Bill Frisell, the singular and much admired/emulated jazz guitarist, is a case study in uncategorizability. As he's often said, in one form or another: First I was tagged as the ECM guy, then the downtown guy, then the Americana guy.
In reality, those were all always the same guy.
As early as the 1982 recordings for his debut on ECM, In Line - solos, overdubbed solos and duets with bassist Arild Andersen - there was this odd… more »
Uri Caine personifies the postmodern musical impulse; he's recorded straight-ahead and not so straightahead jazz, funk, klezmer, Brazilian pop, turn-of-20th-century Tin Pan Alley songs and breathtakingly novel and diverse arrangements of 18th and 19th Century classics. Depending on the setting, he'll play grand piano, electric piano, their ancestor the pianoforte (as when wittily improvising on Beethoven's Diabelli Variations), harpsichord, organ, synthesizers - pretty much anything involving black and white keys. Most anyone else trying all… more »
No one recognized the manic possibilities of klezmer more than clarinetist Mickey Katz, whose 1945-1947 tenure with Spike Jones spawned a comedy band that launched such funny travesties as the Yiddish cowpoke ditty “Haim Afen Range” or the Jewish-Hawaiian “Mechaye War Chant.” Katz used humor to expand the musical boundaries of klezmer, thrusting it into the laps of World War II mainstream America at a time when Yiddish was identified as a victim’s language and most Jewish music looked backward in time because the post-Holocaust present was intolerable. Playing Katz’s songs demands prodigious chops, hence the attraction of Katz to molecule-splitting clarinetist Don Byron, who demonstrates nerve presenting Katz the monologist as the equal of Katz the composer. In sum, convoluted, kaleidoscopic silliness topped with Byron’s usual dazzling self. – Bob Tarte
