organizer Paul Creager's efforts almost every year, and this past summer, they had to shut down the whole thing early when an electrical storm threatened everyone's safety. But weather won't be stopping International Novelty Gamelan from performing their score for the 1926 animated feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" this Thursday at the Cedar Cultural Center. Creager has put together this Square Lake Festival redux to make sure their hard work didn't go to waste, and the night will kick off at 7 pm with a banjo performance by Paul Metzger, followed by thirty minutes of local film, then the performance by International Novelty Gamelan, and then close out with more local film.

And just what the heck is a gamelan? It's a traditional Javanese (and Balinese) instrument composed of many different percussion and resonating (i.e. gongs, xylophones) pieces that make a kind of ensemble when played together. Elaine Evans was kind enough to sit down with me and answer some questions about International Novelty Gamelan and their process for composing music for the oldest surviving feature-length animated film.

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​The whole notion of experimental music is a little wonky, much like the notion of politicians "experimenting" with drugs. As one comedian noted, "What are they, setting up test tubes and beakers before they smoke a little weed?" And a lot of music, to one extent or another, is built around chance and the notion that you can never enter the same stream twice; improvised solos live and die in an instant on the stage and technical difficulties have led to plenty of unamplified audience sing-alongs more inspiring than a performance that went according to the letter would have been.

But composers like John Cage actively used chance operations based on the throw of the dice, the I Ching, or other sources of indeterminate outcomes in composing their scores. The performances based on these scores are often as random in outcome as the scores themselves. Cage's (and experimental music's) most famous piece, 4'33", is often misunderstood as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but in fact, it's more a frame through which to hear the world. By indicating the beginning of a performance and its conclusion four and a half minutes later, Cage made the environment the piece is performed in the music. More >>

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When Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue in 1959, by way of contrast, he was looking for a way out of the straitjacket harmonies of bebop. He'd begun this work with modal compositions on Milestones and 1958 Miles (or '58 Miles as listeners in the CD age came to know it from the new cover art), but for Kind of Blue he came into the studio with nothing but sketches--scales or melody lines for the improvisers to use. The results were, of course, legendary.

And now here is Kind of Bloop, an album that re-imagines Davis' album as the soundtrack for a vintage Nintendo or Sega videogame. If that simple description doesn't already give you a clear picture, you should probably just head over to kindofbloop.com, where you can listen to samples and also buy the album.

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