Th session with Michael Gregory Jackson & Joe Daley went off like like a nebular interstellar interchange! I wanted very much to work with both of these guys having followed a lot of their work fastidiously for years to such high appreciation, although not necessarily within th same project. Life had other ideas, th opportunity presented itself & both musicians displayed zero-bullshit & total alacrity so we deigned a tuba-electric guitar-drums trio go! Michael came with a pantheon of FX, noise pedals & abstruse techniques & Daley played like a maniac & even cranked FX & distortion boxes ON A TUBA! – later in the set. Having these two extremely enigmatic veterans charging through th uncharted was an exponentially awesome indulgence & th results are seminal! We have a surplus of material which will result in one fuck of an album that I hope will be available as early as this November. It was recorded at a first rate studio in New Jersey & was expertly engineered by a don of Black Saint Records – Jon Rosenberg (Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Pat Methany etc). Video footage & audio excerpts from th session are impending so keep yer eye-balls parmesanned. Music aside, kicking it with them lot was exceedingly enriching. 

So here is summit’ scalding-hot frum th walruses gut-lining! This is all confirmed, assured ascertained & sewn-up in a sarcophagus with a floral intagliation in Cyrillic circa 1700’s – next month I will play at Visions Festival in New York with th Roscoe-Ragin-Tyshawn-Taborn posse (hopefully that recording/show will result in a release all of it’s own) but it also gives me tremendously cardio-vascular-swelling to announce, to unveil, to hatch n’ avouch – that I will be recording with guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson & tuba-don Joe Daley, in a professionally recorded medium/ environment engineered by Jon Rosenberg. I am producing th entire project & these two cats have been specifically enrolled for their consummate capacities & creative contagion. MG Jackson cut his teeth with Oliver Lake, contributing to some of th greatest Avant Jazz/kinetic & hyper complex whilst simultaneously ultra-effusive abject improvisational Jazz albums such as Holding Together, Shine! & Zaki as well as ridiculously challenging & distinct albums as a leader/composer himself. Joe Daley is a veteran of the tuba, ranking hard as a frequent consort of Sam Rivers & Muhal Richard Abrams. His recordings with Rivers, from Waves, The Tuba Trio tri-LP series, Crystals, Black Africa & albums with th Riverbea All Star Orchestra are legendary artefacts amongst Baku law & Joe’s more recent work as a leader & composer of his Earth Tones ensemble, particularly 2010’s The Seven Deadly Sins CD, which knocked me for nineteen, consolidate his presence as one of the most adventurous & dope tuba players of th effin’ lot son. Anyways, get-off th fault line cos shits gonna’ devour!!! Iym going to put th album out myself as waiting for these other loser-labels to catch –up is raking my xylemic sorus, kno worra’ mean!? FRUCTUOUS!!!

Wanderers, inyanga, beregs, mendicants, tobosha! Every now & then someone cool muso-marauder just falls out of a puff of smoke & we jump in a haggard rehearsal space & revolutionize th etchings. This shit should happen a lot more often but it’s difficult in this era of idiot with i-phone entropy. Anyhew’, here’s one track from an impromptu session & some Bollock Swine blush-bash in video & audio format are well on th way (editing/mixing). Thanks to Birax Marceleriac ^_- 

Kryzt-kid! wul’ I got my cervix all knotted over this shit & arrived at th wrong destination! Peep gaym – there’s two vision festivals… April 8^th in London & July th 7^th in New York…iym actually playing at th NEW YORK/JULY divination, not th London event, which is another good reason not to go to East London where th stench of gentrification is as thick as th knuckles on a camen-herders crab-claws after cement work in th Sinai! So sorry to all my trillions a’ to-mang-ja/hitogoroshi tail-gating frum fuckin’ Harlesden to th cliffs a’ Dover, this sorry-arse city will hafi’ mek do wit wuteva The Liar has been paid to lick to palatable status for these toothless fuckin’ meekers!

Oh’ & here’s two more reviews of Conversations, frizzant on it’s virtues, velocity & vertiginous-ness! all American a’ course! Yu kno Blacc, we never got one, NOT ONE review in this mzrfkr/th UK!!! Jzt goes to show yu th extent of th chronic-detumescence in this otiose deflated shit-dish of malingering pendulous-wristed bilge-vendors!!!

See ya’ in th least habitable/hospitable regions…. Kaku Jun Jun  

Multireedist Roscoe Mitchell is well into his 70s, but coasting just isn’t on his agenda. These two albums, which are products of the same two-day session, reflect a recent strategy in which the master woodwind player has matched up with much younger drummers who have some concepts of their own. Like drummer Mike Reed and multi-instrumentalist Weasel Walter, both of whom he has played with in the past year, Kikanju Baku, the percussionist on this session, is a player who makes things happen. Possessed of both manic energy and a fine instinct for restraint, he articulates elaborate shapes that sound like they owe as much to prog rock as to any radition of improvisation.
Mitchell takes to their convolution like a duck to water; his own playing is all sharp angles, coarse cries and pitches so acrid, they seem to have been set alight by Baku’s ferocity. Taborn’s piano runs match Mitchell’s lines in momentum and persistence, but he also has good instincts for when to hold back; there are long passages where he plays sparsely or not at all. His other keyboards add subliminal textures and tonal variety without once lapsing into mere novelty.
Both of these CDs are remarkably consistent; the engagement and invention never flags, which makes it hard to favor one over the other. Honor also goes out to the session engineers, Gregory Howe and Jimmy Fontana. Not only is the sound crisp and immaculate, it imparts a spacial experience that makes it feel like the music is happening all around the listener.

—Bill Meyer

These excellent trio recordings provide proof that, 50 years into his recording career, multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell continues to find new worlds to explore in his musical universe. Though his compositional methods range from music notated along traditional lines to free improvisation, it seems safe to assume that most of what we hear on Conversations I and Angel City is improvised along preset guidelines. What these might be is, ultimately, irrelevant to the experience of hearing the music, but the fact that they guide the ways that the musicians relate to one another is worth keeping in mind. On Conversations I, Mitchell is joined by Craig Taborn (piano, keyboards and synthesizers) and Kikanju Baku (percussion). Taborn has worked with Mitchell frequently since the late ‘90s while Baku is newer to the scene and information gleaned online (there are no liners here) indicates that he is a Japanese musician based in London. Taborn never puts a foot wrong, whether he is working through the avant side of his widely varied piano style or showing how well a judiciously handled synthesizer can blend in on a group improvisation. Baku is extremely impressive as well, his concept of rhythm not unlike the constant fragmentation of either a Milford Graves or such Europeans as Tony Oxley, but his frame of reference is completely different from either of these masters.

Baku’s willingness either to lay out or simply lay low for prolonged periods helps the overall flow enormously and when things heat up, he is right there, dancing through the traffic with agility and poise. As for Mitchell, he spends more time giving subtle cues than pouring out a lot of flipped-out saxophone lines. It’s a blast when he does get into some of this, as on “Outpost Nine Calling” for instance, but when this happens it feels like part of the whole play, not just one actor’s monologue.

— Duck Baker