Don Byron - A Ballad For Many - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Chris Hontos and Aaron Anderson do business both as Nuke Watch and as their sampled-based cousins, Beat Detectives. The Detectives are what The Beatnuts might make on an experimental dissociative drug protocol, while Nuke Watch is a free improv band that doesn't feel the need to squeak and believes in pleasure. Nuke Watch's new album, Grave New World, is their tenth since beginning the project in 2020. This music dips, collides, and spills out of a bag, the sound of an electric world mulching itself. Modular synths spread like cordyceps through rooms full of bass and saxophone and hand drums, leaving behind a new, infested space glowing, safe, and freaked. This music was played by instruments, a chunk of it done entirely live. Most tracks are Hontos and Anderson playing with one or two others, meaning most of these are trio recordings. It's tempting to call Grave New World fusion, though that doesn't quite work. Otto Willberg's bass playing is accomplished enough to summon giants like Percy Jones and Jaco, and Leonard King approaches the bass a bit like someone in Fela's Africa 70. The three processed wind instruments-Zack Stafford on processed flute, Christopher Farstad on MIDI wind instrument, and Cole Pulice on processed saxophone-bring the music into adjacency with jazz, though none of the band's music ends up feeling much like jazz. Outtakes from Star Wars foley bank? Touch-sensitive multimedia greenhouse exhibit overtaken by kindergarten class? Zoom session with latency problems generated by musicians in five different continents? Grave New World could be called world music in the sense that if you folded up the world into a funnel and shook it and made everybody slide down onto a plate full of people they didn't grow up with, they might end up making this. - Sasha Frere-Jones, 2025

Aruan Ortiz, who grew up in Santiago, Cuba, and has lived in the U. S. since 2002, is among the most creative pianists on jazz's landscape. As a boy he was performing Cuban popular music. His studies broadened to include jazz, first in Europe, and finally New York, where he now lives. In Don Byron, Ortiz has found an unparalleled clarinetist, whose classical training and exquisite technique anchor a career spanning an unusually broad range of music that nevertheless reflects a focused line of musical inquiry. Byron was born in The Bronx, into a musical family of Antiguan descent. Some of his work has involved highly refined repertory ensembles devoted to early jazz, gospel or klezmer music. Other works assert un-fettered new musical routes owing to no single style. InchRandom Dances and (A)tonalitiesInch reveals the imaginative leaps of two free-thinking minds. In both, we feel an implied swing, gentle yet with conviction, and shared values of erudition and compassion. We sense a clearly documented moment between two masterly musicians.

Guitarist Doug Munro's fourth album for CMG, InchBig Boss Bossa Nova,Inch is just what the title implies - bossa nova writ large. It's an ebullient, up-beat affair that features the work of Palmetto recording artists Javon Jackson and Ray Vega who, along with bassist Harvie S. and drummer Richie Morales, lend a distinctive salsa flair to the proceedings. InchStella by Starlight,Inch InchLow Rider,Inch and InchMilestones,Inch along with eight original Munro compositions, are all rendered in what Munro describes as his Inchslightly twisted take on the bossa nova and samba.Inch