You Are #6

Don Byron | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 23, 2001)
• Original Release Date: 2001
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Blue Note Records
• ASIN: B00005Q66K
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #373,400 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting., December 13, 2001

By 

N. Dorward "obsessive reviewer" (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Are #6 (Audio CD)

This album attempts a synthesis of jazz, Latin & (on "Shake 'Em Up") Caribbean musics. The result is an hour of intelligent, interesting music that never really adds up to much more. Byron's clarinet playing is mostly pretty restrained, & his partner, the trumpeter James Zollar, is sometimes downright tepid; it's genuinely bizarre to have an album concentrating on Latin jazz which is (a) lacking in fire & high-note showmanship; (b) oddly introverted & even sombre in hue. It could really have used a musician as sunny & as distinctive as Bill Frisell, Byron's regular cohort: the band is perfectly fine but lacking much sparkle. The subtitle "More Music for Six Musicians" is in some ways misleading--there are a whopping 14 guest musicians on here, bringing it up to an even 20 players in various combinations. Yet the actual texture of the album is virtually uniform, to the point that one hardly notices the added reinforcements.

Worth a listen, but this is yet another Don Byron album that is "interesting", in the weak sense of the word: more of a concept than a fully satisfying musical experience. Get _Romance with the Unseen_ if you want a better sample of recent Byron.

[One sidenote: Byron's packaging is getting ever more pretentious. This album has bizarrely elaborate artwork that has to be seen to be believed; it also has the--consciously?--absurd statement in the linernotes: "DON BYRON IS A MEMBER OF: NATIONAL WRITERS UNION; SCREEN ACTORS GUILD; BLACK ROCK COALITION; MENSA". Gimme a break.]

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Much Semi-Music, July 6, 2009

By 

Karl W. Nehring (Ostrander, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Are #6 (Audio CD)

The subtitle for this recording is, "More Music for Six Musicians," and those musicians are Byron on clarinet and bass clarinet, James Zolnar on trumpet and flugelhorn, Edsel Gomez on piano, Leo Traversa on bass and vocals, Milton Cardona on congas, percussion, and vocals, and Ben Wittman on drums and percussion. A number of guest artists are also included in the credits, both instrumentalists and vocalists. Most of the cuts are composed by Byron, with Henry Mancini's "Theme from Hatari" and one other "traditional" cut being thrown in for good measure.

The fold-out cover insert is pretty unhelpful. I guess it's just too post-modern for a left-behind old guy for me. And although there is some interesting playing in many of the cuts, the musical mix is also a bit too post-modern for me. It just seems to self-consciously hip to be taken too seriously, or to be too entertaining. The music and the recording are too good for this CD to be considered a failure, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts--post-modernism in a nutshell.

But still, these guys can play, and there are passages in this recording that are dynamite. Just listen to the cut "A Whisper in My Ear," for example, which just burns, for example. But then they come back with "Dub-Ya," a little piece of what I guess is supposed to be a political statement. Whatever.

There is some really exciting music on this CD, but also a good amount of half-baked semi-music. All in all, You Are #6 is a frustrating release. Very post-modern, I guess.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Album of the year 2001!, December 29, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: You Are #6 (Audio CD)

Let me second the proclamation of a previous reader's review.

This is a jazz recording of great fun, from the delightful spirit in the grooves of Latin, M-Base, and Calypso, to the very intelligent writing that all fits together in an exciting way, with Byron's clarinet playing never sounding so good.