This holiday season, join NYS Music and Toy for Tots as we bring joy to kids around the state this holiday season with our annual giving drive, Jam for Tots.
Traditionally, our Jam for Tots series would be centered around various live music performances in November and December. At each show, fans are encouraged to bring an unwrapped toy as a donation to brighten the day of a kid somewhere in the state. Due to the pandemic, we are changing it up this year so our collective charitable effort doesn’t fall short due to restrictions on live music and mass gatherings.
At each of these venues, whether you’re stopping in for dinner, getting take out or grabbing socially distanced drinks with a side of incidental music, bring an unwrapped toy for kids who are most in need this holiday season. A box will be there to leave your donation (through mid-December), which will be picked up by the Marines and distributed within New York State communities.
We greatly appreciate their support of these venues and the Marines during this annual giving drive. We may not be able to get down to live music while supporting the kids, but we can still support them while we wait for live music to return. Please use proper social distancing when patronizing these wonderfully supportive venues.
Jam for Tots has been an ongoing series dating back to 2008 when Positive Mental Trip frontman Luke Weiler took the show on the road, touring the East Coast while collecting toys for local charities. The event has since returned home to New York State and slowly expanded in the past few years. In 2019, in addition to a record haul of toys, 15 events were held across the state, bringing music and charity together throughout the Holiday Season.
And now for something completely different. Two New York-based guitarists, Harvey Valdes and Álvaro Domene, come together for an ear-opening album of nine deliciously deviant duets. It’s an ever-evolving, sonic tornado that is part free jazz, ambient somatic, mournful acousticity, industrial noise and the most searing, dark brand of heavy metal thunder – Nueva Guitarra.
Madrid-born, Kingston-based Álvaro Domene is not only a most formidable and original guitarist; he’s a tireless advocate for the creative music scene in the Hudson Valley and beyond. His Singularity Concert Series has brought many renowned musicians like guitarists Ben Monder and Elliot Sharp for intimate performances at his Kingston loft. Since 2013, his co-owned Iluso Records has released over two dozen discs featuring some of the most fearlessly composed and improvised music you’d even want to spin. As with this album, Domene continues his habit of keeping some heavy company, recording and performing regularly with the likes of Joe McPhee, Karl Berger, Henry Kaiser, Ches Smith, Michael Bisio, Billy Martin and many more.
Like Domene, Brooklyn-based Harvey Valdes is another guitarist (and oud master too!) for whom genre boundaries have little meaning. His three solo albums have encompassed the radical reshaping of jazz standards (“Roundabout”), Mahavishnu-esque jazz fusion fury meets math rock (“PointCounterPoint”) and the 18 concise solo guitar compositions of his latest, “Solitude Intones Its Echo,” mixed and mastered by sonic guitar innovator David Torn (David Bowie).
“Nueva Guitarra” is not designed for the faint of heart and that’s a very good thing.
The duo make their uncompromising and delightfully madcap intentions known in the album opener, “A Crooked Odyssey.” It’s a sonic assault of tapping, looping, glissandos, drones, whammy dives and frizzled corrupted guitar signalry, a mad ride to the mountain top that only let’s up with a soothing ambient cloud appearing in the last 45 seconds of the six-minute outing.
The best place to start your listening might be with the two solo pieces, which showcase the players’ varied approaches and signature sounds.
Valdes’ “Zealous Reflections” is a chord and melody exploration, with close voiced dissonances alternating with pleasant resolutions that he lets ring out. “Biomimicry” is Álvaro Domene swinging for the fences. It’s all quicksilver, speeded up melodies over noisy pads, loops and thumps, over under upside down signals, otherworldly whammy bar and harmonizer torture. A noise jazz industrial racket of the highest order, from the bastard son of Buckethead and Albert Ayler.
My personal favorites, and maybe the easiest for the noise jazz newbie to dip into, are “Lady Dog Night Terror” and the album closer, “The Sophist Pundit.”
“Lady Dog Night Terror” emerges quietly from the darkness. Its deep warm volume swells from Domene’s rise to surround and complement Valdes’ clean chording and single note lines. Slowly, the dissonance in the melody and backdrop increases. It gets symphonic and fuzz laden, then slowly slips away just after the four minute mark.
https://youtu.be/p0idBsB0z6Q
With “The Sophist Pundit,” the duo saved the best for last. This is a summary statement of all the ideas set before, spread over nearly nine and a half minutes of guitar hellacious.
The track begins with stutter stop phrases looped to create a variable pulse, over which the duo improvise jagged lines. It just gets more intense as it goes on, with the duo creating a wall of feedback looped upon feedback, punctured by siren calls and squeals designed to melt your preconceived notions of what guitars can do.
All musicians have been hit by COVID-19, but not many have as hard as Domene. He battled the ailment all through the spring, but still managed to ready this and other collections for release.
If you want to do a good deed for music kind, and vastly widen your own appreciation of music and the creative possibilities still left in the guitar, download this uncompromising disc.
Key Tracks: Lady Dog Night Terror, The Sophist Pundit, Biomimicry
On Thursday June 25 at 8pm, heavy prog and future groove band lespecial will debut “Cheen Stream II,” featuring multi-angle video and a soundboard audio live set. Filmed at the band’s studio and music school The Music Cellar in Millerton, NY the performance will be streamed live on lespecial’s Facebook and YouTube.
“A lot of times in horror movies sequels don’t live up to the original. But the best ones expand on the lore and go deeper, introducing the makings of a franchise. I don’t know what that has to do with cheen stream II. But I do know that with the multi-angle video and soundboard audio, this will be a big step up from the first cheen stream. There will still be a level of in-studio casualness, but more bangers. Older songs we haven’t played in a while in a new setting, and some new music we’ve been working on. We’re excited to bring some music to people right now, in our home studio with some fresh production.”
Luke Bemand, bassist for lespecial
lespecial recently joined Royal Artist Group, whose roster includes DJ Logic, Ghost-Note, James Casey, Natalie Cressman and many more. If you’re looking to see lespecial live and in person, they will be performing a private drive-in show in the Glens Falls area this on Saturday, June 27. For details and information on tickets, please email claw@jamflowmgmt.com.
Guitars A Go Go, the improvisational duo of two acclaimed Hudson Valley-based guitarists, Rick Warren and Sal Cataldi (Spaghetti Eastern Music), have released their debut album, Travel Advisory. The duo have been performing at leading concert venues and art galleries since early 2019 and, on occasion, in a quartet abetted by bassist/composer Mark Steven Brooks and percussionist Pete Tenerowicz.
NYC and Saugerties-based guitarist Sal Cataldi may be best known these days for his style-jumping solo project, Spaghetti Eastern Music. Time Out New York describes Cataldi’s music as “largely instrumental, Eastern-influenced jams are infused with some delicate guitar work and hauntingly moody atmosphere.”
Originally from Kingston, Hudson-based guitarist Rick Warren has been deeply involved in the improvisational and experimental music scene. He was encouraged by renowned vibraphonist Karl Berger at his Creative Music Studio in Woodstock. It was Berger’s visit to a Rick’s high school music theory class that led him to become a regular participant in twice-yearly workshops held at CMS, an international hot bed of improvisational music performance and education founded in 1971 by Berger, Ingrid Sertso and Ornette Coleman. Rick is best known for using his guitar and a variety of electronic sound sources, each one a new and different on-the-spot creation.
Their debut album is a quartet of live-in-studio duets recorded just as the COVID-19 quarantine took hold. Travel Advisory features contemplative, peaceful songs as well as songs with textured noise and dissonance. These songs communicate the wide array of emotions we are feeling in response to the global pandemic. Five more songs were later produced in remote collaboration, with Cataldi adding guitars, synths, and effects at his studio in West Saugerties to solo pieces performed by Warren at his studio in Hudson.
Travel Advisory opens up with “A Jig for Europa,” comprised of blues performed by Warren on heavily processed acoustic 12-string, electronic blurbs, and backwards guitars by Cataldi. Throughout the album are songs such as “The Volcano Lovers,” 13 minutes of serene music with back-and-forth relay of melodic improvisations by each guitarist and “DeKooning Was a Crooner”the final and longest live-in-studio improvisation. The song consists of jazz chordal voicings from Cataldi lead into the inside-out improvisations from Warren.
Key tracks: A Jig for Europa, The Volcano Lovers, DeKooning Was a Crooner
As we enter June, the fourth month where live music performances are postponed until it is deemed safe to have mass gatherings due to COVID-19, we take a look at the music venues across the state that are closed for now, but in the coming months will hopefully reopen.
Working with 13 photographers to document more than 60 venues in 20 cities across New York State, we present this monthly series that will look at the current conditions of these beloved venues. As they reopen, we will provide photo documentation recording the changes over time in all corners of the state.
Great thanks to all photographers and venues who take part in this series.
