Search - Michael Blake :: Blake Tartare

Out of the Blue

Read-Only | New York City | 04/09/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Michael Blake is fairly well known as a New York tenor saxophonist, having played in a number of critically acclaimed groups such as John Lurie's Lounge Lizards and various spinoffs of the Jazz Composers' Collective, such as Medicine Wheel. I have heard him in a number of these groups, and I have to say that he has not made a strong impression on me. But based on a positive review, I took a chance on the present album, on which he leads a group of Danish musicians unknown on this side of the pond.



The result is frankly one of the best jazz albums I have heard in the past couple of years. The compositions are especially strong, and they alternate between more acoustic and electric vibes. The musicians emphasize feeling over virtuosity, and if you put it on in the background, you find yourself drawn away from whatever else you are doing to think, "What IS this?" Blake composed all the songs except for the Mingus song "Meditations on Integration" (given an alternative title here) and the extremely surprising Sun Ra tune "Languidity," which is remarkably beautiful.



I don't write reviews unless an album strikes me as surprisingly good or woefully bad, and this one fits well into the first category, and I can recommend it to anyone interested in modern jazz.



(Since the current Amazon page doesn't have the personnel, here they are:

Blake, saxes, bass clarinet, kalimba

Jonas Westergaard, bass

Kresten Osgood, drums

Soren Kjaergaard, keyboards

Teddy Kumpel, guitar on 3 cuts)"

What I love about jazz

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 10/01/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Michael Blake, noted Downtown saxophonist, founding member of the Jazz Composers Collective, here links up with unknown Europeans for maybe his strongest set yet.



Jazz by nature is unpredictable. Sometimes the most intentional superstar sessions fall flat, while in-the-nonce get-togethers such as this score big. Who knows why?



It's not that his other discs particularly lack something; indeed, Drift, Elevated, and Kingdom of Champa are among my favorites. But here something special is happening. I think it has to do with the casualness of the setting combined with no huge expectations. Thus, a bunch of no-name European youngsters manage to land on the perfect soundscape for emerging sax giant Blake.



There's a world-weariness sensibility all over this remarkable disc--one of my favorite moves in jazz. Just listen to the electrifying tho slow burn vibe of "Lemmy Caution," which kinda sets the stage for the noirish atmosphere that oozes most attractively from the majority of the tracks assayed most brilliantly in "A Messy Business," the mood of midnight blooziness perhaps never having been more spectacularly captured. When the boyz go out about halfway through this remarkable cut, they stamp the proceedings with an authority and weight of huge consequences, only to morph into a most attractive off-kilter loopiness. If they did nothing other than this slick move, they would've accomplished something of rather large significance.



But that's only the beginning. Once the lads rev up, they continue to amaze with "Cuban Sandwich," a very smart Afro-Caribbean number, followed up with "Feast," a North-African-ish number of massive authority, the type of thing Blake brilliantly majored in on Elevated, here casually trumped.



With "Languidity" we're in ur-ballad territory, and Blake's timbral authority combined with his 3 a.m. smoky-dreariness positions this track in some kind of noirish hall of fame. "Meditation (For a Pair of Wirecutters)" injects a Vegas-ish jaunty hopelessness into the mix, with, once again, musical bona-fides way beyond the call of duty. The heroic deconstruction that ensues about two-thirds through to the calliope wrap-up astounds.



"A Hole Is to Dig" (one supposes the wire-cutting perps from the previous track have been caught and incarcerated, and are attempting to tunnel their way out of the Big House, a la Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona), brings a Dean Koontz-like wackiness circa Odd Thomas to the disc, solidified in its eldritch craziness by the a-referential zaniness of the closer, "Neil's Toy Train."



Music of mammoth presence and evocation. Not to be missed."