PRICE:
$15.00
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Live At Montreux Jazz Festival
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
AX 056CD AX 056CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
7/1/2022

Recorded live at Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux Switzerland on July 8, 2021. "With the release of The Paradox: Live At Montreux Jazz Festival, techno legend Jeff Mills and keyboard wizard Jean-Phi Dary embark on an exciting, ground-breaking musical trip that takes techno and electronic dance music to a new level . . . The Paradox's direction of travel into unexplored musical territory should come as no surprise since the original techno wizard has never stopped pioneering new ideas . . . Never content to outstay his welcome by staying in the same place for too long, in 2005 he revealed the breadth of his imagination with his conceptual classic Blue Potential, an album with the Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra that saw techno happily co- existing alongside symphonic sounds. And now, Jacquline Caux's Man From Tomorrow -- the title of her film documentary of the techno maestro -- has cast his eyes over the musical horizon and borrowed a couple of ideas which he believes can transform techno and take it to the next level, 'I thought maybe it's not too late to bring or transfer some of the ideas from jazz over to electronic music, and look at the machines differently -- to play the machines and not just 'programme' them. I had the idea of trying to find the common link between free jazz and electronic music, so I reached out to jazz musicians to see if we could create something new that might be a benchmark that we could start from to create another step forward for electronic music.' Turning to keyboard player Jean-Phi Dary, with whom he had collaborated on the late Tony Allen's album Tomorrow Comes the Harvest, he remembered the musical ideas he had exchanged with the pianist while the sound engineer was doing his stuff during sound-checks on tour . . . Musically, they threw ideas out there to twist, turn and develop until they hit a groove and moved forward with that. The result was their first album together as Paradox called Counter Active (AX 096LP, 2021). It was a bold move, leaving the rhythmic certainties of techno to explore alternative, free flowing paths that allowed the breeze of change to blow through its highly compressed rhythms. Next came the challenge of presenting their ideas in live performance. They chose the demanding Montreux audience, and with the addition of Zaf Zapha on bass, the resulting album captures their spontaneous musical invention as it happens in the moment. It's a high risk, high reward strategy that was pulled off with conviction and aplomb . . . electronic sounds of techno are used to spontaneously interact with the piano, producing a deep musical conversation not pre-determined by tape loops, MIDI presets, the 96 rhythmic patterns stored in a TR-909 drum machine or the bass patterns of the Roland TB-303 electronic synthesizer-sequencer and all that technical geekery." --Stuart Nicholson Personnel: Jean-Phi Dary - keyboards, synthesizer; Jeff Mills - drum machine, synthesizer, percussions; Zaf Zapha - bass.