Double Trouble
Homage for Charles Moffet
Austerity
Ecaroo
Rollover
Downgrading
Mumblypeg
Not since

Ray Anderson, trombone
Bobby Previte, batterie

Magic … is one of the most overused terms for describing music. You seldom hear something that is really magical. On the other hand, the American bandleader Ray Anderson is a magician if there ever was one. His magic wand is the trombone. He masterly breaks down the boundaries between magic and reality, spirit and the physical, tradition and utopia. He belongs to those mystics like Louis Armstrong or Lester Bowie before him, whose music depicts gravity and centrifugal forces, becoming and passing away as well as expansion and compression alike. And yet this is about nothing less than the measurability of the world. In addition to these physically calculable quantities, the magic of the trombonist is awakened precisely by those immeasurable spirits that we place exclusively in the realm of metaphysics and its first derivative, poetry. Growing up in Chicago and influenced from early youth by the whole spectrum of jazz history from New Orleans to the innovations of the AACM as well as by Chicago Blues, Motown, R&B, folk singers of the sixties and rock bands, Ray Anderson started his apprenticeship with Anthony Braxton in the 1970s and realized that music must always be a component of life, not the least in the bands of Barry Altschul and Charlie Haden. With the Slickaphonics, he combined the avant-garde sound of New York with biting funk, and he showed with BassDrumBone that formal strictness and subtle humor do not have to stand in the way. To this day, he has retained a sound in which the canon of tradition is broken down faced with the pulse of the times.