Check out the latest LE7ELS release Syn Cole - Miami 82 edited by me!

Get your copy here: 
http://www.beatport.com/release/miami-82/1198527

Check out Syn Cole here:
https://www.facebook.com/SynCole

Syn Cole - Miami 82 (Avicii Edit)

from "Les twins - Performance in Italy , Uragano"
→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2POwt1mwXGU

Yuna - Fading Flower [LES TWINS SPEED UP VERSION]

December

From "Celebration Day"
Jen Smith voice
Piero Marani drums
Chris Cottros guitar
Jay Turner bass

Bigger Picture

"Buzzcut Season" by Lorde

@AmandaTKunz
http://facebook.com/AmandaTaylorSongs
http://amandataylorkunz.com

Audio and Video by Corn Dog Studios
Mark McLemore, Engineer

Buzzcut Season (Lorde Cover)

Get Patty Griffin's new album "Servant of Love" now on iTunes: http://smarturl.it/ServantOfLove

Buy now on iTunes

Patty Griffin- There Isn't One Way

"I...was stunned by his Hendrix meets late era Coltrane approach."
– Guitar Moderne

"Despite the boilingly hot drive...influenced by Cream, Lifetime, the Jimi Hendrix Experience (and perhaps more notionally the Pete Cosey/Reggie Lucas version of the Miles Davis group), there's a lyrical side to the guitarist’s playing as well...Excellent."
– Point Of Departure

"...out jazz with lots of sass and vigor...recalls the thornier side of the ECM Records catalog, especially the works of fellow Scandinavians Edward Vesala and Terje Rypdal. Björkenheim attacks the guitar the way the late great Sonny Sharrock did - like Coltrane and Ayler “attacked” their saxophones...yet blues is never very far away. There’s also the chunky focus of pre-Mahavishnu John McLaughlin...The way RB cross-pollinates between jazz and rock recalls fellow traveler Nels Cline, and the results are similar: Oblique swing, gnarly noise, predictably unpredictable, swell."
– Icon

Ecstasy is usually an all too fleeting experience offering the briefest glimpse at transcendence. But a heightened sense of consciousness and discovery manifests throughout Out of the Blue, the transporting second album by composer and guitar maestro Raoul Björkenheim and his extraordinary Finnish quartet Ecstasy.
Featuring the celebrated drummer Markku Ounaskari, the young and dauntingly prolific bassist Jori Huhtala and saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen, Ecstasy has forged more than a signature sound. Over the course of five years the musicians have honed a supremely interactive modus operandi marked by unstable textures, rapidly shifting meters, and emotionally charged melodic flights. Earthy, pristine and unmistakably Nordic, the music evokes the grandeur of Finnish landscapes and the hothouse intimacy of a tight-knit Helsinki scene where the musicians regularly convene to refine their volatile sound.

“I always felt there’s something special about having a band,” Björkenheim says. “An all-star session can be good too, but the thing I’m missing nowadays in jazz is really good bands playing together tightly, turning on a dime together, and especially improvising together.” True to Raoul's statement, this is a band effort, and like all great bands, the sum is greater than the parts. With 2 years additional experience together for this album, everything is upped from the last one: the compositions, the improvisations, the ensemble work and the solos!

Raoul Björkenheim / eCsTaSy, "Uptown" from 'Out Of The Blue' (Cuneiform Records)

A junction is the point at which several things converge. For the visionary and award-winning jazz guitarist Rez Abbasi, his new band Junction weaves together musical currents he’s spent his career navigating. Abbasi has been at the center of some of the most enthralling and culturally expansive music of the past two decades, and his Cuneiform debut Behind the Vibration introduces a bracing new body of music, a sinewy 21st century approach to jazz-rock inspired by his far-flung influences. 

“Everything I do musically is stimulated by call and response,” Abbasi says. “I did the Acoustic Quartet project of covers from the ‘70s jazz-rock period and that impacted me to want to do an electric project of all originals. The new album reflects a continuum of what I’ve been doing all along – finding fresh orchestrations to present my music through. In some ways this project connects me more directly back to my first love, the energy that comes out of rock music. I wrote new tunes for this band and it was time for all these musical worlds to collide.”

Junction, the electric project that Abbasi formed to bring his original tunes to life, features Mark Shim on tenor saxophone and the electronic MIDI Wind Controller, Ben Stivers on keyboards, B-3 organ and Rhodes, and drummer Kenny Grohowski. The band is a supremely maleable ensemble that has forged a poised and texturally accute group approach. While exploring a vivid palette of electronic sounds and aggressive grooves, Junction maintains the dynamics, precise calibration, and interactive imperative of an inspired jazz ‘acoustic’ combo.

Sonically surprising, the album opens with “Holy Butter,” a piece inspired by a collaboration with classical South Indian dancers. In the first of many sonic feints, what sounds like a deeply funky bass solo is actually Shim getting down with his MIDI Wind Controller. Indeed, not having a defined bass player is a significant element of Junction, opening up the band’s sound as Stivers and Shim alternate low end responsibilities. 

Inspired by the Arab Spring, “Groundswell” is a slowly ascending tune that, while originally written for another ensemble, comes home in Junction, with Stivers on B-3—“the first electric keyboard instrument,” Abbasi notes—and a searing Abbasi solo followed by Shim’s oragami-angular tenor.  If that piece evokes the mounting of external pressure, “Uncommon Sense” suggests a wending internal spiritual journey with a hypnautically sinuous opening guitar line. As Abbasi puts it, “The title refers to a ‘sense’ that’s beyond our five and one that’s more difficult to connect to due to the clutter in our minds.” Before long, the becalmed lyricism gives way to a frantic search powered by Grohowski’s exceptionally deft trap work. 

A sparsely decorated noir scene that emerges and departs without pausing for a solo, “And I You” is a brief, cinematic mood piece that arrives mid-album like a shimmering urban oasis. “Self-Brewing” is one of the album’s most fusion-y pieces, with a steeplechase theme introduced by Abbasi and Shim on Midi Wind Controller. The album closes with “Matter Falls,” a mid-tempo anthem that hints at South Asian cadences. Both grand and invitingly intimate, it’s a crunching tune that points to further explorations. Clearly, Junction is just one stop on a spectacularly rich and incident-filled sojourn. 

With this newest album, Behind the Vibration, realized via his new electric Junction, Abbasi takes another bold step, embracing his rock ‘n’ roll roots with a bear hug that encompasses post-bop, South Asian traditions, and state of the art sonics. “More than anything that I’ve ever recorded, this album is the convergence of everything I’m interested in,” he says. “The musicians I’ve chosen are versatile enough to pull it off. It’s not only all of the influences that have come up to this point, it’s also the process of merging it with the technology of today. This is music that could’ve only happened now.” 

Rez Abbasi & Junction, "Self-Brewing" from 'Behind the Vibration' (out May 20 on Cuneiform Records)

Thumbscrew (M. Formanek, T. Fujiwara, M. Halvorson), "Sampsonian Rhythms" from 'Convallaria'

Melissa Wimbish, Soprano & Jessica Meyer, Viola
SONG 3 of 3: “Space, in Chains” is a set of three songs using the text of acclaimed poet Laura Kasischke.  Her poetry is a series of abstract, yet vivid, episodes that paints a surrealist portrait of everyday suburban life and these three particular poems address loss in very different ways.

My deepest thanks to Melissa Wimbish for making these come alive during her Carnegie Hall debut in October of 2016.  TEXT: 

These difficult matters of grace and scale: 
The way music, our savior, is the marriage of math and antisocial behavior. 

Like this woman with a bucket in the morning gathering gorgeous oxymora on the shore… 

And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored gently in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July. 

Which set a place for you next to mine—the fork beside the spoon beside the knife (the linen napkin, and the centerpiece: a blue beheaded blossom floating in a bowl)—and even the red weight of my best efforts poured into your glass as a dark wine before I tossed the table onto its side. 

Just another perfect night. Beyond destruction, and utterly unlikely, how someone might have managed, blindly, to stumble on such a love in the middle of her life. 

O elegant giant. 

While, outside, the woods are silent. 

And overhead, not a single intelligent star in the sky.