OK, strap yourselves in, prepare for some fodder that requires a stronger stomach than most and let's take a walk down San Deigo way courtesy of two well known oddballs. Take a bow Thomas J and Richard Dunlap, prime movers and shakers of TMFSD and dadala respectively. Yeah, NOW you feel those gossebumps right? Although his sax playing is central to this track it is much more Richard Dunlap in feel. It is, as the label states, Jazz Fusion although what its fused with is best left to conjecture. I've said it once and I'll say it again, I LIKE Thomas when he's on his horn - if you know what I mean. On Do You Know The Way To San Diego, this attribute is given full rein and I find it very enjoyable indeed.

Do stop feeling if I am feverish, will you? I'm trying to be serious... (Riiiiggghhhhtttt....)

I know that I don't normally get all gushy about the more difficult stuff but this IS good enough to please even nitpickers like me. It helps enormously that I like Richard Dunlap's whole approach to the 'noise is useful' school of random chord theory, or at least what SOUND like random chords. The musical accompaniment is composed of spheres, sweeps and flourishes of sound - mostly electronic although I think I can hear a guitar sawing away in there too. Obviously then, it would be totally redundant to wonder what happened to the kick drum because there ain't a beat in sight, unless you are looking at it from a Chinese scale angle (or even Double Dutch come to that...) In other words, whatever randomness you perceive as happening in this track is there for a purpose - and that to me makes all the difference. The whole provides the very best base for the overridding sax and it's tonal oddities.

Dionne Warwick, this is not, OK?

Now maybe I'm gonna have some bearded saxophonist stalking me (well, they ARE all beardy's aren't they? ;P ) but I think what Thomas does with a sax is soooo him. Where he scores most with me isn't so much what he plays, as the sound he makes playing it. There's a very satisfying feel to those low end sax notes and Thomas brings his lazy bastard approach to the job and provides a definite counterpoint to a relatively laid back arrangement, providing the slow as death feel this whole track is soaked with. It's that very laziness that won me over initially, along with the aforementioned sax tones. The only way to go slower than this in music is to be dead. Sooooo, it'll be one of those tracks you should probably reserve for those quieter, more reflective moments that undoubtedly pepper your day, and make sure you have plenty of mind refreshment to hand. If you give it that careful treatment, you may well end up liking this as much as I do. Not because it does anything that clever musically; it just relaxes me and brings a little peace along the way.

Different, yes, but still Highly Recommended.

1. God, I love the sax...wish I could play it. And you play it incredibly well, certainly one of the very high points of listening to your song (over and over).

2. Mood/Atmosphere - God, I love the dissonance. This track is superb, captures a type of mood I think is one of the hardest to get right.

Right off, I added M.F.S.D. to mySC. Thanks for the download link.
Personally, this is one of the most interesting tracks I've heard in the genre in a while!

I'm not really reviewing at this point, just giving props.. Great job! Respect!

One of the biggest surprises for this reviewer over the past year has been the metamorphasis of the artist known as Station For Imitation into a multi-hued being with many names (The Men... being one of them). Of even greater surprise value has been the emergence of SFI's leading light Thomas J as a competent, risk-taking horn blower. Although I don't really have a lot of time for so called 'free jazz', TMFSD impressed the beejeebers out of me with the dead on feel that Midnight Stroll carried like a badge of pride. As well they should because this is an excellently produced, well played voyage to the outer limits of jazz - and it sounds great!

Not bad for starters, now gimmie some meat....

One Smokey Night At The Jazbah by title alone gives the game away. All TMFSD tracks are collabs; Thomas supplies sax lines, other artists supply everything else. In this case, the baton falls to The Spazmatics, a name I have been keeping my eye on for a while. Although I didn't think One Smokey Night has anything like the commanding prescence Midnight Stroll has, it's still a peice that sounds and feels authentic and shows that Thomas should have been showing us this side of his music far, far sooner. He is a saxophonist after my own heart, his tone and delivery are excellent, seeming to fit any musical jacket it's shoved into. Almost makes me want to have a go too...

For my money though, as good as Jazbah is, it's a little thin in ideas and structure. Essentially, it appears to be one section of music, repeated once with Thomas's sax lines dominating the proceedings - exactly to be expected really. After all, his playing does kinda demand centre stage. Nonetheless, I also expect the underlying arrangement to be as nuanced as the playing and in this case it wasn't IMHO. It isn't that it's a bad rhythm track it isn't. It's a kind of off beat walking blues riff that does suit the style of sax playing but doesn't really venture any further than that. The authenic feel is helped enormously by the use of spoken word samples that surely must have come from the Great Voices Of Jazz sample set Very Happy At the end of the day, however, as much as I liked individual parts of this track, it didn't - to me - make much of a coherent whole as I thought it could have done. Still, very nice peice of down in the cellar type jazz if you are in the mood for some of that.

I can sum up this review in one word- wow! But I won't, ha ha! I was sitting here thinking I really shouldn't critique music when I'm tired because I don't get the full effect of it, which is a good thing in this case! I went to sleep, hung myself, feared for my life, had a major coronary, went insane (and back, thank you for that), danced a jig, fell in love in Paris, and lost everyone I ever loved in five minutes and thirteen seconds and boy, am I exhausted! I'm not a huge fan of jazz but I enjoy some from time to time and this song I would most definitely recommend to anyone into that sorta thing. I wish I could send it to hospitals to people with terminal illnesses, to both bring back memories of what life contains and to let people live through your music. Do you remember how Snoopy dances and cries intermittantly throughout Schroeder's piano playing? That's how I felt, being pulled from one end of the spectrum of emotion to the other and then back again. If that's what you were going for, you met and exceeded your goal!! Great job, and thanks for submitting it to me for review!

A new name but one that shelters an old friend, one Thomas J (better known to us Soundclicker's as the experimental outfit Station For Imitation. The Men From San Deigo (TMFSD) is essentially a collaborative vehicle for Thomas and his sax - which comes as a real surprise to me because I always thought he was an electronica artist, or at least that comprises of the bulf of Station For Imitation's releases. Apparently though Thomas has been playing sax since he was nine, but even so this is a completely new experience for me.

The list of his fellow collaborators reads like Soundclick's Experimental Top Ten. get this: drt, The Spazmatics, Guanoman, Billy Shaw, Pilesar, The Big Ship and loads more. As SFI, Thomas has to be one of the most prolific artists on here and it looks like TMFSD are going to do the same because I noticed there are already 19 tracks on the site and AFAIK this is a new project. Midnight Stroll is a collab between Thomas, Congo In Oakland and Billy Shaw and is - terrifyingly - billed as free jazz.

Now before ya all get your panties in a bunch, let's all calm down. Free Jazz is not, as some would have it, cacaphonic rubbish - or to use a technical term 'shit'. In fact, some of the most awesome and challenging of music comes out of this genre and has informed a great deal of todays music - especially of the more experimental kind. Names like Miles Davies, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and the mighty John Coltrane reverberate to this day. It's only fair to say that this is most definitely a niche market, especially on Soundclick and that is truly a shame. If you should check out Midnight Stroll, I can assure you this track reeks with authenticity; from the horn sounds to the arrangement, this could have come from the Free Jazz heyday. A bit more Miles Davies than Sun Ra, which IMHO is something to thankful for, and a track I have no hesitation in recommending most highly...

And I don't even like this stuff.....

well the sax is definately the highlight here, it works very well with the simple but effective guitar, to create quite a dark piece, i really liked it, no criticism here. i would have personally shortened the track, but it was great! created quite a dark atmosphere! good stuff!

Or, the resumption of the 'is it noise or art' conversation we were having the last time I reviewed a Pilesar track. These things REALLY should carry a government health warning.... Anyway, where I was? Ahh....madness... Now you know, and I know, that Pilesar as an artist can definitely be termed 'out there' in all respects and he'd take that as encouragement, but there is a fine line between something 'experimental' and valid and noise for the sake of it. I can't always be relied upon to spot the difference but somehow with Pilesar I have always been able to. This man - as mad as it sounds - knows exactly what he is about and our lives are made better (notice I didn't say quieter) by that.

OK, so we've established that I like Pilesar a bit. Although I'm not so sure 'like' is the operative word. Pilesar's material is a little too edgy and uncompromising to be truly likeable - especially in the veritable feast of fools that makes up the track called Sans Nothing Blue. A track that, despite it's experimental tag, rightly belongs firmly in the Modern Jazz section. It isn't an easy listen mind, I had amassed several plays before it finally struck me and it's that jazzy edge that kept me from that point on.

All very Sun Ra if ya know what I mean.

Almost as interesting as the musical content of the track is the lineup that made it. You may think I was just kidding about with the 'feast of fools' comment but maybe this will make it clearer. The track is essentially made up of two tracks: one from taiga blues and one from Project Nothing, then added to by The Men From San Deigo (aka our own Thomas J aka Station For Imitation). Pilesar provided the overview and tweaked the tits right off the mix and what you have is one of the strangest Pilesar tracks yet but one that - darn it - works even though you know damn well it shouldn't. Ever. And yet it still lives..... The last thing these guys are is fools... They may not SOUND like anybody else but that's surely the point?

Excellently weird.

Wow,...well I think this is a sax? or is it a sample of one put into a keyboard or something?
It has a really cool sound to it, like a cross between an electric guitar and a pissed off bee slamming into a window over and over
nice

Okay, cool little sax riff, I like how it starts out solo, then the instruments slowly build up around it, the bassline is good, I'm totally digging on the sax improvisation, reminds me of something by early King Crimson, very jazzy. The little drum breaks where the echo starts up and the drummer goes insane, those are tight. Not that bad.