Word: fusions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THESE TWO albums are about as dissimilar, musically, as any products of today's mass-marketed record companies can be. Lou Reed's record is curious fusion of jazz instruments, electronic effects, and Reed's fast-decaying voice; Patti Smith's latest is a luke-warm porridge of mushy mixing and tame playing. Yet we have New York Times critic John Rockwell '62 hailing both artists as "principal figures in New York's vanguard rock underground," and liberally praising their records. Arista Records chose to release both new albums at the same time, helping link the two in the public...
...Want to Boogie With You," Don Cherry's trumpet and Marty Fogel's sax thicken the soup of a repeated chord sequence in the bass and guitar; indeed, throughout The Bells these traditional jazz instruments are worked into Reed's rock songwriting better than most so-called fusion bands ever manage. Reed advertises his new orientation on the album sleeve, prominently displaying his statement. "If you can't play rock and you can't play jazz, you put the two together and you've really got something." Unfortunately, Reed's voice has deteriorated from the days when he could belt...
...frogs and the smell of formaldehyde. For another, Thomas made few concessions to the ignorance of laymen. He certainly did not obfuscate, but he gave complex matters the taxonomic precision they required: "It has been proposed that symbiotic linkages between prokaryotic cells were the origin of eukaryotes, and that fusion between different sorts of eukaryotes (e.g., motile, ciliated cells joined to phagocytic ones) . . ." Such is not the stuff that bestsellers are made of, but that is precisely what Thomas' book became. Novelist Joyce Carol Gates found the essays "remarkable . . . undogmatic . . . gently persuasive." John Updike praised Thomas' "shimmering vision...
Group improvisation is not a new idea in music, but the AEC has advanced the idea to a new technical and artistic plane. The Art Ensemble sound is a fusion of five highly individual and even idiosyncratic stylists; their special achievement is in learning, through years of experimentation, to combine these styles into a coherent music that retains the originality and vitality of each. Lester Bowie is especially startling in his instrumental technique. He finds within his trumpet an astonishing variety of blasts, blares, bleats, and buzzes it was never meant to produce. He exploits the lower ranges...
...trout," the principal challenge to the do-it-yourself bombmaker is the snaring of radioactive material. In Z Warning, by Dan Oran and Lonn Hoklin (Ballantine; 336 pages; $8.95), the snatch-80 kilos of plutonium dioxide-is executed with lethal efficiency. The gang that pulls the job has its fusion in a Western mental hospital. There the principals-a deranged young Texas millionaire, a female Japanese physicist suffering from Nagasaki syndrome and a dishonorably discharged black Vietvet -first pool their malignant talents. The group's nuclear capability is channeled by an ambitious eminence blonde, mistress of a powerful...