On Disambiguation, guitarist and composer Christy Doran joins forces with Indian tabla player Imran Khan for a vivid, border-crossing duo album that brings together rock energy, blues feeling, jazz improvisation, Irish melodic traces and the subtle rhythmic flow of Indian classical music. Doran's guitar language is instantly recognizable: shimmering textures, sharp rhythmic accents, eruptive solos, intricate patterns and a fearless sense of movement. After six decades of musical exploration, he returns here with renewed clarity to the roots that have shaped his playing: blues, rock, Hendrix, McLaughlin, improvisation and, more recently, the Irish music of his family heritage. Echoes of Uilleann pipe melodies can be heard in pieces such as 'Ode to Johnny Doran' and 'Dark Slender Boy', where folk material is transformed into Doran's own highly personal sound world. Imran Khan's tabla provides both pulse and atmosphere. A distinguished player of the Delhi Gharana, Khan brings warmth, clarity and expressive depth to the music. His gently shifting rhythmic patterns open a space in which Doran's acoustic and electric guitars can move freely between drive, abstraction, lyricism and intensity. The album title points to a kind of artistic clarification. The ambiguities are not simplified, but illuminated. Across pieces such as 'Disambiguation', 'Haute Savoie', 'Taal Pravaah' and 'Mantra On An Irish Stream', the duo creates music that is fluid, forceful and deeply rooted, yet always open to surprise. Disambiguation is a meeting of two distinctive musical voices: Christy Doran's expansive guitar art and Imran Khan's refined tabla tradition. Together they create a sound that is direct, exploratory and full of depth.
Glacial Voyage is an evocative exploration of sound and memory, brought to life by the dynamic collaboration between guitarist Christy Doran and pianist Izumi Kimura. The album paints vivid sonic landscapes, reminiscent of the rhythmic push and pull of waves upon a shore or the quiet contemplation of a starlit coastline.
For Christy Doran and Stefan Banz, aerosols are an excellent metaphor for their intermedia collaboration between music and painting, in which they have explicitly sought to inspire and influence each other. Thus Banz has responded to five pieces of music composed for solo guitar and electronic devices by Doran with five new paintings in acrylic on cotton, and Doran in turn has responded to five paintings in acrylic on cotton by Banz with five new compositions for solo guitar and electronic devices. This publication contains the complete outcome of this fruitful collaboration, with additional texts by Stefan Banz and a link to a digital video animation of the total of ten music compositions and paintings
The band is cult. This band wrote history from 1972 to 1982 combining the energy of rock music with the power of free improvisation. With enormous vitality they bring together the experiences of a young generation electrified by Jimi Hendrix, fascinated by John Coltrane and inspired by free jazz. OM brought rock music into spontaneous musical processes with uncertain endings. After a long break from touring, the band returned in 2008 with a brilliant concert at the Willisau Jazz Festival, with highly explosive freely improvised music. Now the journey goes on as OM reinvents itself. At small live concerts in Lucerne the band creates and forges new concepts and themes. The new album "It's about Time" presents pieces that were developed from concepts, improvisations and compositions by the four musicians. Everything is there: the energy, the power, the radicality, the freedom, the form. Delivered with the passion, the skill and the experience of an entire lifetime of the four musicians. "ElectroAcoustiCore" is what the band calls their sound.
Philadelphia's Rave Musical Bar, where he played a few evenings, marked Coltrane's time around 1957, when he found his sound through Monk and his ecstatic play began to reach it's artistic heights in ever longer solos. After the cult quartet OM, named after an album title of Coltrane's, Christy Doran pays homage to the titan once again. After stopped teaching, he deliberately raised the bar for his own work, while successfully dedicating himself to the music of another immortal star, Hendrix, since 1993: neither adulating nor imitating and with different line-ups. The Irish-born citizen of Lucerne begins the title track almost in a similar way to Western music, but then it draws it's characteristic lines immediately over the rocky groove of the wonderful Argentine bassist Franco Fontanarrosa and the precise driving beats of Lukas Mantel. Doran's guitar alternates between irregular riffs and flat contrasts, between memorable melodies, repetitive patterns and trashy, noisy bulkiness at the end of the coziness. A few harmonies, dramaturgically set exactly in the right place, fire the sound and let us sense it all the more intensely and urgently. It is music of today, Doran's very own, long-known and yet always a surprising sound, captivating and astonishing: Rock music of the hour, rich in nuances like jazz, played by three musicians with feeling and stupendous technique. It is the fourth Sound Fountain album, one of which was recorded live in Gutersloh in the series "European Jazz Legends" - to which Christy Doran has long belonged.
Christy Doran's bands are called "New Bag," "Sound Fountain," or "Bunter Hund," and the same thing applies to all of them: nomen est omen. He chooses his co-musicians exclusively according to the pleasure principle, and does not know any prejudices not only in this respect, but has played with Fredy Studer, Urs Leimgruber, Carla Bley, Ray Anderson, Erika Stucky, and many more. He regularly jumps back and forth between Jimi Hendrix, Samuel Becket, and Chinese folk music in the search for inspiration and seems to expand his artistic portfolio every second. Christy Doran, for this release, got the idea to bundle 20 electric guitars, four electric basses and a drumset into an orchestra that has never before existed in this form. He calls it "144 Strings for a Broken Chord" in view of the tempestuous storm that it creates. One has to listen to this sometimes brutal elemental force, which can change into a soft hovering in a matter of seconds, a vacuum of reverberating sound fragments. And note: Each of the 20 guitarists and four bassists brings his own personal touch to the daring project, creating a special, original sound that resembles an artistic DNA with the help of smaller or larger instruments.
On a distant island, a man waits. Robbed of his posiiton, power and wealth, his enemies have left him in isolation. But this is no ordinary man, and this is no ordinary island. Prospero is a magician, able to control the very elements and bend nature to his will. When a sail appears on the horizon, he reaches out across the ocean to the ship that carries the men who wronged him. Creating a vast magical storm, he wrecks the ship and washes his enemies up onto shore. When they wake, they find themselves lost on a fantastical island where nothing is as it seems
On a distant island, a man waits. Robbed of his posiiton, power and wealth, his enemies have left him in isolation. But this is no ordinary man, and this is no ordinary island. Prospero is a magician, able to control the very elements and bend nature to his will. When a sail appears on the horizon, he reaches out across the ocean to the ship that carries the men who wronged him. Creating a vast magical storm, he wrecks the ship and washes his enemies up onto shore. When they wake, they find themselves lost on a fantastical island where nothing is as it seems
