Programmed

Amazon.com

Future-jazz visionary Carl Craig's Innerzone collaboration project highlights his pedigree as a producer, arranger, and all-around genius, ranking him with the likes of Stepney and Jones. Craig has created an album that genuinely manages to break new ground, merging the musical past with the technological future, blurring the textures of the electronic and the organic. "Manufactured Memories" like "Blakula" sets the abstract pace, as breaksmith Fransico Mora executes immense live drum technique (as he does throughout) within an electronic framework. Like some lost studio session tapes of Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, and Max Brennan, "Basic Math" and "Timing" are avant-fusion workouts. As some plunder and exploit, claiming originality, Craig makes no secret of the inspiration drawn from the others' works (including the superb reinterpretation of the Stylistics' "People Make the World Go Round"). By borrowing, reconstituting, and making his own, he has created something very unique and utterly sublime. --Amazon.co.uk

Review

In the awkward embrace between jazz and electronic dance music, the same compatibility problems keep popping up. Either the music operates within too narrow a rhythmic sphere to inspire genuine improvisation or the harmonic content isn't interesting enough to hold the attention of jazz players or the mood remains locked in a rigid, one-dimensional frame that's resistant to all manner of crashing and bashing. Two 1999 releases eluded these traps - Tim Hagans' Animation/Imagination and Detroit techno maverick Carl Craig's collaboration with pianist Craig Taborn and percussionist Francisco Mora Catlett, the Innerzone Orchestra. Where Hagans' outfit played like Miles Davis' Silent Way band parachuting into the fourth hour of an all-night rave, DJ Craig figured out how to utilize electronically derived patterns to launch agitated, absorbing, in-the-moment musical conversations. These dialogs between worlds had the skronk of jazz fusion but none of the pretension, the repetitive throb of electronic dance music with little of the residual numbing mindlessness. Such delicate balances make Programmed a landmark, of sorts. It's one of the very few electronic records in which improvisation is more than mere window dressing, where the exchanges between the beatkeepers and the hired jazz hands feel genuinely open and spirited, if not spontaneous. Taborn glances at Joe Zawinul (the burbling synths of "Monsters") and Herbie Hancock during his Fender-Rhodes period (the refreshingly un-basic "Basic Math"), but his best forays exhibit a knack for subverting the status quo and a command of the techno vocabulary that enables him to take big polyrhythmic risks and prevail. While not all of Programmed involves Taborn, his tracks have enough juice to suggest the end of lurching and hesitant electro-jazz and the start of a whole vibey new thing.

--Tom Moon, JAZZIZ Magazine Copyright © 2000, Milor Entertainment, Inc. -- From Jazziz