THE SLOW MUSIC MOVEMENT​
  • Home
  • Music Tips
  • Radio/Playlists
  • Record Label/Licensing
  • Blog
  • Sound Advice
  • About
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Music Tips
  • Radio/Playlists
  • Record Label/Licensing
  • Blog
  • Sound Advice
  • About
  • Contact
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

Picture

The Slow Music Movement Blog

​Mostly we put our daily recommendations here for the blog readers among you, although occasionally we go longform.
Reading about music is a bit like looking at pictures of food - not nearly half as much fun as getting involved, so we scribble a brief intro to hopefully whet your appetite but you're better off just hitting play. Not very "slow" I know but there's a lot of music to check these days & hopefully you'll find the recommendations a handy filter.
​Trust your ears, not opinions.

17/5/2021 0 Comments

Jussell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi - Yamawarau (山笑う)

WHAT THE COVER LOOKS LIKE:
Picture

WHAT WE SAY:

​As the air warms, flora paints the landscape once more & the days lengthen Matthew Sage, Chaz Prymek & Chris Juswell unfurl their musical leaves in tandem with nature to celebrate this most welcome time of year, with the third installment of their remotely executed, seasonal adventure in ambient jazz & chamber folk fusion for Cached Media.
Vertical Divider
WHAT YOUR EARS SAY:

WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY:

Spring rises from the ground like a spirit full of light and latent pollen. A mountain, laughing, covered in flowers. Yamawarau (山笑う) is the third in a four-part album cycle by Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek, Matthew Sage, and Patrick Shiroishi… feel free to simply call this group “Fuubutsushi” if you so prefer. What began with their first album, Fuubutsushi, an autumnal ECM jazz suite, led to Setsubun, a warm place to hide from those too-long winter nights. As Spring breaks, the quartet have continued to refine their signature sound, to expand their mutual vocabulary, and to take playful risks together, all while maintaining their social distance. 

Prymek’s guitar and bass parts serve as the primary core of this collection; his style balances deeply emotive chords and spry flourishes with unique time signatures and spiraling phase patterns. The structure here is the rich soil, once dormant, coming back to life. In response to these structures, Sage’s percussion expands into multi-tracked and polyrhythmic territory it hasn’t explored before. His piano parts fall to the background, but flourish there, coloring Prymek’s melodies. If Prymek’s structures are the soil, Sage is the roots that tangle, swirl, and hold the album down. Jusell’s violin eddies through the early buds, painting the wind with warmth, light, saturation. Lyrical, dazzling but never showy, pastoral but never campy. Shiroishi does appear with his signature saxophone some, but his vocal presence on several songs, his playful melodica, and his first turn on the guitar, the bossa-nova closer, find him continuing to push the group into new places, like a tree that every year grows into previously unexplored air, atmosphere, currents of wind. This collection feels connected to their previous albums, but also feels different; vocal harmonies appear at the center of several songs, both wordlessly and sung beautifully in Japanese. Though still approximately “jazz” these songs feel more like a kind of campfire circled by the players. They are propulsive in places, meditative in others, often dynamic, but profoundly radiating light. 

What has been said before about this quartet remains true: they collectively cultivate a tenderness when playing together. That tenderness comes from patience, from foregrounding a sense of play, from leaving space and from finding joy in the act of creation as a group. Yamawarau is just that, a joy in cultivation, a smile full of new blossoms.
 
 CreditsChris Jusell: violin, voice 
Chaz Prymek: guitar, bass, clarinet, synths, samples 
Matthew Sage: keyboards, percussion, voice, acoustic guitar, field recordings 
Patrick Shiroishi: trombone, guitar, glockenspiel, tenor and alto sax, laptop, samples, voice 

photographs by Matthew Sage

​
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    OUR MISSION STATEMENT GOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS

    Lazy Days, Hazy Moments & Dancing to a Slower Groove

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    April 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Lazy Days, Hazy Moments & Dancing To a Slower Groove