A pair of 70th birthday celebrations take the spotlight in this podcast. We hear septuagenarian Joe Morris on both guitar and bass in the company of Matt Shipp, Marshall Allen and Seattle’s own Tom Varner, while his contemporary hand drum specialist Adam Rudolph is represented by a duet with mentor Yusef Lateef plus more recent excursions in cross-cultural music that combine Western, East Asian and South Asian instruments while avoiding most of the limitations of garden-variety “world music”. Toshio Hosokawa offers his own variety of East meets West in a one-act adaptation of a Medieval Japanese drama written for one opera singer and one Noh singer. Gabriela Ortiz contemplates Violeta Parra and the “canto nuevo” in her latest portrait album. And avant-rock from New York and Montreal, crossover electronica from England and a 50-year anniversary look at items by The Residents that anticipate both those genres round out the proceedings. Creative and improvised music with Michael Schell.
