Craig Taborn

Reid Anderson, Dave King & Craig Taborn – Golden Valley Is Now (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 17, 2023 · Comments off

In 2010, Bad Plus drummer Dave King, his bandmate bassist/keyboardist Reid Anderson, and pianist/synthesist Craig Taborn performed together at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis as part of the drummer’s King for Two Days Extravaganza. The music they offered, while fully imbued with their individual musical personas, bore little resemblance to their better-known projects. This trio’s members, all from different parts of Golden Valley, Minnesota, have known one another and played together off and on since high school. They explore rock, punk, and post-punk, electronic music, jazz, and indie pop together and separately. All are lovers of songs above all else, despite the fact they are highly developed improvising jazzmen. Given their wildly busy schedules, The Golden Valley Is Now took roughly a decade to come together. Recorded in August of 2018 in Minneapolis, these ten tracks have little — if anything — to do with jazz, and that’s a good thing.

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Craig Taborn – Shadow Plays (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 26, 2022 · Comments off

On his first solo piano masterpiece, 2011’s Avenging Angel, Craig Taborn added his voice to the proud ECM tradition of keyboard greats, a list that includes Chick Corea, Vijay Iyer, Paul Bley and especially Keith Jarrett. As a sideman with saxophonists James Carter and Chris Potter, a skilled player and composer of electronic music, and later a contributor in a variety of contexts led by jazz notables such as Paul Motian, Dave Holland and Bill Frisell, the Minnesota-born Taborn has fashioned one of the most spiritually rewarding and musically adventurous careers in jazz today. Besides his ability to contribute in various musical milieus, Taborn has two extra special musical talents: he’s a master at the stiff, difficult (but wonderfully distinct) Fender Rhodes and he’s an enormously talented free improviser who can sit at the piano and spontaneously create entire concerts such as Shadow Plays using tones, textures and his own seemingly limitless imagination to revel in kaleidoscopic discovery on solo piano. Produced by ECM’s visionary founder Manfred Eicher and exquisitely recorded live at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, Shadow Plays is the opposite of a passive listen. The ear is immediately drawn in by the profound silences and chiming single notes of “Bird Templars” and held rapt throughout these seven longish tracks by the ingenuity and prowess of Taborn’s stream of consciousness creativity. Rarely has one man on one instrument produced this many sounds, this many ideas, tempos, echoes, sustained notes and multi-colored moods in a single program of recordings. Having stated in interviews that he’s interested in trying to “extend boundaries” and how as an improviser he’s both “creating and observing at the same time,” he launches into the exuberant opening of “Conspiracy of Things,” resorting to showers of single notes, repeated figures that rise and fall in volume, and dramatic strokes across the keyboard. And as a player who says he’s interested in the avant-garde but yet likes to “swing,” Tarborn manages in pieces here like the title track to create a precise intellectual exercise that is somehow also deeply personal, frenetically percussive and thoughtfully subtle. This is jazz in only the faintest of outlines. An acquired taste to be sure, Taborn’s very individualistic shaping and invention of music is full of wit, wisdom and erudition: by any other name genius! – Robert Baird

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Craig Taborn – Daylight Ghosts (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 26, 2022 · Comments off

Keyboardist Craig Taborn’s Daylight Ghosts is the Minneapolis-bred New Yorker’s third ECM release as a leader, a quartet album following the solo Avenging Angel and trio disc Chants. Both projects earned wide acclaim, with The Guardian saying that Taborn’s “musicality and his attention to detail are hypnotic, as is his remarkable sense of compositional narrative within an improvised performance.” Along with the questing Taborn on piano and electronic keyboards, the quartet of Daylight Ghosts features two other luminaries from the New York scene – reed player Chris Speed and bassist Chris Lightcap – plus drummer Dave King, the leader’s fellow Minnesota native and one-third of alt-jazz trio The Bad Plus. Each player draws from a broad artistic background, as informed by rock, electronica and diverse strains of world music as they are the various permutations of jazz improvisation. Dynamism and spectral ambience, acoustic and electric sounds, groove and lingering melody – all come together to animate Daylight Ghosts.

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Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel – Piano Solo (2011) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 26, 2022 · Comments off

“Avenging Angel” is Craig Taborn’s distinguished contribution to the great solo piano tradition at ECM, a powerful, purposeful and rigorous album, which rises to the challenges of the format and transcends them. The disc explores the textural dimensions of sound, builds new structures, uncovers a rugged lyricism. Recorded in the optimal acoustics of the recital room at Lugano’s Studio RSI, with Manfred Eicher producing, it’s Taborn’s first disc under his own name for ECM, following on from inspired sessions with Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, David Torn and Michael Formanek.

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Ches Smith, Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri – The Bell (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 13, 2022 · Comments off

The Bell features dynamic chamber music compositions written for masterful improvisers. “The best thing I caught all weekend,” said critic Peter Margasak of the 2014 New York Winter Jazzfest, “was a superb trio led by drummer Ches Smith with pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri, which expertly infused seductively narcotic writing with a mixture of brooding melody and rich texture.” Since that NY debut, the trio has become a priority project for all participants and in June 2015 Smith, Taborn and Maneri recorded The Bell at Avatar Studios with Manfred Eicher as producer. Ches Smith’s first album as a leader for ECM follows appearances for the label with Tim Berne’s Snakeoil and with Robin Williamson. Ches has worked a very wide range of music in the course of his career, playing with musicians from Terry Riley to Wadada Leo Smith to Marc Ribot and his own groups have been informed by his far-reaching experience. His early biography included studies in composition with Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran and his taut writing for the trio on The Bell triggers inspired contributions from Taborn and Maneri, in an album which gradually builds in intensity. “The Bell” is issued on the eve of a major tour with concerts in the US, Canada, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway through January and February. In March the trio heads to South America.

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Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn – The Transitory Poems (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 26, 2022 · Comments off

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, two of creative music’s most iconoclastic players, first learned to meld and mesh their artistic approaches in Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory ensemble (as documented on Mitchell’s 2007 recording Far Side). Since then, Iyer and Taborn have continued to play duo concerts together, beginning in early 2009 at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and several times since, the world over. The Transitory Poems, recorded live at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest in March 2018, is their first duo album. A marvel of shared invention, it incorporates pieces offered as tributes to their common formative influences including pianists Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams and Geri Allen, and the painter and sculptor Jack Whitten.

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