A Brilliant Collaboration

Review of Into The Fire

Paul Grabowsky's high-hitting Art Orchestra – exploring the zone between written and improvised music, and hence stacked with stellar jazz musicians – has collaborated brilliantly with one of southern India's finest drumming ensembles. The results are new, invigorating and exciting music. A remarkable thing is that instead of compromising both cultural traditions at play here, this music seems to extend them both. Elements such as call and response and elegant treatments of rhythmic pulse speak to common characteristics in the course of producing something original. While exploring Karnatic music variously from the point of view of melody or rhythm, at times there's an almost swing band flavour to the flaring horns replying to the Indian instruments; elsewhere, as Grabowsky notes, the band itself is like a huge drum. This is absolutely beautiful, both in creative reach and actual recorded substance.

- Australian Financial Review (Shane Nichols), June 2000

Reviews of Into The Fire

• Hypnotic Rhythms
• Ideas Never Become Tangled
• West Meets the Subcontinent
• The Exception to the Rule
• A Brilliant Collaboration
• Unique and Beautiful
• For Sophisticated Listeners
• All That Jazz
• New Music From An Older Tradition
• Out of This World Music
• A Triumphal Hurrah
• Melody is the Mother; Rhythm is the Father
• When East Meets West!
• Into The Fire: Synthesising East With West
• Experiment that worked
• Oceanic Wave of Fused Rhythms
• Music Connecting People
• Where Genres Meet
• Moved by Rhythm Patterns
• Into the Fire - An Introduction and Brief History
• A Quick Word From Paul Re. Into the Fire