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Neon Egypt

  • Home
  • The Shendai Drums
  • Intuitive Music
  • Albums / Tracks
  • Contact Us
  • More...
    • History - Tabula Rasa
    • About Harrison
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    • Feedback from Friends
Press and reviews of Neon Egypt's remarkable World Jazz and World Fusion music.

Press And Reviews

TALES OF KINGS  Release Review 

"The songs of Tales of Kings by Neon Egypt are first-take improvisations. Yet out of the potential for chaos indigenous to such spontaneity, Harrison Goldberg on soprano, tenor, and alto sax, and Steven Miller on his resonant, one-of-a-kind Shendai Ceremonial Drums travel a purposeful, though curvilinear journey. The languid flight of a singular bird, an ibis perhaps, coursing desert nights from Alexandria to Luxor, then on to Khartoum and Kampala. The music is the tone poem migration of sensibilities, as if the Nile could flow through Chicago.  

"The album's whole personifies a timeless river tumbling over ancient stones, or the early a.m. negotiations of a big city's streets, as if mood indigo resided in civilization's crucible. It possesses azure meditations, scarlet musings, golden speculations, each aspiring to discovery in a world of slate gray-green melancholy. It wears textures velvet to worn corduroy. It exudes an allure of rhythm that manifests the seduction of danger.  

"Goldberg and Miller handle their instruments in a way that accesses that subconscious place where only competent genius goes. Though there is a sense of lament on the wilderness they've chosen to traverse, never are they lost, struggling to find a way back to or out of any improvisation. There are in Harrison's work rare whiffs of Paul Desmond and Pharoah Sanders (Nejd) or Joao Gilberto (Triamorous), but never more than a speculated moment. He never massages any riff for that riff's sake. Miller's drumming elicits an African-ness, but never succumbs to overt ethnic references. The stage is theirs equally, as in Night of the Lotus, where Harrison's harmonic dissonance cruises inside and at half the pace of Miller's kinetic beat. It is being within non-being: a place where one senses, even at the end, that the music never stopped." 

-- Sandy Thompson, Director of Development, Plains Art Museum

Quotes from Other Reviews:

"Listening to Tales Of Kings I am once again floating down the Nile, the ancient past flowing past.  A farmer dips water into a jar tied to a pole, phrases of Koran are sung from a tower, boys slap mud into frames to dry as bricks.  Sax answers drum, bounces from the bent overtones, builds reedy structures on the embankments of sound.  Phrases are clipped then looping into lyrical flights.  Echoes of Miles Davis in Spain.  At times a deeper drum voice casts a shadow of disaster to come, rising flood, drying drought.  But the cry of the sax is reborn, it rises like the call of the human spirit, insisting, like the river, on the ongoing flow of life.  This becomes, with the sinking of the sun, a bit of blues.  Your music, like the sphinx, poses riddles while offering profound answers.  Play on."

-- Professor George Price, UC San Francisco

"One of the best contemporary jazz duos on the web.  Extraordinary drumming.  Exotic melodies.  Very nice stuff!"  

-- John Morgan Newborn, Musician & Recordist "Malachi"

 

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You might also enjoy visiting Harrison's personal web site at:  www.HarrisonGoldbergArts.com

Also see:  Harrison's profile at All About Jazz

Listening note:  The Shendai Drums produce large amounts of low frequency (bass) energy. If the drums sound too quiet, or distorted, try using headphones, or switch to a listening system with larger speakers.

NeonEgypt.com  Copyright 2020, Neon Egypt and Phenomaly Arts

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    1. 1
      UNEARTHED - Return To The Golden Land 5:06
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    2. 2
      Spirits and Kings 3:53
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    3. 3
      Cartouche Du Jazz 2:39
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      View From A Mountain Temple 5:55
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      Waters Of Nubia 4:10
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      Enter The Princes 4:15
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      Luxor After Dark 5:00
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      Bedouin Down 2:44
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      Nearly Too Far 4:21
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      Flows The Sacred River 4:54
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      Under A Scimitar Moon 3:13
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      Towards The Sun 7:50
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