TRANSMUSEQ RECORDS 

                              What they said.....             

New Music America
        " Melodic sections merged with drones, and while the improvisations rarely used conventional musical techniques, there was something well intentioned about them.  The pieces seemed like meditations on a nice day, and if the rest of the world at large didn't get the performance --there were a few catcalls---it was the world's loss, not the performers.."    -Peter Watrous  New York Times, 1989


                                                                                       

Musique Actuelle   Another pair, Alabama's LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams, sought a middle ground. Smith's viola stroked grand gestures and hoedown tactics behind Williams' sometimes surrealistic guitar escapades. Theirs is the Nip & Tuck School of Improvisation--at its wildest an orgiastic yelp, at it's most intimate like the inside of a pumpkin growing.  Their good-natured, folksy humor suckered the audience into a comfortable  acceptance of an unconventional sonic spectrum. -  Art Lange,  Down Beat , 1990

 

 

 

 

 

                          

                                                                                                         

        Williams specialty is what he calls "object guitar". To obtain all manner of other worldly, non-guitar noises, he plays with various odd found objects -- everything from workshop tape measures to bullet casings to egg beaters have been rubbed against William's strings. "Actually, it's a combination of stuff that I appropriate for its sound making potential and fetish objects that I notice or like"        Pulse! - New Music America 89

In his music, [Davey Williams] skillfully played authentic soul music, and Delta blues slide guitar riffs occupy an equal position with sound explorations beyond any category.. Jim Staley  - Roulette, NYC 2006
 

                                                                                                      


                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                       

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the relatively unadorned sound of pedal steel and amplifier, Susan Alcorn brings forth music that is as full of emotional honesty as it is of melodic and harmonic exploration and surprise. She possesses a virtuosic technique that is always at the service of the musical moment and its possibilities for expression and communication.

- Kevin Macneil Brown
Dusted Magazine

 

 Stage charisma, and an imaginative ear for the possibilities of timber, make Smith an appealing presence. In a solo set,
 she combined sawing on the violin's open strings with a set of frenzied wails on the remaining string, over which she sang
 an eerie cantalina. The effect was an impressive complexity of texture, like some deranged nun chanting next to a devilish
 fiddler."                                             - Philip Kennicott,  Classical Music Critic St. Louis POST DISPATCH

 

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 Floating Bridges, 2008  (cd) radiates with high energy interplay from the first notes and reveals a musical dynamism of fluid invention and sympathetic creation from the String Trek duo of violist LaDonna Smith and guitarist Misha Feigin.

Recorded in June, 2007 at the “Meeting of Improvisers” in Krakow, Poland, the set opens with the nineteen-minute “Krakow Concerto.” After the initial shock but superficial comparison to the duo of Smith and guitarist Davey Williams heard live during the 1970s-80s, String Trek comes crisply into
focus with its own characteristic sound and approach. This well recorded live performance captures the duo at a high point of artistic collaboration. 
                                -Thomas Gaudynski,  ALL ABOUT JAZZ    2008
                             http://allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=29192

LaDonna Smith
'EYE OF THE STORM'

 In Yokel Yen, she collaborates with poet Misha Feigin creating a strange masterpiece.
                                                                                                  - http://mutant-sounds blogspot.com

There is always a fresh and child-like vibe at the center of everything that LaDonna does and with Misha, she has met another kindred spirit and sympathetic musician. On the first piece, "Terrestrial Passage", both players explore the outer regions of acoustic free improv in their own idiosyncratic way, delicately blending their notes into an enchanting tapestry. LaDonna has a distinctive way of bending notes that gives her playing an oft-kilter feel. All acoustic, well recorded and balanced just right. Both of these gifted improvisers make a fine match. The cover picture of the owl and the dragonfly, as well as LaDonna's informative liner notes make this disc even more special.
                                                                              - Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music, NYC 

The difference between improvisation I want to listen to and that which I don't, probably comes down to something like personality. Every note of LaDonna Smith's music has something of this quality, as well as a physical directness and a happy foolishness which says, "yes, I know this is silly, but…"

Her solo voice, viola and violin CD scrapes and howls, whistles and whinnys, often making strange allusions to a variety of genres but mainly alluding to nothing much at all. There is a convincing seriousness of purpose behind her highly accomplished stream-of-consciousness playing, most fully revealed in the searching title track.

Richard Scott, WIRE

“Michael Evans is an amazing player of clattering junk percussion, drum kit, and his own special brand of electronics. Evans recalls the young Peter Sellers if he were attempting to make terrible fun of Spike Jones and a cab driver and a giant cockroach all at once.
He’s famous; he was in God Is My Co Pilot and is deeply connected with the WFMU vibe. He is also capable of otherworldly… restraint.”
  - John Berndt (Baltimore improvising musician and director of Baltimore’s yearly High Zero Festival)


    
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LaDonna Smith has been doing improv for almost 30 years. A virtuoso violinist, teacher, and co-founder of The Improvisor ("the international journal of free improvisation"), she is the image of feminine empowerment, the female criminal in pursuit of the ecstatic, potent, subversive and transcendent. LaDonna has done about as much as any of the improvising pioneers Stateside to raise the bar, to obliterate expectations/preconceptions and, in the end, form new vocabularies in music. Never mind that she did this in a scene dominated by men or that she did it from Tuscaloosa and eventually Birmingham, AL., solo and along side her performing partner Davey Williams. The freakin' odds were stacked not against her, but on top of her. But anyone who has had the singular pleasure of being in her presence will attest to the fact that if anyone might prevail against said odds, it'd be her. She's incredibly pleasant. She always seems to be aware of everything going on around her. But at the same time, sitting across the table from her can imbue you with a sense of power and belonging rarely felt. And even though I have my suspicions she realizes this she never holds it over your head. She just drops the sonic block on you while she plays. Her eye is your storm. - Kelly Burnette, Perfect Sound Forever
 www.furious.com/perfect/ladonnasmith.html 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      WATERS ASHORE (CD)   2007
LaDonna Smith, Dave Liebman, Misha Feigin, Jason Foureman

   "...thinking back on it, the collaboration was like meeting in a dark alley in the evening and doing a dance, only it was daylight,  it was an opening,  it was a ride.  That's why I love improvising.    -LaDonna Smith
  
    
       

 

Ah!-  prime hooten-nanny of improvised, new fangled and hand-crafted       music to boot!   -Shaking Ray Levi Society

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other Releases of TQ artists:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Davey Williams  is one of America's improvisational treasures. A multi-dimensional guitarist of wild invention, 
                                                                                                                                   - ecstatic peace !
 http://www.ecstaticpeace.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_music_info&products_id=30

 

                   

 

         feigin.jpg
Misha Feigin is a key example of an artistic career paralleling the transformation of Russian culture from Communist restrictions to Capitalist freedom, and alongside so many other artists documented on Leo Records, he's a pioneer of improvised music in Russia...rarely using extended techniques, but freely accepting harsher sounds as part of their instrument's full timbral spectrum, Hultgren and Smith revel in the warmth and depth of bowed strings, and that's at least half the explanation for the copious rewards I've found in this album; I really just have an endless appetite for the nuances of cello, viola, and violin in pretty much any aesthetic context, but especially in a context like this where the nuances are brought well into the foreground. Of course, delicious timbres alone don't tell the whole story; it's the split-second sensitivity and creativity of master improvisors like these three that complete the timeless package.  ~Michael Anton Parker

 

LaDonna Smith has been doing improv for almost 30 years. A virtuoso violinist, teacher, and co-founder of The Improvisor ("the international journal of free improvisation"), she is the image of feminine empowerment, the female criminal in pursuit of the ecstatic, potent, subversive and transcendent. LaDonna has done about as much as any of the improvising pioneers Stateside to raise the bar, to obliterate expectations/preconceptions and, in the end, form new vocabularies in music. Never mind that she did this in a scene dominated by men or that she did it from Tuscaloosa and eventually Birmingham, AL., solo and along side her performing partner Davey Williams. The freakin' odds were stacked not against her, but on top of her. But anyone who has had the singular pleasure of being in her presence will attest to the fact that if anyone might prevail against said odds, it'd be her. She's incredibly pleasant. She always seems to be aware of everything going on around her. But at the same time, sitting across the table from her can imbue you with a sense of power and belonging rarely felt. And even though I have my suspicions she realizes this she never holds it over your head. She just drops the sonic block on you while she plays. Her eye is your storm. - Kelly Burnette, Perfect Sound Forever
 www.furious.com/perfect/ladonnasmith.html