Christy Doran's Sound Fountain - Lift the Bar (2020) [Hi-Res]

... Wild stuff that’s not for everyone but is a new gold standard for those that like to boldly go where no one has gone before. It’s on the corner of where prog jazz meets prog rock... Chris Spector, Midwest Record

Philadelphia’s Rave Musical Bar, where he played a few evenings, marked Coltrane’s time around 1957, when he found his sound through Monk and his ecstatic play began to reach its artistic heights in ever longer solos. After the cult quartet OM, named after an album title of Coltrane’s, Christy Doran pays homage to the titan once again. After stopped teaching, he deliberately raised the bar for his own work, while successfully dedicating himself to the music of another immortal star, Hendrix, since 1993: neither adulating nor imitating and with different line-ups.

The Irish-born citizen of Lucerne begins the title track almost in a similar way to Western music, but then it draws its characteristic lines immediately over the rocky groove of the wonderful Argentine bassist Franco Fontanarrosa and the precise driving beats of Lukas Mantel. Doran’s guitar alternates between irregular riffs and flat contrasts, between memorable melodies, repetitive patterns and trashy, noisy bulkiness at the end of the coziness. A few harmonies, dramaturgically set exactly in the right place, fire the sound and let us sense it all the more intensely and urgently. It is music of today, Doran’s very own, long-known and yet always a surprising sound, captivating and astonishing: Rock music of the hour, rich in nuances like jazz, played by three musicians with feeling and stupendous technique. It is the fourth Sound Fountain album, one of which was recorded live in Guetersloh in the series “European Jazz Legends” – to which Christy Doran has long belonged.