Artist: Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Ensemble
Date Released: March 26, 2002
Label: Tzadik
Produced By: Otomo Yoshihide
Tracklisting:
- Preach
- Yume
- Good Morning
- Teinen Pushiganga
- Toi Hibiki
- Eureka
- Hahen Fukei
Review[]
This came out a few years ago. I dig Otomo Yoshihide, and this is my favorite album. I'm not really a jazz fan, and so I don't know pretty much squat about jazz music, so perhaps to someone who actually does, this album wouldn't seem as interesting, but I don't know. (One of my best friends is hardcore into jazz. I've been meaning to play this one for him; I played Tails Out for him and he dug it, but Dreams is a bit different.) It's the only (as far as I know) Otomo Yoshihide record with live vocals throughout the entire thing. Otomo Yoshihide's a Noise/Jazz musician, and it's one of the noisier of his Jazz records (he typically puts out two kinds of records; straight noise/turntablism/etc. -- the Filament project is a good example of these—and more or less straight free-jazz -- Tails Out (which actually did come out this year) is pretty good as that). But, anyway, though, of all the Otomo Yoshihide records I have, this is by far my favorite. I've been meaning to write an essay on this one, actually. It's sort of loosely organized from being relatively normal-but-off-kilter to progressively noisier. The opening track is pretty straight-forward musically, but the vocals are this sort of... broken, lilting delivery; unfortunately, I haven't been able to find much w/r/t the concept of the album (if there is one), but I get the impression that there's a dreamlike aspect to it, where, as in dreams, things are just almost normal, but there's enough there to throw you off and make it clear this isn't the real world—and you get that impression with this. When you put it on, the music is really pretty, but when the vocals come in, they throw you off. Some of the later tracks feature Sachiko M on sine-wave generator and her special blank sampler (no, I don't know how this works), and it all leads up to the last track which is just a complete explosion of noise—it's almost like a standard dream where everything progressively falls apart as the dream-logic folds in on itself over and over until it can no longer sustain itself and it collapses. Anyway, though. As I tell Dale (my Jazz friend), that if I had my way, "Jazz" would be stuff like that. (Well, to be truthful, it'd be split between stuff like Dreams and the early, loose anarchic stuff, of the variety that appears in Forbidden Zone.) - Rev. Syung Myung Me