I would say that Gamelan is good 5 am music. The whole 5 o’clock hour was generally on a pretty nice and mellow vibe, which is particularly appropriate now that I’m riding my bike to the station instead of driving — no stop at White Hen for coffee! Although it was a good track, the Vandermark/Nilssen-Love did sort of kill the mellow. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really had enough time to preview the album, but after seeing Nilssen-Love with Vandermark at the Territory Band-4 concert at the Chicago Cultural Center the preceding Sunday, I was interested to hear more. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Gjerstad/Brotzmann track, from a new clarinet duet CD of theirs, didn’t. Some tracks on the album wouldn’t have fit too well, but the one I played, while maybe a bit more sonically challenging than most of the other tracks from the first hour, still had a relatively quiet sound.

When Colin came back from his South African vacation last week, he brought me a CD. I guess I had mentioned before he left that I love South African Jazz and so he picked out “Archive Africa: From Jazz to Jive“, a compilation of 50′s and 60′s jazz from South Africa that is really wonderful. I was happy to play a pair of tracks from it, and to connect the dots between the Blue Notes and the Brotherhood of Breath, two groups with many members in common. The Blue Notes played in South Africa, but took a lot of heat for being an integrated band during the apartheid era, so they headed to England and evolved into the Brotherhood of Breath.

Another great recent discovery is the Fred Lonberg-Holm trio CD “A Valentine for Fred Katz“. It’s a couple of years old, but I finally picked it up from eMusic. I had seen a variation of that group perform at the Empty Bottle Jazz Festival. I also saw Fred at the Territory Band concert last weekend, and he told me that they’ve just finished mixing a sort of follow-up to that disc due out early next year.