Time Control, or Controlled by Time (Live)

Hiromi’s Sonicbloom: Hiromi Uehara (piano, synthesizer), David Fiuczynski (electric guitar), Tony Grey (electric bass) and Martin Valihora (drums) playing in Japan (2007). From the album Time Control (2007).

Although born in Newark (New Jersey), David Fiuczynski moved with his family to Germany when he was eight years old, but returned to the United States at nineteen and studied at Hampshire College and the prestigious New England Conservatory in Boston, where he graduated in 1989. In 2006 returned to study the microtonal music of Chinese, Hindu and Turkish traditions, in addition to receiving microtonality courses from saxophonist and composer Joe Maneri, obtaining in 2008 the master’s certificate. Microtonal music consists in the use of smaller sound intervals than a semitone or, in other words, the notes that are hidden between the keys of a piano. Since then Fiuczynski has sought the integration of microtonal techniques and western rhythms.

Also in 1989 he founded the jazz-rock group Screaming Headless Torsos with a line-up that later changed completely. In 1990 he appeared in the album The London Concert by jazz pianist, arranger, composer and great theorist of jazz harmony compared to that of classical music George Russell, which includes concerts with his Living Time Orchestra recorded at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. That same year Fiuczynski participated in Blu Blu Blu (1991) with the big band of free jazz pianist Muhal Richard Abrams to record eight of his compositions.

In 1992 he took part in Serious Hang by trumpeter Jack Walrath’s funk/soul jazz group the Masters Of Suspense with Don Pullen on organ; both worked with the mythical double bassist Charles Mingus before his death in 1979. After that, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson brought Fiuczynski with guitarist Jef Lee Johnson and electric bassist Dominique Richards to release the free funk album Raven Roc. In it, the two guitarists create a magical atmosphere while Jackson plays the drums with the same energy as free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, with whom he had contributed before, hits his piano. Free funk is a mixture of avant-garde and funk that appeared during the 1970s and whose main representatives were alto saxophonist and father of free jazz Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s Spectacle, Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, tenor saxophonist Greg Osby and guitarist James Blood Ulmer.