Marc Ribot - Plays Solo Guitar Work of Frantz Casseus

Solo guitar work by the indefatigable guitarist who might turn up almost anywhere.  What more can you say about a guy who can work in just about every style imaginable? Whether he’s skronking it up roughly or playing the gentle classical guitar work of Frantz Casseus, Ribot always seems to succeed and even if I’m in no place to be able to appraise the work of either artist, I was surprisingly engaged through this solo work, and I’m not someone who tends to really gravitate to works like this. The music has a certain sort of melodic style that works around more familiar scales while always hanging in there in terms of its friendliness.

Daevid Allen / Don Falcone - Obscura 12 - Glissando Grooves

An intriguing collaboration between the Gong and Spaceship Eyes chiefs but like a lot of these projects that ride between ambience and electronica, I tend to prefer the former style and even if there aren’t really that many true beats here, the ones that do work in seem just like any other sort of rave or house style. But aside from that personal issue, there’s also a great deal of psychedelia here, the stuff that reminds me of Allen’s work all the way back to his late 60s sound collages. It’s all liberally drenched with a lot of atmospheric synth work and strangely sounds a little like Berliner synth in parts, but overall this is the sort of cosmic/modern headspace fans of the artists involved will already likely expect. Of course any sort of heavy textural music with Allen waxing poetic over the top is usually of interest in these parts.

Mingus - Mingus in Europe

A big sprawling concert, originally from two volumes, from Wuppertal, Town Hall, West Germany 4/26/64, this features Mingus roughly around his Impulse period, leading a quintet with Eric Dolphy and Jacki Byard involved. There’s never a question with Mingus that his sense of composition and his melodic framework didn’t work very close to the trends of the time and much of this sounds like it has its roots in a bop a decade earlier, even if the actual melodic lines touch on areas that could only possibly come from the mind of this bass player. The live music stretches out a little more, but overall it doesn’t stay terribly highly charged and for my ears, I started tuning out a little in the second half, but that’s more likely due to the challenge of the writing than a reflection on the quality here.