Davey Williams Memorial Concert Roulette NYC March 13, 2023
NICE Curlew Review!!!! OF :
CBGB’s, NYC, 1987 (Cuneiform, 2022) and
Curlew - Phantasmagoria 1998 + WFMU 1997 (Cuneiform, 2022)
Dave Sewelson’s show on WFMU with
me as the guest
“Cartwright’s songs tap into some quintessential American Soul …” Boston Rock – Michael Bloom
" A playback of the diaspora that brought musical life to this planet: all the music ever made-Phoenician sailors' chants and Basque weddings and radio broadcast of Edgar Varese and regional fife-&-drum competitions-drifting back through space toward some musical Big Bang..." - Jazz Times
"Incandescent saxophone playing "- The New York Times
"It sounds like a hummingbird caught in the drapes."- Newsweek
"...Cartwright sounds like he's stirring about the galley of a boat at night, below deck, opening a beer, fixing himself an omelet, and doesn't know he's being overheard. All in all, an offering of great loneliness. Even despair." -Jazz Improv
"Earth music heard on another planet, audible through space if soundwaves go on forever like light waves, and if not, well, it's none of their business up there anyway, what goes on down here. "- Nebraska Music Educator
"...Cartwright sounds like he's stirring about the galley of a boat at night, below deck, opening a beer, fixing himself an omelet, and doesn't know he's being overheard. All in all, an offering of great loneliness. Even despair." -Jazz Improv
"Earth music heard on another planet, audible through space if soundwaves go on forever like light waves, and if not, well, it's none of their business up there anyway, what goes on down here. "- Nebraska Music Educator
Reprinted on CD (Cuneiform Records), it is one of those albums released from the polymorphic New York laboratory of the nineties that responds to a genre almost impossible to classify: jazz, rock, folk, blues, cabaret, punk, avantgarde converge merging into a very original unicum. For starters, the performance of the entire Curlew quintet is amazing, the melodies are beautiful, the overall show brings back to the great brilliant seasons of experimental collectives like Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention. Also collecting different unpublished material, on one side with the studio recordings, on the other in DVD through two concerts at the Knitting Factory and in Washington (respectively March 23 and December 9, 1991). The videos thus show the sound of a group, Curlew, who had few rivals in the United States, with the classic line-up managed by the leader George Cartwright (alto sax and tenor), including Tom Cora (cello), Davey Williams ( guitar), Ann Rupel (bass) and Pippin Barnett (drums): it was the typical sound of the Knitting Factory along with other bands such as Naked City and Last Exit or soloists like Ronald Shannon Jackson and James Blood Ulmer, Last Exit, in the only contagious mixture of the aforementioned genera. In addition A Beautiful Western Saddle as well as being the last album of the original line, differs from all the other works of Curlew because it is also an album of songs, both with the wonderful voice of the guest Amy Denio (singer, author and multi-instrumentalist), both with the surreal texts of the writer Paul Haines, who in turn is famous for having composed the lyrics of Escalator Over the Hill and Tropic Appetites by Carla Bley, etc.). What else to say? Both the well-structured disc and the two most open improvisations confirm the values of an amazing quintet, of which Cuneiform has in the catalog seven other albums: Live in Berlin, Bee, Paradise, Fabulous Drops, Meet The Curlews, North America , Mercury to listen carefully.