Rabih Abou-Khalil - Roots & Sprouts (1990)

Country: Lebanon
Genre: Jazz / World Music

Rabih Abou-Khalil is a Lebanese oud player and composer, and "Roots & Sprouts" is one of the most interesting fusions of western jazz and middle eastern music I've ever came across. The album essentially consists of jazz numbers played without traditional western jazz instruments apart from a double bass. The result is impressive, since all the musicians are tight as fuck and pretty versatile, so you can bet that everything is very well composed and improvised. The songs can range from really fun jams (like the excellent opener "Remembering Machghara" and the cover of Duke Ellington's "Caravan") to sparse and hypnotically atmospheric tunes. (like "Walking on Air" and the awe-inspiring closer "Dreams of a Dying City") I also reckon this is really accessible stuff as well, so it should also be suitable for the non-jazz types as well.

Rabih Abou-Khalil - oud
Selim Kasur - nay
Yassin El-Achek - violin
Glen Moore - bass
Glen Velez - frame drums
Mohammad Al-Sous - darabukka

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Recommended further listening: Shakti - s/t; Yusef Lateef- Eastern Sounds; John Handy & Ali Akbar Khan - Karuna Surprise; Jonas Hellborg & Shawn Lane - Good People in Times of Evil; Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda

A large classical dump from the necro coming soon.

Thelonious Monk - Monk's Dream (1963)

Thelonious Monk was a jazz pianist born in North Carolina, but know mostly for being a fixture of the New York jazz scene from the 40's until the 70's. He is considered to be one of the inventors of the Bebop style. His trademark was his use of up tempo melodies interspersed with percussive and atonal piano chords and frequent rests and pauses. He would take a basic melody, speed it up and chopped it into pieces.

Monk's Dream is his most well know album, possibly due to its accessibility combined with the fact that it was his Colombia Records debut. This undoubtedly gave it wider exposure than any of his previous efforts. Don't be fooled by into thinking it isn't kvlt or whatever though, this is his best work in my opinion.

This album actually has a special place in my heart though, I've probably listened to this album more than any other album regardless of my charts. When I was a wee little tyke I used to listen to Monk's dream every night before I went to sleep. Along with Sargent Pepper and the Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles I listened to this album daily for years upon years. Unlike the Beatles though, I still have as much appreciation for Monk as I did when I was 6. I guess that I'm lucky to have grown up with Monk intstead of say... The Wiggles.

Just A Gigolo

John Zorn - Astronome

As an introductory post, I figured something rooted in metal would be appropriate, since I will be diverging from that stream pretty frequently later on, so I present to you John Zorn's epic, Jazz Metal non-verbal opera, Astronome. Using the same line up as his earlier release, Moonchild, (in which he managed to persuade a jazz duo to play metal) Zorn crafts an insane three act wordless drama of grim insanity. The concept here is the lack of language, all the vocals are incomprehensible screams, growls, wails, grunts, chokes and basically any other noise you can possibly imagine the human vocal chords producing, and the effect is beyond belief. Quite terrifying at times.

On top of that, the instrumentation, while sounding like metal, is much closer to jazz in its improvisational style. You don't really get repeated riffs, there are themes and motifs but they flit in and out of existence without establishing themselves with any permanence, and the result is a mind-bending randomness that belies a much deeper complexity of form and content. If you like the more out-there forms of metal, noise or jazz music, you should definitely check this one out.

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