Noah Howard - 'Patterns'/'Message to South Africa'

I'm a bit ambivalent about trying to blog my mp3 collection but they all just sit here, never being listened to, collecting dust, in a shitload of difficult-to-access cds with random food names written on them. And so I thought, do I actually review each album (in alphabetical order) on each disc (in alphabetical order) as a separate post? Or do I make one post for each mp3 disc and give one line descriptions? And do I really need to do this, since my output on Vinyl Underbite, Glass Mastered Cinderblocks, and Denial Embroidery is already a bit slow? And, do I upload each mp3 collection to Rapidshare or something, making these all available to everyone but then risking pissing off artists and labels?

I'm gonna attempt this anyway, though I don't know the answers to all of these questions. So proceeding alphabetically by disc title, and then alphabetically by album, we begin here. For some reason whenever I burned a CD of mp3s from 1999-2005 I would write the name of a random food on the CD, which was how I catalogued them. And judging the numerical value of 1000 to come before A, we start with the "1000 Island" disc which I named after the salad dressing I guess (even though it's usually written out as 'Thousand Island' on the bottles).

So, Noah Howard. A marginal jazzman in the officially written history, but Patterns will make you wish otherwise. This CD, put out by Eremite, is two tracks of Howard with two of my favorite gangs of non-US jazz dudes. Patterns is recorded with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink and some other Dutch dudes; it's a weird hybrid between Shepp-style pan-African rhythm beatdowns and Dutch swing, with occasional solos emerging from the clatter. Generally, the percussion is heavy -- both Bennink and a separate conga player and Howard as well at times. Sometimes the cymbals just cut through everything but maybe it's just the compression on these mp3s. There's parts where the reverb is cranked up and everything becomes a muddy, psychedelic mess, and those bits are my favorite, but the slowdowns and outerspace sax runs are inspired as well . Message to South Africa is recorded with Dyani. McGregor and Kali Fasteau so it's sure to please fans of the South African avant-swing scene. It's political in nature but what isn't? I'm already glad I started this project because I haven't listened to this in years (the CD says I burned it on 25 January 2002 and I doubt it got many listens since then) and it's a wonderful balancing act between American ESP-skronk and the digested trad cadences from Holland and South Africa.