Jamaaladeen Tacuma's Unsolved Mysteries - Klagenfurt III incl. duo vocal improv
Sorry I'm late but I'm moving to the coast soon and things are wild here.
Stress issues aside, we'll sneak this 2nd of two Bass Deity screeds under the milestone birthday wire.
This guy's been around my whole adult life since high school, it seems, yet he's just 10+ years older than me.
He first surfaced, with a style seemingly fully formed upon his advent, in the 1970s Prime Time bands of Ornette Coleman, assuming a central rhythmic role in the saxophonist iconoclast's forays into electric music he dubbed Harmolodics.
With a way of playing the bass somewhere between Larry Graham and Steve Swallow, the propulsive force of his sometimes ear-astonishing technique is matched by the melodic pathways he navigates and Earth-excavating tones he gets from a variety of custom and often striking-looking instruments.
What makes Jamaaladeen Tacuma -- born this day in 1956 and somehow only ten years my senior -- stand above so many other bass wielding people is that he can play so many notes and in such a commanding, thunderthumbed style, yet what he chooses to play always ends up 101% supportive of the music as a whole.
In lesser skilled hands, what he does would overwhelm the listener and unbalance the sound and the song. But in his, it unlocks and uncovers the beams that hold up the edifice of the composition or improvisation in which he is participating.
Ah yes, improvisation, always one of JT's greatest strengths (that's foreshadowing, folks).
Like, say for instance this 2+ hours of near-total extemporization, captured like hot lava from an erupting volcano in Austria almost 20 years ago. Don't burn yourselves, OK?
Jamaaladeen Tacuma's Unsolved Mysteries
Kärntens Haus der Architektur
Napoleonstadel
Klagenfurt, Austria
10.1.2007
01 intro/Klagenfurt I
02 Klagenfurt II
03 Klagenfurt III incl. duo vocal improv
04 Klagenfurt IV
05 Klagenfurt V
06 Klagenfurt VI
07 Klagenfurt VII incl. Yesterdays
08 Klagenfurt VIII incl. If You Want Me to Stay & Sweet Sticky Thing
09 Jamaaladeen Tacuma outro comments
Total time: 2:04:14
disc break goes after Track 04
Jamaaladeen Tacuma - bass & vocals
Jean-Paul Bourelly - guitar & vocals
J.T. Lewis - drums & percussion
mono soundboard capture, of indeterminate origin, of the complete concert
spectral is 100% lossless, with sonic information to 20 kHz
this music was almost entirely improvised in the moment it was made
de/remuxed to spread the audio field a little wider, edited & remastered by EN, June 2026
725 MB FLAC/direct link
725 MB FLAC/direct link
I went a little bonkers splitting this one apart and adjusting things very slightly, to make the lava flow over your toes just fiery enough so you can still walk when it's over.
Obviously, you gotta be on the lookout for guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly here, as he supplies the lighter fluid vibes straight outta Monterey 1967 to keep things consistently blazing, as Jamaaladeen and drummer JT Lewis locomotivate the train along the perilous tracks of the unknown realms of instantaneous invention.
I'll be back with a couple more before going coastal, but that's next week. Today we bid a topnotch ascent to septuagenarian status for Jamaaladeen Tacuma, a bass player so innovative and distinctive you can identify him from one <thump>--J.
