Human Feel

Human Feel – Speak To It (Remastered) (1996/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:35 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Songlines Recordings

The fourth album by this Brooklyn-based collective builds on their strengths in a program that ranges across jazz, improv, and contemporary classical/new music, with a passing nod to the traditions of eastern Europe. As composers, Black, Speed and D’Angelo provide different frameworks for the band’s characteristic, often tensile explorations, heard as well in their atmospheric rendition of the Billie Holiday standard “Left Alone” where they’re joined by vocalist Holly Palmer. The feel moves in and out of time (from jazz-rock to free, polyrhythmic and vamp to rubato), while the shifting textural/melodic interplay demonsrtates their commitment to collective improvisation. As critic Louisa Hufstader remarked about their 1994 New World/Countercurrents release, “You can hear them listening to each other, reevaluating, reacting; there’s both urgency and joy in the process…These are really, really talented guys having fun.” The unedited analog recording vividly preserves the integrity of their playing.

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Human Feel – Gold (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 58:56 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Contemporary Jazz, Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Intakt Records

Human Feel have been together 30 years now, with no personnel changes in almost as long. Chris Speed, Andrew D’Angelo, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Jim Black had been developing individual and collective vocabularies in this very outfit, which went on to epitomize the 90s downtown scene. Through it all Human Feel has carried on, and whenever they reconvene they have new musical stories to tell, and old ways of relating, of honing musical structures that depend on precision in the details yet leave much to be determined in performance. Now Human Feel present ‘Gold’ 12 years after their last album. The fusion of various musical idioms and the subtle play of calculation and spontaneity provide a highly individual musical language. Jim Black says, We were joking recently we only make an album every 10 years now … The past four years we’ve been getting together more often to work on new material, and to record when schedules allow. We had an amazing European tour in November 2017. The band just gets better. We believe more than ever that the four of us making music together is a necessity, and we intend to keep doing it wherever and whenever we can.

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