Thirsty Ear
2004
Junk Magic
About This Album
After his tenure with James Carter, many in the stuffed-shirt, ultraconservative world of "mainstream" (not commercial, just boring) neo-and-post-bop societal misanthropes known as jazz purists, had hoped pianist/composer Craig Taborn would become the next rung on the ladder to the past with his virtuosity and taste. Curses, foiled again. On Junk Magic, his second date for Thirsty Ear's glorious Blue Series, Taborn, armed with his piano, laptop, and techno and breakbeat pedigrees, makes jazz just another part of marginal pop culture as it endures, changes, and mutates. For Taborn, jazz is not some elitist, detached, academic, primarily white celebration of all things dead and gone (the endlessly windy theorizing about which would never have been recognized by its legendary and heroic participants). For Taborn, history is in the making, not in the gnashing of teeth over its passing. Recruiting tenor saxophonist Aaron Stewart, drummer David King, and violist and mictrotonal improviser Mat Maneri, Taborn shapes an entirely new aesthetic; in so doing, he fulfills Blue Series curator Matthew Shipp's mission statement "to make it all new." On the title track, which opens the disk, there are the skittering beats as they layer themselves over off-kilter drum machine pyrotechnics and a looped piano phrase.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4 and 5)

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