Grand Unification (Milford Graves Album)
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Grand Unification (Milford Graves Album)
''Grand Unification'' is an album by American percussionist Milford Graves, recorded in October 1997 and released in 1998 by Tzadik Records. Reception In a review for AllMusic, Stacia Proefrock wrote: "the record is a tight, technical masterpiece played with passion. Combining a variety of African, Asian, and Western drums with rhythmic chanting, Graves provides all of the instrumentation on the album and creates something rare: unaccompanied jazz percussion that shows variety and consistent energy throughout a nearly hour-long album." The authors of ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz'' noted that, since being taken up by Tzadik Records, "for almost the first time in a long career, the drummer can be heard clearly and with definition." Writing for the Chicago Reader, Peter Margasak called the album "a dense, enthralling work that demands repeated immersion," praised Graves's "mind-boggling multilinearity," and stated that "the barrage of grooves and ideas distracts a listener from the s ...
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Milford Graves
Milford Graves (August 20, 1941 – February 12, 2021) was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, Professor Emeritus of Music, researcher/inventor, visual artist/sculptor, gardener/herbalist, and martial artist. Graves was noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the 1960s with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet, and is considered to be a free jazz pioneer, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role. The composer and saxophonist John Zorn referred to Graves as "basically a 20th-century shaman." Early life Graves was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, on August 20, 1941. He began playing drums when he was three years old, and was introduced to the congas at age eight. He also studied timbales and African hand drumming at an early age. By the early 1960s, he was leading dance bands and playing in Latin/Afro Cuban ensembles in New York on bills alongside Cal Tjader and Herbie Mann. His group, the Milford Graves Latino Quintet, included s ...
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Power Station (recording Studio)
Power Station at BerkleeNYC, formerly known as Avatar Studios (1996–2017) and Power Station, is a recording studio at 441 West 53rd Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City. The building contains 5 studio spaces: A, B, C, G, and E, as well as a black box theater. History The building was originally a Consolidated Edison power plant. In 1977, it was rebuilt as a recording studio by producer Tony Bongiovi and his partner Bob Walters. The complex was renamed Avatar Studios (under the Avatar Entertainment Corporation) in May 1996. In 2017, the studios were renamed back to Power Station, by special arrangement with Berklee NYC. The studio reopened in 2020 after a full renovation, while maintaining the studio spaces. In 1995, Sonalysts, which had begun as an underwater acoustics research company, licensed the Power Station's design and naming rights from Bongiovi and Walters. The company built a perfect replica of the o ...
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New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ...
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ...
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Percussion Instrument
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments.''The Oxford Companion to Music'', 10th edition, p.775, In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of ideophone, membranophone, aerophone and cordophone. The percussion section of an orchestra most commonly contains instruments such as the timpani, snare drum, bass drum, tambourine, belonging to the membranophones, and cym ...
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Tzadik Records
Tzadik Records is a record label in New York City that specializes in avant-garde and experimental music. The label was established by composer and saxophonist John Zorn in 1995. He is the executive producer of all Tzadik releases. Tzadik is a not-for-profit, cooperative record label. Tzadik has released over 400 albums by a variety of artists with diverse musical backgrounds, including free improvisation, jazz, noise, klezmer, rock, and experimental composition. On the label's catalogue are releases by Zorn himself and his multifaceted "songbook" group Masada; singer Mike Patton; guitarists Derek Bailey, Yoshihide Otomo, Tim Sparks, Buckethead and Keiji Haino; noise music icon Merzbow; composers Gordon Mumma, Frank Denyer, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Teiji Ito; experimental groups Kayo Dot, Time of Orchids and Rashanim, microtonalists Syzygys; drummer Tatsuya Yoshida and his bands Ruins and Korekyojinn; trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; electroacoustic composer Noah Creshevsky; and jazz ...
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Meditation Among Us
''Meditation Among Us'' is an album by American percussionist Milford Graves, recorded in July 1977 and released later that year by Kitty Records. The album features Graves on drums, percussion, and piano, along with Kaoru Abe on alto and sopranino saxophones, Mototeru Takagi on tenor saxophone, Toshinori Kondo on trumpet and alto horn, and Toshiyuki Tsuchitori on drums and percussion. It was recorded while Graves was visiting Japan with dancer Min Tanaka. Reception In a review for AllMusic, Thom Jurek awarded the album 4 stars, and wrote: "The blowing intensity on any Graves' date is intense, but here it is over the top, as the Japanese players attempt to match his intensity." Writing for The Wire, Alan Licht commented: "Graves firmly establishes himself as the pivotal figure, driving the ensemble but also acting as its steady hub, enabling the music to flow without fraying. 'Together and Moving' bristles with the excitement of the occasion yet it remains taut and purposeful. On ...
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Stories (Milford Graves Album)
''Stories'' is an album by American percussionist Milford Graves, recorded in June 2000 and released later that year by Tzadik Records. Reception In a review for AllMusic, François Couture wrote: "Milford Graves is a fantastic drummer for whom the simple act of hitting a drum calls for his whole body and mind to take over. He lives, thinks, and expresses himself through his contact with resounding objects. All he needed was an album that would do justice to his art. He had come close to it in 1998 with ''Grand Unification'', his first solo CD for John Zorn's Tzadik label. With ''Stories'', he might have recorded the best solo percussion album ever. On this playground, there are no limits to what Graves can do, but no artifices to alter the sound. The recording quality is incredible, better than on the previous album. Nothing is lost in the mix; everything comes through pure and lively. This is the first time Graves has been recorded so faithfully. The performances themselves also ...
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AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the database was first made available on the Internet in 1994. AllMusic is owned by RhythmOne. History AllMusic was launched as ''All Music Guide'' by Michael Erlewine, a "compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar and musician". He became interested in using computers for his astrological work in the mid-1970s and founded a software company, Matrix, in 1977. In the early 1990s, as CDs replaced LPs as the dominant format for recorded music, Erlewine purchased what he thought was a CD of early recordings by Little Richard. After buying it he discovered it was a "flaccid latter-day rehash". Frustrated with the labeling, he researched using metadata to create a music guide. In 1990, in Big Rapids, Michigan, he founded ''All Music Guide' ...
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The Penguin Guide To Jazz
''The Penguin Guide to Jazz'' is a reference work containing an encyclopedic directory of jazz recordings on CD which were (at the time of publication) currently available in Europe or the United States. The first nine editions were compiled by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, two chroniclers of jazz resident in the United Kingdom. History The first edition was published in Britain by Penguin Books in 1992. Every subsequent two years, through 2010, a new edition was published with updated entries. The eighth and ninth editions, published in 2006 and 2008, respectively, each included 2,000 new CD listings. The title took on different forms over the lifetime of the work, as audio technology changed. The seventh edition was known as ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD'' while subsequent editions were titled ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings''. The earliest edition had the title ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, LP and Cassette''. Richard Cook died in 2007, prior to the comp ...
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Chicago Reader
The ''Chicago Reader'', or ''Reader'' (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a group of friends from Carleton College. The ''Reader'' is recognized as a pioneer among alternative weeklies for both its creative nonfiction and its commercial scheme. Richard Karpel, then-executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, wrote: e most significant historical event in the creation of the modern alt-weekly occurred in Chicago in 1971, when the ''Chicago Reader'' pioneered the practice of free circulation, a cornerstone of today's alternative papers. The ''Reader'' also developed a new kind of journalism, ignoring the news and focusing on everyday life and ordinary people. After being owned by same four founders since 1971, by the early 2000s profits and readership of the ''Reader'' were dropping, and o ...
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The Wire (magazine)
''The Wire'' (or simply ''Wire'') is a British music magazine publishing out of London, which has been issued monthly in print since 1982. Its website launched in 1997, and an online archive of its entire back catalog became available to subscribers in 2013. Since 1985, the magazine's annual year-in-review issue, Rewind, has named an album or release of the year based on critics' ballots. Originally, ''The Wire'' covered the British jazz scene with an emphasis on avant-garde and free jazz. It was marketed as a more adventurous alternative to its conservative competitor ''Jazz Journal'', and targeted younger readers at a time when ''Melody Maker'' had abandoned jazz coverage. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the magazine expanded its scope until it included a broad range of musical genres under the umbrella of non-mainstream or experimental music. Since then, ''The Wire''s coverage has included experimental rock, electronica, alternative hip hop, modern classical, free improvisat ...
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