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Baker's Dozen

Impulse purchases: Oren Ambarchi Jazz (Fusion) Baker's Dozen
Jennifer Lucy Allan , August 7th, 2019 08:10

The musician, label head and self-described record obsessive has eyes bigger than his stomach in his own Proustian boulangerie of jazz and fusion records. By Jennifer Lucy Allan.

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Music Revelation Ensemble – No Wave
A lot of the music I love, like Ornette's Body Meta record earlier, is music that really kind of baffles me, where I don't really understand what's going on. And sometimes, yeah, you're sort of saying: Is this good? Is this actually good? Or is this bad? That young, naive thing where you've heard great players and, and then all of a sudden, there's this guy playing guitar and it's really jagged, and it's like, what's going on here?

This has James Blood Ulmer on guitar. He was a mysterious figure that appeared in the late 70s – he was doing stuff earlier but he was doing stuff on CBS in the late 70s. The music revelation ensemble was one of the first James Blood Ulmer records I heard, and it was also called No Wave. People were calling it punk jazz, and so it crossed over into a lot of the stuff that was happening in New York, in the No Wave scene too, although I think it's pretty different. But it was a connection that led me on to that stuff.