Thursday, March 12, 2020

New Music Releases: Blaine Sharpe, Ephemerals, Horace Tapscott Quintet

Blaine Sharpe – Wanderlust

With the last name ‘Sharp’ it might seem like destiny that Blaine would end up making music but this wasn’t always so. There were many “zigs” and a lot of “zags” along the way. Moving to LA in 2017 was definitely a game changer though, it was time to face that namesake destiny head on! Born and raised in Canada Blaine also spent important time in England, the United States and France and considers all of these places to have a special place in his heart as well as in his music. His love of theater and film is also a big influence. For Blaine it’s all about a real connection to the story and to an emotion and sharing this honestly with his audience. Blaine’s début release Wanderlust is an exploration of many of these artistic influences. With jazz inflections throughout it wanders romantically through musical genres, allowing this new recording artist a little space to wander creatively too. It is a fitting introduction for his listeners, one that hints at musical directions to come. In the meantime, Blaine is based in LA and Toronto and continues to work as an actor, singer and songwriter. He has several new projects on the go.

Ephemerals - The Third Eye

The fourth album from ephemerals, "the third eye" sees them continue their ever-evolving musical journey. Fusing styles including spiritual jazz, psychedelia, and spoken word, to convey an identity that is unmistakably their own. The core of the work is built from the honest and incisive compositions of Hillman Mondegreen combined with the unmistakably emotive vocal delivery of singer Wolfgang Valbrun. Experimenting with recording and mixing techniques to illustrate the artistic concepts behind the songs has been key in the overall character of the record. Hard panning is used to group together specific sounds and instruments to the left and right to convey masculine and feminine sides within the track as within the individual. The album is a deeply personal and conceptual body of work using ambiguous harmony to discuss gender identity, polychords to demonstrate the power of being between the gender binaries, and modal changes to remove the homeliness that you find speaking to the alienation of being transgender. Although drawn from Hillman’s personal experiences the writing is always universal, and singer Wolfgang Valbrun relates the pieces to his own experiences of a young black man leaving the USA. The band has evolved exponentially over the course of these four albums, and they continuously push beyond the boundaries of traditional genre ideas and traverse unexplored musical territories.

Horace Tapscott Quintet  - The Giant Is Awakened LP

The title of Horace Tapscott’s debut release is apt, if not self-referential, for indeed a giant of West Coast jazz had awakened with this, the pianist/composer/bandleader’s 1969 album for the Flying Dutchman label. Tapscott went on to form two groups crucial to the flowering of modern jazz in the Los Angeles area, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (or P.A.P.A.; the name is an homage to Tapscott’s predecessor and peer, Sun Ra), which eventually became part of a larger umbrella organization, Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA). Out of UGMAA came a host of LA-bred musicians, singers, and poets, including Arthur Blythe (who goes by Black Arthur Blythe on this recording), Stanley Crouch (who wrote the original liner notes), David Murray, Butch Morris, Wilber Morris, Jimmy Woods, Nate Morgan, and Sinclair Greenwell, Jr. (a.k.a. Guido Sinclair). And anchoring it all was Tapscott himself; as Kamasi Washington, whose vision of a large, Los Angeles community-based ensemble echoes that of P.A.P.A. and UGMAA, said in 2015: “Horace is one of the most important figures in the foundation of music in L.A., from both a purely musically and socially conscious perspective.” Now, Real Gone Music is proud to present the first-ever LP reissue of The Giant Is Awakened (original copies go for hundreds of dollars) taken from high-resolution audio sources.

No comments:

Post a Comment