The prisoners of strange
A review of Theory, the excellent new album by Carlo Mombelli and the Prisoners of Strange.
Watching a performance by Carlo Mombelli and the Prisoners of Strange is to be taken on a fascinating, lyrical and sometimes odd journey through unorthodox timing and enthralling headspace.
Listening to them on Theory is also a journey, but in a different way — here you won’t have the beautiful distractions of the performance itself, but instead you’re left alone with the force of the music. And what music. It’s described on their official site as “spontaneous freestyle chamber jazz”, which gives you a small clue.
The Prisoners are master bass player Mombelli, acclaimed and eclectic trumpeter Marcus Wyatt (get his superlative 2006 release, Language 12), drummer Justin Badenhorst and voice artist Siya Makuzeni. Together they play jazz that’s as experimental as it’s rooted in tradition and as entertaining as it’s intriguing.
A track like joburg-downpipe-gutter-bows, for example, makes use of found instruments such as the eponymous gutter bow (at least I assume it’s not a regular instrument), as well as the unbelievable voice of Makuzeni, to create a sound that’s got a rocking rhythm to move you along, but also an arresting dissonance to interrupt your ease.
Sonic design collective improvisation — fire is probably more the sort of free jazz that you’d associate with the avant-garde, a gloriously rampaging soundscape with some frenziedly tamped-down wind improvisation. But there’s melody as well as fire on Theory, one of those albums that demands to be listened to as a whole, each piece reading off the other to produce music of lovely genius.
(First published in a roundup of local jazz cds on the Mail & Guardian)
Chris’ Music
- @KBellSays no pressure, huh.
- yuck “@tim_gregory: Blue mouldy boards uses to serve pizzas at Knead in Wembley Sq http://t.co/h3ff8U6o”
- RT @PatrickConroySA: While ANC goes to court to ban Zuma painting the court orders Zuma Gvt to do it's job and deliver text books to lea ...
- Goodbye Donna Summer. Disco legend. Hot Stuff.
- @SammyNjenga nah. Just my id book.
- “For any leader to be oversensitive in the face of criticism, a grave error it is.” @khayadlanga on Yoda Mandela. http://t.co/QkDevEOM
No Responses to “The prisoners of strange”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks