Joyfultalk - A Separation Of Being - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Brady Rymer - Good Morning Gus [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/17/2001

The creation of music as a collective art requires participants who are open and engaged. The essence of ensemble jazz music is the collaboration between elements, including sound and time and the musicians and audience. Pianist/composer Todd Cochran views these interchanges of energy and emotions as positive forces for change in the world. // Cochran's musical interests have always been vast in their outlook, from the avant-garde to fusions of jazz and rock. As Bayeté, his sound can be heard on albums that push the bounds of genre, from Santana and Automatic Man's arena filling rock sounds to the explosively spiritual world of his own records. The element that has never escaped Cochran's work has been the blues esthetic tied to jazz's legacy, which he re-embraces on his new recording, Then and Again, Here & Now. // Growing up, Cochran found a middle ground between the dimensions of the intellectual and spiritual when he discovered jazz music. His parents and grandparents were highly educated and motivated him to become the same. That led to his serious investment in classical piano study; performing and entering competitions as early as when he was just eight years old. The influence of his grandmother's evangelical faith was never far from Cochran's music, as he learned to express a particular mood by playing during church services. // His cousin introduced him to jazz at 13 and Cochran found a parallel, magnetizing pulse. He began to revisit his parents' collection of Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal recordings, transcribing and analyzing them so he could apply their lessons to his own music. It wasn't long before Cochran was reaching out to local jazz leaders. At just 17 years old, he found himself performing alongside the likes of jazz masters John Handy, Mike Nock, Bobby Hutcherson and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. // Though his own music would branch out dramatically from

JOYFULTALK returns with another vibrantly divergent stylistic take on the analog materiality and sensibility of electronic composer-producer Jay Crocker. Familiar Science rallies contributions from a quintet of musicians into a cosmic recombinant combo-still shot through with JOYFULTALK's singular mixing desk kinetics, but this time deep-diving into gnarled and twisted, spliced and diced out-jazz. Crocker draws inspiration from 1980s M-Base music, Ornette Coleman's harmolodic funk, and more recent touchstones like The Comet Is Coming, later Tortoise, or Squarepusher's Music Is Rotted One Note. His own prior history as an improv guitarist also resurfaces for the first time in many years-an element in this polyvalent artist's chemistry set that hasn't appeared prominently in his own music for over a decade. Crocker lays down stacked wordless vocals on several tracks to complete the picture, weaving all these raw materials into exuberant compositions that blur the line between sizzling corporeal combo and sampledelic futurist jamz. Familiar Science is a buoyant, delirious feast of noise-tinged polychrome electronic avant-jazz that takes Crocker's composition and production acumen in an unexpected, highly accomplished, exuberantly satisfying new direction. JOYFTULTALK keeps revealing brilliant new facets and Familiar Science finds the project at it's most intricately kaleidoscopic.