Balance Point Acoustics : Damon Smith

CONCERTS

calendar

NEWS

reviews
workshops
projects

MULTIMEDIA

audio
video
visual

Featured CD:

Firestorm is an intense and musically assaultive release of killer, balls-out free jazz that will appeal to those who long for the most bombasic works of Broetzmann, Ayler, Takayanagi and Cecil Taylor! This release reveals many shades of intensity and mood while remaining frenzied and inventive at all times. Featuring Taylor alumni Marco Eneidi (alto), Marc Edwards (drums), Lisle Ellis (bass), Elliott Levin (tenor), Sun Ra Arkestra legend Marshall Allen (alto), bassist Damon Smith and manic Austrian reedist Mario Rechtern, Firestorm is a delerious concoction of new energy music that pushes beyond the stratosphere of sound!

You can send a paypal for $15 pp to damon@balancepointacoustics.com If you would like one. Buy This CD

A few copies of "Healing Force" are available You can send a paypal for $15 pp to damon@balancepointacoustics.com If you would like one.

Vinny Golia-reeds
Aurora Josephson-voice
Henry Kaiser-guitar
Mike Keneally-piano, guitar and voice
Joe Morris-guitar and double bass
Damon Smith-double bass
Weasel Walter-drums

Seven major figures from the art-punk, free-jazz, brutal prog, improvisational and modern jazz world come together for a ROCKING tribute to the unfairly ignored, misunderstood and vilified late period works of Albert Ayler. These late period songs have always seemed to me like they may have been some of the most personally spritually resonant for Ayler, but the musicians and the culture of the late 1960s were possibly not able to successfully translate and perform his concept of spirituality, free jazz, boogaloo, nursery rhythms, marching bands, blues and r'n'b, and certainly the free-jazz following public was not ready to accept it. Now, 40 years and many stylistic mash-ups later, perhaps these works can be better enjoyed.

“Albert Ayler's later works (Love Cry, New Grass and Music is the Healing Force of the Universe) seem to be generally reviled. Through meditations, dreams, and visions, the players on this project were given the message to once again attempt to send the people of earth a message of love, peace, and spiritual understanding. We selected a representative set of tunes for this material and essentially let it play itself through us. We hope you will be as surprised as we still are by the results of this invocational experiment. We hope you will like this record.”
- Henry Kaiser, producer and guitarist Buy This CD

Limited copies of the "Noisy People" dvd are available here. It is a Film by Tim Perkis featuing Damon Smith and other Bay Area Musicians. Includes footage of Gratkowski/Bryerton/Smith and Wolfgang Fuchs' Six Fuchs Project. Buy This CD

Improvised music form Oakland and Tel Aviv from the Jerusalem based Kadima Label.
Aurora Josephson - voice
Ariel Shibolet - soprano saxophone
Jen Baker - trombone
Scott R. Looney - piano
Damon Smith - double bass Buy This CD

"Ghetto Caylpso" Peter Kowald/Marco Eneidi/Damon Smith/Spirit out now on NOTTWO records. Buy This CD

New from Nuscope Records: Biggi Vinkeloe, alto saxophone, flute; Damon Smith, double-bass; Kjell Nordeson, drums, vibraphone Buy This CD

Forthcoming CD's

BPA 013 "Pepper Spray" Ariel Shibolet/Jen Baker/Damon Smith/Jerome Bryerton

Bertram Turetzky/Damon Smith ThoughtBeetle

"Cruxes"
Players: Aurora Josephson/Joelle Leandre/martin Blume
Reviewed by: Philip Clark , Double Bassist
“Cruxes” by Philip Clark
Double Bassist (Summer 2006:73)

Joëlle Léandre (db)
Damon Smith (db)
Aurora Josephson (v)
Martin Blume (dr)

This quartet, headed up by bassists Joëlle Léandre and Damon Smith, is featured in a studio set from 2004 and a live set recorded around the same time at the Berkeley Art Center. The music parades all the techniques for which Léandre has become known – there’s dazzling balletic movement across and around the bass, while her heady sense of the theatrical comes to the fore in the live material, where the presence of an audience adds to the drama.

If the music has any fault, it’s that greater clarity in the structures could be forthcoming. The final track, Hodie Mihi, Cras Tibi!, is a whopping 19 minutes along, and although stuffed full of great ideas, the stuttering continuity makes the music feel overly episodic. Nonethless, there’s a brilliant moment when the two bassists collide head-on with flurries of pizzicato notes, each player tuned slightly differently, and Martin Blume’s drumming has much-needed precision and transparency.

Smith is a Bay Area bassist who recorded a fine duo CD with Peter Kowald. The studio set includes a brief duo with Léandre, and Smith uses her vocalizations as a springboard for his own explorations of the extreme outside edge of bass colourings. There’s an attractively incongruous moment in Tanglefoot Flypaper as the music briefly references jazz swing. Vocalist Aurora Josephson is cast shrewdly in the group, with her high-pitched tones counterpointing nicely against the rumbles and percussive quicksand underneath her.