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31 Days Of Album Reviews #2: Carlos Barretto Lokomotiv, “Labirintos”
CARLOS BARRETTO LOKOMOTIV Labirintos (Clean Feed) This disc, by the long-standing trio of bassist Carlos Barretto (who’ll show up again toward the end of the month), guitarist Mario Delgado and drummer...
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Interview: Bill Laswell
Bill Laswell‘s discography, as producer and bassist, label head and general eye-of-the-storm, is vast and can be intimidating. Not all of it’s brilliant. His central concept of collision—taking...
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Revocation
Chaos of Forms (Relapse) by Phil Freeman Buy it from Amazon Massachusetts-based metal band Revocation‘s 2009 album Existence is Futile was one of the best releases of that year. The band seemed to have...
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Power Trio Prog
Raoul Bjorkenheim/Bill Laswell/Morgen Ågren Blixt (Cuneiform) Buy it from Amazon Levin Torn White Levin Torn White (Lazy Bones) Buy it from Amazon by Phil Freeman Back in February, I interviewed Bill...
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Death
Human (Relapse) Buy it from Amazon by Phil Freeman The early 1990s were a weird time for metal. Some of the genre’s biggest bands were fracturing and faltering—vocalist Rob Halford left Judas Priest in...
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Mahavishnu Orchestra
The Complete Columbia Albums Collection (Columbia) by Phil Freeman Buy it English guitarist John McLaughlin first emerged into the public eye in 1969 and 1970, a period he spent mostly working with...
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Miles Davis In The ’80s
by Phil Freeman [The following is the text of a paper I delivered at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference in New York last week, under the title "From the Corner to Carnegie Hall and Beyond: The Urbanization of...
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A List Of 50 Jazz Albums
by Phil Freeman Apparently April 30 is International Jazz Day. So as a way of subverting the canon-building exercises that are sure to go on across the jazz internet today, I’ve come up with a list of...
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Tony Williams Lifetime 1971
Here’s some terrific video, with augmented soundboard audio, of the Tony Williams Lifetime performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1971. This was the final version of the group’s first...
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Spectrum Road
Spectrum Road is a new group featuring guitarist Vernon Reid, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jack Bruce, and drummer Cindy Blackman Santana; their brief, basically, is to keep the music of the Tony...
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The Best Jazz Albums Of 2013: #20-16
This year, Burning Ambulance is publishing two year-end lists, one covering jazz and one covering rock/metal. Here is the second installment of our countdown of the 25 best jazz albums of 2013. (Click...
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Ihsahn
This feature originally appeared late last year, as the cover story to Burning Ambulance #7, which is still for sale as a print magazine, an ebook, or a Kindle edition. We’re publishing it here because...
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McCoy Tyner In The ’70s: Part 3
by Phil Freeman All this week, we’re looking at the 19 albums pianist McCoy Tyner recorded between 1970 and 1979. Here are Part 1 and Part 2. On August 31 and September 1, 1974, Tyner and his road...
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BA Podcast 14: Billy Cobham
Episode 14 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with drummer Billy Cobham, an absolute jazz legend. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he worked with...
View ArticleOlli Hirvonen
Photo by Luke Marantz Finnish guitarist Olli Hirvonen, perhaps best known for his work in Brian Krock‘s bands liddle and Big Heart Machine, will release his latest solo album, Displace, on August 30....
View ArticleSonny Rollins in the ’70s: Part 3
Sonny Rollins might be the greatest tenor saxophonist who ever lived. But in the 21st century, his reputation mostly rests on the albums he made in the 1950s and 1960s, on the Blue Note, Riverside,...
View ArticleAura
Miles Davis was born May 26, 1926. In observance of the anniversary of his birth, I’m taking a look at an album that I haven’t listened to in about 15 years. In December 1984, Davis was given the...
View ArticleThe Runners-Up: Billy Cobham
The Runners-Up is a monthly column, wherein we will analyze an album that isn’t the consensus first choice or most canonical title by a given artist, but is one worthy of more attention than it’s...
View ArticleOn The Corner @ 50
I’ve been obsessed with Miles Davis’s On the Corner, which was originally released on October 11, 1972, for over 30 years. I first heard it, on vinyl, in about 1989. Since then, I’ve owned an early...
View ArticleLotus @ 50
Look, sometimes you gotta just lay down a marker, so that’s what I’m gonna do. For about a half dozen years, from 1969 to 1974, Carlos Santana and his band made some of the most exciting,...
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