Album you probably missed…from 1995: Al di Meola, Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke - Rite of Strings
In most popular forms of music, collaboration between great artists doesn’t necessarily result in a sum of all participating parts (think, for example, of “Ebony And Ivory” or the Jagger-Bowie version of “Dancing In The Streets” – they are both downright creepy). In jazz, however, the best recordings usually happen when great musicians play together.
On Rite of Strings, the fusion gods bless us with an acoustic collaboration of three modern masters: Al di Meola (guitar), Jean-Luc Ponty (violin), and Stanley Clarke (bass). The result is an extraordinary outpouring of adventurous virtuosity. Perhaps most striking, however, isn’t the individual skill of the musicians but how wonderfully they play and compose together. Di Meola and Ponty trade majestic solos throughout, weaving them together with warm and mysterious melodies, while Clarke holds the entire experiment together by crafting brilliant bass-lines. The end result is an album that feels more like a journey into the musical unknown than a simple collaboration effort.
- Jesse Javna, The Vegetable Report
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cuetheconscience reblogged this from wqhsradio and added:
those 5 albums I would have on...deserted island.
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