Anthony Braxton and Mario Pavone's Seven Standards shows that you can utilize an outside/inside approach to traditional material (and that there are less obvious standards than, what, "'Round Midnight" and "Lush Life" and "On Green Dolphin Street?") and still come across really rather dry. The really frickin' weird thing about this date is that Pavone plays bass, right, duh, but the sax is handled by his bandmate Thomas Chapin while Brax himself tickles the ivories! Oh and Pheeroan Aklaaf and Dave Douglas appear, too, so this is a pretty star-studded affair, all things considered. And everything gets started off just fine with "Dewey Square" but the band just doesn't gel elsewhere and Chapin should stick to sax and not flute. Then again, what I really want from this line-up is duel axefire spraying across the countryside and killing everything in its path and slightly out versions of standards with AntBra playing piano isn't quite what this doctor* ordered.
*I am not actually a doctor.
And Ali Wali by Ghulam Hassan Shugam didn't pass either the "Did it give me chills?" (it didn't) or the "How often did I forget I was listening to music while it played?" (it was quite a lot) test, which are my go-to criteria for how good any Hindustani or Carnatic music is.
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