Search Results for: arnau obiols

I listen to everything.  At least, I try to.  Every year, I toy with the idea of tracking just how many albums I listen to in a year, and how many cross my desk via unsolicited promos and new release listings on various retail and label sites.  That first category?  Maybe somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500.  The second category… those albums that get just a few moments of my time to give me a reason to give more than that?  Five times that amount.  Maybe more.  Tons.

But more important than calculating a specific number is providing the context that no matter how much I try to hear it all, there will always be ones that (temporarily) get away.  There’s only so much time in the year, and as the year draws to a close, time becomes an even greater scarcity when it comes to albums hitting the new release shelf.  Eventually, I manage to get to it.  It may take a while, but the good stuff hits my radar eventually.  But in terms of creating a Best Of list for any one particular year… eventually isn’t always good enough.

It’s an odd sort of anguish to discover an excellent recording months after finalizing the year’s Best Of list.  Anne Paceo‘s Yokai was my first experience with it.  I was filing away my lists for 2012 (yes, I actually keep a handwritten list as I go through the new releases), when I noticed a follow-up mark next to Yokai and no final designation.  It fell through the cracks.  No big deal, I figured.  I’ll give it a listen.  I can always give it a write-up if I like the thing.  Well, I did like the thing.  A lot.  So much, in fact, that I tried to travel back in time through sheer force of will so that I could add it to my Best of 2012 list.  Once acknowledging my failure on that plan of action, the only avenue left to me was give it a nice write-up and add an addendum about how special the album is.  That, and be haunted by its exclusion, still, even today.  Lame!

I swore it would never happen again.

(Ahem) Here’s a few older albums I wrote about over the course of the last year.  Had they hit my radar in the year of their release, there’s every likelihood they would’ve been included in that year’s Best Of list.

Francesco Chiapperini’s InSight – Paradigm Shift (Aut Records)

Paradigm Shift is the pattern of sharp images melting into alien shapes, and then reuniting again as something equally vivid, and strangely familiar.  On this 2016 release, clarinetist Francesco Chiapperini and his InSight trio were an unending source of stunning waves of intensity and interludes of jaw-dropping beauty.  The Aut Records label hit my radar in the latter half of 2016, and had I gotten around to Paradigm Shift a bit sooner, there’s no doubt it would’ve landed a spot on the Best of 2016 list.

Read more on Bird is the Worm.

Arnau Obiols – Libèrrim (Aladid Records)

It’s the way this music shifts between phases of immense orchestration and free improvisation that marks Libèrrim as a winning album.  Drummer Arnau Obiols leads a quintet into the thick of a composition where every step is directed and every footprint’s shape predetermined, but these manipulations are not, in fact, enclosures, but instead behave as doorways to passages of wild spells of imagination.  Aladid Records reached out to me in December of 2015, and it wasn’t until nearly a year after it was released that I finally got around to writing about Libèrrim.  Had I gotten to it sooner, would it have found a home on the Best of 2015 list? Maybe. Probably. Sure.  This is a brilliant album, and it’s difficult to envision excluding it… even though the Best Of list is populated by nothing but brilliant albums.  It’s considerations like these that have me content with my decision to bump up this site’s Best Of list to a Top 50.

Read more on Bird is the Worm.

Laurent Rochelle – Les Amours Invisibles (Linoleum Records)

Les Amours Invisibles is not a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction… it’s how a flock of starlings come together as a murmuration then break off again into their individual flight patterns… yet still are locked in with one another.  It’s where the togetherness of individual expressions are still part of the united whole.  On his 2012 release, Laurent Rochelle guided his own melodic development to that of his ensemble’s in that same way, and it’s how he fluctuates between melodic nuance and the confluence of a grand unity that marks this recording’s success.  It’s a gorgeous album, and I didn’t discover it until exploring through Rochelle’s back catalog after falling in love with Si Tu Regardes, his 2016 collaboration with the Okidoki Quartet (an album that earned the #6 slot on the Best of 2016).  It’s hard to imagine not having included this on the Best of 2012 list.

Read more on Bird is the Worm.

And remember… the list never truly ends.

The Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) is a non-profit that provides a mix of jazz advocacy and journalism resources.  Everything about the organization comes off as well-meant.  Once a year, they, like most music organizations and sites (including this one), roll out a Best Of list.  Apparently the JJA membership vote on a number of categories, which leads to a nominating list, which then goes through another vote for the final selections.  The newest ballot, for the 2016 JJA Jazz Awards, was just released.  I very much like that the JJA has a Jazz Heroes section, which puts the spotlight on various people in communities tirelessly seeking to promote and advance jazz music.  However, the rest of their nominating ballot reveals a pretty big flaw.  A few years ago, after reviewing that year’s ballot, I stated it was unfortunate that only U.S.-based musicians were eligible for inclusion.  That’s when the JJA informed me that there was no such restriction, and the reason that almost every musician on the ballot lived on the east coast (with a few west coast musicians sprinkled in) was that’s how the votes shook out.

And that’s how it typically is.  It could lead you to believe that the only place the best jazz is happening is within or near the epicenter New York City and a couple hot spots along the California coastline.  This, obviously, is nowhere close to a representative picture of the state of jazz.  Outstanding jazz is being created everywhere, and it’s disappointing that a jazz advocacy group whose membership consists of jazz journalists isn’t able to reflect that fact.

So, in the spirit of jazz advocacy, I spent the last 48 hours putting together an impromptu “expanded ballot.”  I included only musicians (and labels) who aren’t based in the United States.  I used most of the JJA Awards categories.  I didn’t bother with categories like Album of the Year or Musician of the Year or Large Ensemble of the Year, because, quite honestly, those categories are adequately populated by the various inclusions on my Best of 2016 list.  In order to be included on my list below, each musician had to have a significant release in 2016 and/or contributed to someone else’s recording in a significant way… which I believe honors the true collaborative nature of jazz music.  Strangely, that doesn’t appear to be a requirement of the JJA Jazz Awards; there have been several musicians over the years who didn’t appear on a recording for a year they were nominated.

I also included the city each musician resides.  The locations are only as accurate as the online resources I utilized.  These lists are certainly not comprehensive.  I tried to leave it at five selections for each category, and I worked mostly from memory.  Most of the music I listen to each year (which numbers in the thousands of albums) stays with me pretty well… especially the best of it.  That said, there will be holes in this list, and I’m sure many of them will become apparent to me within 24 hours of posting this column.  By way of example, for the life of me I can’t figure out why I could only come up with three trombonist selections.  And I could filled pages for the “rare instruments” category, but kept it simple.  I did a quick review of my 2016 recommendations to fill in some holes on my list (relying 100% upon my memory is a dangerous approach for any venture), but not much more than that.  As I said before, this list isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but simply to put the spotlight on some musicians who aren’t receiving it elsewhere.

You can learn more about each of these musicians by searching their names on Bird is the Worm.  It will lead you to posts of album recommendations, which also have embedded audio, links to artist & label sites, retail options, and anything else that seemed like a good idea to include at the time.  I strongly encourage you to do it.  These are trails of breadcrumbs that can lead you to your next favorite album.  As an added incentive, I included some embedded audio.

Let’s begin…

Record Label of the year:

For-Tune (Warsaw), Edition Records (London), Clean Feed (Lisbon), Auand Records (Rome), Underpool (Barcelona).

Vocals:

Sissel Vera Pettersen (Trondheim), Alya Al-Sultani (London), Lucia Cadotsch (Berlin), Siyabonga Mthembu (Johannesburg).

Trumpet:

Laura Jurd (London), Natsuko Sugao (Barcelona), Rory Simmons (London), Susana Santos Silva (Porto), Sebastián Jordán (Santiago).

Trombone:

Tony Cattano (Livorno), Gianluca Petrella (Italy), Filippo Vignato (Mestre).

Alto Saxophone:

Alban Darche (Paris), Piero Bittolo Bon (Ferrara), Anna Högberg (Stockholm), Christoph Merki (Zurich), Marco Vecchio (Bologna).

Tenor Saxophone:

Malte Schiller (Berlin), Shabaka Hutchings (London), Christophe Panzani (Paris), Harald Lassen (Oslo), Elin Larsson (Stockholm).

Baritone Saxophone:

Joakim Berghäll (Helsinki), Anna Högberg (Stockholm), Mats Gustafsson (Vienna), Marco Guidolotti (Rome), Guillaume Christophel (Paris).

Soprano Saxophone:

Jasmine Lovell-Smith (Morelia), Joakim Berghäll (Helsinki), David El-Malek (Paris), Konrad Wiszniewski (Glasgow), Michał Król (Tarnów),

Flute:

Christophe Dal Sasso (Paris), Joanna Ważna-Pociask (Tarnów), Esinam Dogbatse (Brussels), Miho Wada (Auckland), Jane Bunnett (Toronto).

Clarinets:

Nils Berg (Stockholm), Rebecca Trescher (Nuremberg), Wacław Zimpel (Warsaw), Laurent Rochelle (Toulouse), Joachim Badenhorst (Antwerp).

Guitar:

Mikkel Ploug (Copenhagen), Jakob Bro (Copenhagen), Mathias de Wiele (Ghent), Pierre Perchaud (Ballancourt-sur-Essonne, France), Nicolás Vera (Santiago).

Piano:

Clemens Christian Poetzsch (Leipzig), Sean Foran (Melbourne), Giovanni Guidi (Foligno), Christian Wallumrød (Oslo), Ivo Neame (London), Sunna Gunnlaugs (Reykjavik).

Bass:

Jasper Hoiby (Copenhagen), Paraskevas Kitsos (Athens), Tomo Jacobson (Copenhagen), Christian Meaas Svendsen (Oslo), Miguel Ângelo (Porto), Henri Texier (Paris), Pippi Dimonte (Bologna).

Violin/Viola/Cello:

Shirley Smart (London), Peggy Lee (Vancouver), Andrew Downing (Toronto), Olivier Soubeyran (Paris), Lucy Railton (London), Dominique Pifarély (Paris).

Mallet:

Bex Burch (London), Roland Neffe (Berlin), Mario von Holten (Zurich), Stephan Caracci (Marseille), Victor Vieira-Branco (São Paulo), Ralph Wyld (London).

Drums:

Per Oddvar Johansen (Oslo), Mauricio Takara (São Paulo), Arnau Obiols (Catalonia), Einar Scheving (Reykjavík), Shun Ishiwaka (Tokyo).

Rare Instruments:

Daniel Herskedal, tuba (Oslo), Hermine Deurloo, chromatic harmonica (Amsterdam), Yan Lebreton, kamalengoni, (Paris), Stefanos Tsourelis, oud (London), Clemens Christian Poetzsch, fluid piano (Leipzig).

Have fun going through the list!

Cheers.