Nicolas Simion

Nicolas Simion is a reputed Romanian sax/reeds player and composer living in Germany. He has an extensive discography consisting of collaborations with both international and Romanian musicians, most under his lead. His music is paradigmatic European ethnic jazz, which means a mix of post-bop, post-fusion, third stream, traditional folk and a touch of avantgarde (take all this enumeration with a grain of salt ).

I can't find studio samples on YouTube, but the live recordings are good and relevant:



















http://musicbrainz.org/artist/1bf27c06-110d-4a2d-8eae-4ca22d8f3464.html

http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/nicolas_simion

Hmm, that's strange, the search function must be playing tricks on me again.

I see you reviewed Transylvanian Jazz, the review looks positive but the rating is only 2.5 stars...

I don't know any rating system in which a rating bellow *** out of ***** doesn't mean at least "mediocre", sometimes even "bad".

For me it's

**bad
**1/2 mediocre
*** good
***1/2 very good
**** excellent
****1/2 exceptional
***** masterpiece.

For me greatness starts from "excellent" so I too have rated Transylvanian Jazz bellow "great".

I stronly dislike the line of thinking "it's not very prog / jazz, so I'll subtract a star for this site", which is why I reacted in this offtopic direction, sorry.

OK

Well if you listen to the "Village is getting drunk" piece (the second sample from the OP), which is from Transylvanian Jazz, you'll see there's a lot of jazz creativity and inspiraration , even genius IMO. But I agree the studio version is not that great. But it's still the same music, and that's strange. Maybe if I say that the music is great but the studio version doesn't make it justice, it just doesn't "live" like it should, then we agree.

RE the album rating, I'll just have to get used to "not bad" being **1/2 at you, that's what shocked me. And it's good to hear you don' rate the jazziness, I always hated that.