Louis Guarino Jr. is a New Haven Connecticut based musician/composer who has played and been involved in projects with musicians like Wadada Leo Smith, Michael Gregory, Pheeroan Aklaff, Carla Bley, Slide Hampton, Richard Muhal Abrams, Oliver Lake, Claudine Amina Myers, Leroy Jenkins, Ray Anderson, Marty Ehrlich, and others. He was a member of the Creative Musicians Improvisors Forum (CMIF) in Connecticut (started by Wadada Leo Smith), which was sort of a spinoff of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago.
Louis’ trumpet approach is an amalgamation of trumpet players like Miles Davis, Lester Bowie, Leo Smith, and Eddie Henderson, while his compositions are manifestations of the blending of many styles of music... A melting pot of avant gard & mainstream jazz, classical forms & structures, New Age colors, world rhythms, free forms & electronic, as well as funk.
Spiritual Awakenings was mentioned in Keyboard magazine by Titus Levi in his “Discovery” column where he said, “Louis Guarino (has) clear ties to Miles’s music, (and uses) it as a starting point for pursuing entirely different aesthetic directions”. “And as with Miles, there’s “the cushion.” But in this case, it’s more of a throbbing, swirling, pulsing, and dreamy electronic haze rather than the groove-oriented backdrop of Miles’s later recordings. There’s range and variety throughout his recording Spiritual Awakenings, but the whole release has a focused and aural effect”.
The Music Paper gave it 4 out of 5 stars and said, “ The sounds on this tape made the hair on my arms stand up (as the Dutch say, “It gave me chicken skin”)! The music here is free and stirring. The bottom end rumbles with what the sound of OM sounds like and the horn on top flies like a mad bird. The production is simple/complex because it uses richness rather than a lot of studio tricks. But the real kicker is the performance. The music really stirs it up. The odd melodies really get to the center of your gut. This stuff is outside, very moving, and if you’re not dead, guaranteed to bring out a number of emotional responses”.
You can check the Enchanted Vibrations website at: www.enchantedvibrations.com for more information on Louis, and the music on Spiritual Awakenings, including pictures and some one minute mp3 samples of the music.
Spiritual Awakenings is available from the web site, or from Amazon.com or CDBaby.com.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
