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Slava Gliožeris

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Favorite Jazz Artists

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Jazz Genre Nb. Rated Avg. rating 1 Avant-Garde Jazz 272 3.67 2 Post Bop 91 3.56 3 Fusion 78 3.44 4 Eclectic Fusion 66 3.65 5 21st Century Modern 50 3.75 6 Nu Jazz 41 3.65 7 World Fusion 32 3.19 8 Jazz Related Rock 32 3.30 9 Jazz Related Improv/Composition 26 3.60 10 RnB 26 3.38 11 Hard Bop 22 3.45 12 Progressive Big Band 16 3.72 13 Third Stream 15 3.53 14 Post-Fusion Contemporary 15 3.30 15 African Fusion 14 3.64 16 Pop/Art Song/Folk 11 2.91 17 Vocal Jazz 11 3.18 18 Funk 10 3.35 19 Jazz Related Electronica/Hip-Hop 9 3.28 20 Jazz Related Soundtracks 5 3.20 21 Funk Jazz 4 3.38 22 Soul Jazz 4 3.50 23 Exotica 3 2.83 24 Big Band 2 2.75 25 Cool Jazz 2 3.50 26 Blues 1 2.00 27 Afro-Cuban Jazz 1 3.50 28 Acid Jazz 1 3.00 29 Jump Blues 1 3.50 30 Latin Jazz 1 3.50

Latest Albums Reviews

NIECHĘĆ Live at Jazz Club Hipnoza

Live album · 2018 · Nu Jazz

Niechęć, a Polish band from Warsaw, came as a comet with their debut album "Śmierć W Miękkim Futerku" in 2012. Their cinematic mix of alt-rock, jamming, jazz-fusion, post-rock, and free jazz, all well played, with dark melodicism, won listeners by storm. The band's sound, based on heavy keys/electronic passages, sounded attractive not only for jazz lovers but for prog-rock and alt-rock fans as well.

The band's second album "Niech​ę​ć"(2016) significantly strengthened their reputation. So, two years later it looked like the right time for a live album release. "Live at Jazz Club Hipnoza", recorded in Southern Poland, opens with a longish heavy jam, which is probably the most problematic song on the album. The band's strong side is its melodic well well-arranged tuneful songs, so the bulky composition (titled "Koniec"("The End")) based on heavy keyboard passages without noticeable development or direction leaves a mixed impression.

Fortunately, things change for the better right after that. After the short introduction, the band offers listeners what they do best - emotionally colored well-crafted songs with a great balance between energy and melodicism.

The program comes almost exclusively from their second studio album, with two exceptions. The almost twelve-minute long "Chmury" is a new song, which will be released on their third studio album, "Unsubscribe", in 2022. It builds tension from the very first piano/sax/keys sounds and continues with the same atmosphere till the end. The eight-minute-long "Transhumanizm" starts as a slow-tempo dreamy lite (at least by the band's standards) electronics piece, but in the second half explodes with expected heavy keys/sax passages. It has never been released on their studio albums until now.

The closer, "Krew"("The Blood"), starts from free jazz sax soloing and continues with the same sax and piano interplay. The album's end is more impressive than "The End" at its beginning.

For newcomers, I would recommend starting from any studio album (I would probably prefer the debut). Any of them is more comprehensive, better edited, and as a whole more attractive. "Live at Jazz Club Hipnoza" could be interesting for the band's fans, who get the possibility to hear the band playing live.

• 11 days ago
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• Report #573711

EZRA COLLECTIVE Dance, No One's Watching

Album · 2024 · African Fusion

Londoners Ezra Collective were the first jazz band to receive the prestigious Mercury Prize. For their third studio album, "Dance, No One's Watching," the promotional campaign for the album started months before the release date, quite unusual for a jazz release. One of the very first singles, released before the album's release, neo-soul "God Gave Me Feet For Dancing" with Yazmin Lacey's vocals, became a hit in its own right. Not surprisingly, right after the release the album received massive press, mostly very positive.

"Dance, No One's Watching" is an excellent danceable album, combining some better components from London's new jazz scene of the New Millenium. Predominantly up-tempo, it offers Afro-beat, Caribbean, Latin, and South African music, mixed with today's London sound and melted in a never-ending dance fest. True, there are not many new ideas or sounds, and very often drums/rhythm are closer to popular danceable music than jazz (in moments the album's music recalled an excellent example of clever danceable music from the past - Sofie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder On The Dancefloor"). The whole sound is quite polished and safe, still, that way the album's music can attract a much wider listeners circle, not just jazz lovers, that's for sure.

One of the better albums this year for feet, not for the head. Dance, God Gave You Feet For Dancing.

• 17 days ago
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• Report #573680

CLAUDIO MILANO (NICHELODEON) Alberto Nemo, Claudio Milano (with borda), Niccolò Clemente : Frattura, Comparsa, Dissolvenza

Live album · 2024 · Jazz Related Improv/Composition

Unorthodox Italian vocalist Claudio Milano's newest album, "Frattura, Comparsa, Dissolvenza," was recorded by a quartet with electronic artist Borda and two pianists/electronic artists/vocalists, Niccolo Clemente and Alberto Nemo. Unlike many of Claudio's previous releases, the new one has nothing too much in common with the progressive rock of the 70s, which always was a strong Milano influence.

Just four pieces, 43 minutes long in common. Minimalist and liturgical atmosphere, dark and partially chamber. The opener "Frattura Iniziale" is Alberto Nemo's composition. Nemo began his career performing sacred music in chapels. Slow, dark, and minimalistic repetitive piano and operatic voice together sound like church liturgy. Partially recalls Ran Blake's music. Beautiful song and the best on this album for my ears.

"Comparsa" opens with a dark and dreamy(gothic?) piano solo, and operatic vocals come soon after. Song author and composer Niccolo Clemente adds electronics too. The vocals feel the space flying free. The same atmosphere of church liturgy and Gregorian chants continues.

"Dissolvenza", the longest album's composition, is more based on electronic effects sound. Claudio's vocal acrobatics pushes it towards a more leftfield zone. If the album's opener can be compared with chamber Ran Blake's works, "Dissolvenza" is closer to Diamanda Galas' music.

"Frattura Finale", the album's shortest piece, is written by Nemo again. Chamber piano, minimalist repetitive construction, and emotional voice over it. The Mass is ended.

As always in Claudio's music, there are a lot of philosophical themes and minds in the lyrics (true, it's good to be fluent in Italian though). According to liner notes, the album was recorded somewhere in a gas station. Surprisingly enough, its acoustics recall more of a church space. Probably not an album for Claudio's prog rock side fans, "Frattura, Comparsa, Dissolvenza" shows his great alternative talent - an electro-acoustic minimalist chamber vocalist. Well done!

• 47 days ago
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• Report #573584

AKIRA SAKATA Harpacticoida / Akira Sakata ‎: La Mer

Album · 1998 · Jazz Related Soundtracks

A leading Japanese avant-garde jazz sax player has formally graduated as a marine biologist. "La Mer" is his most unorthodox album, containing Sakata's compositions, recorded for the video program ”The Universe of Mijinko (Water Flea)”. Besides being a soundtrack composer, Akira plays reeds himself with the Harpacticoida trio ("Harpacticoida" is a planktonic or benthic water creature), consisting of Indonesian-Japanese pianist Febian Resa Pane, acoustic bassist Hiroshi Yoshino, and marimba player Kumiko Takara.

The album's music is opposite to almost everything we heard from Sakata on his regular albums. The compositions on "La Mer" are low-tempo, dreamy and soulful. Sakata plays many clarinet and alto solos, almost improvisation-less straight tunes. No trace of his regular harsh sound and screaming free sax can be found here. Febian Resa Pane plays almost chamber piano, and the whole music varies from soulful pop-jazz to almost ambient new age, scented with Japanese folk elements.

The original soundtrack material is completed with "Ballad For Taco (Octpus)" - a melancholic ballad with Sakata soprano sax soloing, it sounds a bit closer to his more regular material.

Originally a self-released edition in 2000, it has been reissued in Germany in 2002 by major label Enja and isn't a rarity anymore. Still, this album will hardly attract Sakata's explosive free-jazz fans and can be interesting mostly for his hot followers/researchers and collectors.

• 54 days ago
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• Report #573565

ODEAN POPE Almost Like Me

Album · 1982 · Eclectic Fusion

South Carolina-born Philadelphian sax player Odean Pope, still in his late teens, replaced John Coltrane in Jimmy Smith's band. He played with James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder and joined Max Roach's band.

"Almost Like Me" is Pope's debut as a leader, recorded in Germany and released on the German avant-garde jazz label Moers Music. Very much in the moment's fashion, Pope leads a bare-naked sax-drums-bass trio, playing brutal free funk. The rhythm section is extremely groovy and muscular and includes an explosive electric bassist, Gerald Veasley, and drummer Cornell Rochester (who will replace Ronald Shannon Jackson in James Blood Ulmer's Music Revelation Ensemble in the next decade).

All compositions are Pope's originals, his soulful sax soloing adds a lot of soul to quite mechanistic and strictly framed rhythmic constructions. Like some other free-funk artists' recordings, the album's music combines burning danceable rhythms with melodic "sameness", usual for the genre. The musicianship is still of the highest level though.

It's interesting to notice that all of the album's music is based on repetitive constructions, characteristic more of the next decade's M-Base than early free-funk. In many moments, "Almost Like Me", sounds very much like Steve Coleman's works from the 90s.

Not a masterpiece, this album offers some attractive experiences to everyone interested in free-funk and M-Base quality examples.

• 60 days ago
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• Report #573482

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• Posted 70 minutes ago in Recently Watched Films
  Watched "The French Connection" on big screen yesterday, I'm serious. In a small cinema close to main street, a base for local Cinema School. NYC cops trailing bad guys on foot or by car.  Early 70s New York - not Hollywood glanz, but dirty streets, more realistic characters, dark life. Sort of alternative to classic Hollywood movies of the time, still very American. Few episodes from French Riviera as contrast. Great soundtrack coming from Don Ellis[TUBE]/T76K3RxJY0A[/TUBE]
• Posted 16 days ago in Videos
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• Posted 18 days ago in 90s hip-hop iconoclasts Digable Planets return
   ‘They felt they couldn’t market us to white people’: 90s hip-hop iconoclasts Digable Planets return As they mark the 30th anniversary of album Blowout Comb, the Grammy-winning trio revisit their egalitarian ethos, anti-fascist lyrics and Pink Floyd influencesIt’s 1 March 1994, and at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the 36th annual Grammy awards are under way. Though Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Membrane and Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg’s Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang are favourites for best rap performance by a duo or group, it’s Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat), the debut single from Brooklyn-based underdogs Digable Planets, that wins.And the upsets don’t stop there: collecting the award with bandmates Craig “Doodlebug” Irving and Mariana “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira, founder Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler gazes out at the celeb-packed room and kills the mood dead. “We’d like everybody to think about the people right outside this door that’s homeless,” he says. “As you sit in these $900 seats … they out there not eating at all. Also, we’d like to say to the universal Black family that one day we’re gonna recognise our true enemy. We’re gonna stop attacking each other, and maybe then we’ll get some changes going on.”It was a defining show of seriousness from a trio misperceived as giddy, jazz-loving bohos. Before the year was done, Digable Planets released Blowout Comb, the substantive, subversive second album Irving describes as “about the pain and joy of being Black in America”. Now seen as a masterpiece of alternative hip-hop, the group are celebrating its 30th anniversary with a gig at EFG London jazz festival this week.But only months after Blowout Comb’s release, the group imploded, the album having fallen on deaf ears. Irving reckons Butler’s speech that night might’ve had something to do with that. “I bet people thought, ‘ these mothers’,” he says today, on a video call from his home in Fresno, California. “But I don’t care who we pissed off. Because it was the truth. It was real.”The speech was in character for Butler. Raised by civil rights activists, his parents’ beliefs weren’t just an influence but “the sediment of my being”, he says from his studio in Seattle, surrounded by instruments and gear. The son of a Black Panther, Irving was coming from a similar place. The pair met in Philadelphia in the late 80s, bonding over hip-hop aspirations and their grandmas living a block apart. Butler had already recorded demos with his group Digable Planets, though his bandmates had since quit. Irving quickly jumped aboard, and introduced Butler to a friend from Maryland.The daughter of two Brazilian musicians, Mariana Vieira felt emboldened by hip-hop. “Black American music – hip-hop specifically – co-signed experiences I was having in America as an Afro-Latina girl,” she says, at home in Los Angeles. “It was everything to me – I needed it to survive. I’d begun writing down my own observations on the world. When hip-hop came into my life, I realised: ‘I can turn these words into rhymes now’.”In Irving and Butler, Vieira found friends whose obsession with hip-hop ran as deep as hers. “We’d obsess over every word, every groove, every detail,” she remembers. “Entering these artists’ worlds was intoxicating.” Invited to rap with the boys, her audition rhymes became Nickel Bags off their 1993 debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). “We were like, ‘Damn, she’s dope!’” remembers Butler. “Her delivery, her tone … She was something. The universe was looking out for us.”[TUBE]/cM4kqL13jGM[/TUBE] Vieira was quickly familiarised with Butler’s “insect theory”, an ethos Butler says was inspired by “Funkadelic and Parliament records, my parents’ philosophies and reading lots of Marx and Jorge Luis Borges. The insect thing was: It’s not just about you, it’s about everybody. We’ll work on behalf of our culture, to make progress.”“It was an egalitarian, communal vision,” Vieira says, “like the poor communities where I was raised, where we all looked out for each other.”Their wider doctrine, meanwhile, was shaped by jazz. “My pop was a jazz head,” says Butler. “Jazz spoke to me, culturally and aesthetically: the mood, the pride, the discipline, the consciousness, the coolness. We weren’t just paying tribute – we were participating.” Vieira remembers afternoons studying album sleeves with Butler, “committing all the musicians’ names to memory. We adored this Black American art form born out of oppression and lack, but also remembrance of and deference to African culture. It felt like home, like a miracle.” They sampled jazz records, namechecked jazz artists and, later, performed alongside live jazz musicians.Butler had been making industry contacts while interning at Sleeping Bag Records. “Ish gave a demo to Dennis Wheeler, this hippy A&R guy at Pendulum Records, who got us,” remembers Irving. Pendulum released their debut 12”, Rebirth of Slick, in November 1992, its killer Art Blakey sample accompanied by an artful black & white video that located the group on stage at a classy jazz club. Reachin’ followed the next February, opening on a Herbie Hancock sample, portraying Digable Planets as “weird mothers … from the colourful ghettoes of outer space” and featuring copious shoutouts to forebears like Coltrane and Mingus. Their aesthetic had arrived fully formed.But for all this playfulness, the album was grounded, too – the abortion-themed La Femme Fetal warned that the oft-threatened repeal of Roe v Wade would result in the deaths of young women, and recommended that listeners “fight against the fascists”. It feels painfully timely three decades on. “I didn’t think of it as a sociopolitical move at the time,” Butler says. “I thought, ‘this is how I feel, and I believe I’m right’. I knew from my mom, a social worker who’d helped young women in dire positions.”“Le Femme Fetal’s always been timely,” adds Vieira, “because ever since Roe got passed, there’s always been a rightwing agenda to overturn it.” She pauses. “And they finally did it.”Digable Planets’ arc was intense, but brief. Reachin’ peaked at No 5 in the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop chart; shortly after the Grammys, work began on

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