Daniel Carter / Gregg Keplinger / Reuben Radding
carter,keplinger,radding Artist:
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 Daniel Carter / Gregg Keplinger / Reuben Radding
Language
Origin Records
CD
$10
Daniel Carter is a musician, writer, visual artist, conversationalist, and all-around inspirational spirit based in New York City who has been creating freely improvised music since the early 1970s. He performs most often on alto and tenor saxophones, trumpet, clarinet, and flute, though he also plays drums, guitar, and sings. While Carter is probably most well-known for his key role in long-standing free jazz collectives such as Other Dimensions in Music and Test, he also regularly collaborates with rock bands, abstract noisemakers, singer-songwriters, and more. These projects include some relatively famous outfits, but most often involve countless others who are less familiar to the general public. It's probably safe to say that he has collaborated with thousands of musicians over the years.

Reuben Radding was born in Washington, DC, in 1966 and took up music as a young man, participating in that area's active punk scene. (Hear him on Dain Bramage's I Scream Not Coming Down LP, which also features a young Dave Grohl.) He moved to New York City in 1988, studied bass with Mark Dresser, and started to collaborate with many downtown jazz musicians. Today he leads several groups, runs the Pine Ear label out of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and is active on the Klezmer and Balkan music scenes.

Gregg Kepplinger is a percussionist and drum builder based in Seattle. Though he has been active on the creative music scene for decades, it is only in recent years that he has been featured on commercially available recordings with any degree of regularity, notably on CDs with reed players such as Wally Shoup and Rick Mandyck.

Radding lived in Seattle from 1997 until 2002, and in 2001 he received a grant that enabled him to bring Daniel Carter to Seattle. He and Carter had performed together in various configurations since 1993, but didn't have the opportunity to fully investigate their collaborative duo. Airline luggage restrictions as a result of the September 11 attacks meant that Carter could only bring one instrument with him on his trip out west. He brought his alto saxophone, which he has described as his "main axe".

Language was recorded in Seattle during the same 2001 visit that resulted in Carter and Radding's Luminescence, and is full of energetic and often quite lyrical improvisations. As on Luminescence, Carter is heard exclusively on alto sax, rather than the myriad of instruments on which he often performs. Carter and Radding had collaborated extensively prior to this recording, but Keplinger fits right in and in fact often takes the driver's seat. Language frequently puts me in a similar mindset as does Arthur Jones' classic Scorpio LP for BYG/Actuel, which is top praise in my vernacular.

Credits:
Daniel Carter: alto saxophone
Gregg Keplinger: drums
Reuben Radding: bass