Recorded 016
Todd Whitman
Zeppelins Erste Grosse Fahrt
Todd Whitman's first record is also perhaps the strangest release on Recorded to date. Whitman is a highly influential but massively under-document reed, saw, and electronics player who has produced some of the scariest acoustic music heard on the East Coast. The CD starts out with an amazing overdubbed "double solo" of musical saw and plastic cones on amplified metal--there is no word in the English language to capture its bizzar, otherwordly sensibility. The rest of the CD documents some very hard-to-characterize sets of music with Jackie Blake (reeds), Dan Breen (various), Audrey Chen (cello, etc.), Joe McPhee (reeds), Sbir Mateen (reeds), Andrea Parkins (keyboards), Stanley Schumacher (trombine), and Bob Wagner (electronic and acoustic percussion). During these sets, the ghost of jazz is resurrected in the context of electro-acoustic freakouts, and made to answer a number of difficult questions. In the end, it is the electronic music that is arrested and carted off to jail. Or something. Anyway, recorded live at High Zero 2004.

 $12 (plus add $3.00 for postage in the US). 100% of the profits from this disk go to benefit the yearly HIGH ZERO FESTIVAL in Baltimore (see http://www.highzero.org)

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