Toma Gouband/ Stéphane Thidet / Roman Bestion / Christophe Havard / Matt Wright /Juan Parra - Un Peu Plus Loin (Astropi, 2020/24)

Mysteries of Materiality and Transformation

By Stuart Broomer

I know of no musician who more strongly invokes the given material world – “nature” -- than the percussionist Toma Gouband and have appreciated his work since Courant des Vents (“Wind Current”) his first solo recording (released on psi in 2012 and reissued in April 2025 on Bandcamp. In a sense, he might be considered the master drummer of the natural world, sometimes using a horizontal bass drum as a resonator for lithophones (that is, rocks used as percussion instruments), sometimes striking stones together, or, alternatively, playing a conventional drum kit with tree branches (that begin with their leaves intact) as sticks. Watching Gouband play a solo in the latter manner on the stage of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s outdoor amphitheatre with Evan Parker and Matt Wright’s Trance Maps at the 2023 edition of Jazz em Agosto, surrounded by trees and coloured lights, the leaves and twigs disintegrating into their own ascendant, multi-colored dust clouds, was among the most profound visual representations of music that I have ever witnessed.

As with Courant des Vents, Un Peu Plus Loin is a re-issue, first issued on CD in 2020, it coincided with the height of the Covid-19 outbreak and shutdown and received little attention. It was issued on Bandcamp in December 2024. The mystery of the natural world is at the root of Un Peu Plus Loin (“A Little Further”), which began as the middle segment of a three-part installation, Desert, by conceptual artist/sculptor Stéphane Thidet, set in the ancient Cistertian Maubuisson Abbey, founded in 1236 by Blanche of Castile, at thetime Queen of France. “The segment invokes the mysterious moving rocks of “Racetrack Playa, a dried-up lake in California’s Death Valley. While the stones move (perhaps the result of the slow processes of freezing and thawing), leaving tracks (an image recreated in the rocks and trails in clay of Thidet’s sculpture), they have never been seen to move.”

After the performance, struck by the experience and the Abbey’s special resonance, Gouband writes “I returned alone to improvise in the suspended and mysterious presence of the rocks and their traces. Eleven minutes were extracted and then sent to four inventive electroacoustic musicians, each of whom created a variation from this base. What emerges is an intimate connection with the spirit of the work, an interstellar conversation, a setting in motion.” (The preceding two paragraphs contain material translated and/or paraphrased from Gouband’s notes on the Bandcamp page). The resultant pieces are named by fragments of that phrase Un Peu Plus Loin .

Un is Gouband’s original 11-minute improvisation. Its combination of spaces and echoes and brief rolls and elisions around a drum surface and metal percussion create an extraordinary atmosphere in keeping with the underlying phenomenon being represented here—that is the rolling rocks. As it develops that sense of rolling spheres, like ball bearings on the head of a drum, the work becomes increasing mobile, increasingly evocative. If there are drum solos like this inspired by mysterious spheres, then rolling rocks become a privileged phenomenon, never to be observed, yet known, occurring in an interval of human absence. It is a percussion improvisation of unimaginable subtlety, a percussion solo of the imagination, a kind of natural phenomenon in which an artist approaches a profound mystery.

Gouband’s solo is then followed by four electronic compositions exploring the materials of “Un”, each is transformative, a dream of a reverie, a reverie on a dream.

In “Peu’ by Roman Bestion, Gouband’s rolls are apt to move backwards, Reversed sounds grow in volume, metallic percussion multipies, somehow the desert grows aqueous, the burbling of scuba tanks grows louder, appear amid whispers of electronics and is then sustained, a bass underlay. An organ emerges, a deep bass drum, all the live sounds of Gouband’s kit embrace their phantom others.

In Plus, by Christophe Havard, drum strokes will retreat into the distance. The environment seems more electronic, also more distant, with imitations of glitches, skips and sudden interpolations of unaltered sounds. Extended tones suggest winds, ultimately the sound of subterranean echo chambers (reminiscent of the sounds of John Butcher’s tour of abandoned Scottish architecture ( Resonant Spaces [Confront 17]); the strangely gothic organ solo constructed under complex drumming, suggest the rolling stones occupy an epic, underground cavern/cathedral, sometimes growing louder among the stones’ special resonance…then drifting away, the stones growing quieter as if they are moving out of the frame of our hearing…

In Loin by Matthew Wright, there is further submersion, the echoing stones a background to sounds foregrounded yet ironically muffled, gradually expanded to feedback trilling, an increasingly complex chart of artificial distances and multiple competing clicks and whispers, with Hammond organ dribbles against elastic and metallic percussion instruments. All the sounds are shifting then: sudden upward glissandi, patchwork scratches and rubbery stretches.

The concluding piece, Juan Parra’s Desert, is the longest of these works (11:57) and the most strongly connected to the sounds of the original. At the beginning, preserved drum strokes background metallic scraping, some sounds echoing acoustically with the same degree of resonance as Gouband’s own, but here there are other sounds as well as those tangible forms of the original. It is as if a lost explorer has found a dusty sea and a soggy desert, all materiality open to sudden and substantial self-opposition, the wind growing stronger, the drone interchangeable, the metal strokes of the originating drums turned into a sustained unearthly force. The subterranean winds that move the stones, the undercurrents of earthly tides and tilts, are as subtle and forceful as a poet’s unsought dreams.

Perhaps there is another magnetism lost and found in the moving stones, here recovered in Gouband’s instruments, those materials lost and found in nature herein heard initially acoustically, are then reformed and reborn in the imaginative applications of technology. Embracing, expanding, extrapolating on a mystery, bridging spirit and materiality, this recording feels like what more music should be doing. 

Read More

Willi Keller's The Circle

The roaring free-jazz of Willi Keller's The Circle is a joy to behold. Here is the quartet's concert from Jazzwerkstatt Peitz 2024.

Hans-Peter Hiby - saxophone 
Rieko Okuda - piano 
Meinrad Kneer - bass 
Willi Kellers - drums

  

WILLI KELLER'S THE CIRCLE @ Jazzwerkstatt Peitz | 2024 LIVE FROM BERLIN is a series by @berta.berlin. 

Read More

Matthew Shipp - Cosmic Piano (Cantaloupe, 2025)

By Paul Acquaro 

What's in a label? Pianist Matthew Shipp specifically chose this one to release his latest solo work, Cosmic Piano. New York City's Cantaloupe is run by the Bang on a Can performing arts organization, which is known for modern classical (but really genre-fluid) festivals and performances. For Shipp, who is often categorized as a free-jazz pianist, this is a chance to present his music in a different context. When considering the meaning of a label, one wouldn't, for instance, expect to see Miley Cyrus releasing on AUM Fidelity, but if it happened, it would certainly turn some heads. Perhaps Shipp's music isn't quite represented by this example, but once you are aware of it, it is hard not to hear this music in a new context. 

 

Overall, while entirely improvised, the music captured on Cosmic Piano feels structured around a certain slowness. This does not mean that the tempo is slow, but rather somehow time feels partially suspended, unhooked from the normal ticking of the clock. The opening track, 'The Cosmic Piano,' starts the recording with a gently throbbing pulse and rich blocky chords. Short passages with contrasting tempos are interjected, but they serve as a transition between thoughtfully placed rich chord tones. The music unfolds with what could be mistaken for composed modern classical music. Then, the track 'Cosmic Junk Jazz DNA' starts by exposing the basic sequences of jazz piano - intervals that convey the sound of jazz are woven between anchoring events, deep notes from the far left side of the keyboard slam up against sharply phrased, tension filled chords from the mid-field, fragmentary melodies help carry the ideas forward.

 

'Orbit Light' is a burst of energy. Big, powerful chords are delivered with certainty, the mood is dramatic as the melodic and harmonic ideas act in unison. Classical leaning passages, complete dissonance and stark, naked phrases flow together, again with a slow and purposeful deportment. In 'Piano's DNA Upgrade,' one can hear the stem cells being injected, growing new healthy piano music cells. The approach is lighter, but there is still an oozing slowness below, connecting the many components, feeding the newly forming cells, growing with organic intent. A true slow burner is 'Suburban Outerspace,' in which spacious chords at the outset expand with lush tones and questioning melodic lines, pensive and avoiding expected resolutions.

 

Each track on Cosmic Piano stands apart, each one has an identify, but they are also very much of a piece. There is consistency and intent in this improvised music, it sounds like it was always meant to have been played this way, except that it has not, rather this is fully improvised music, composed by the cosmos. Cosmic Piano sits alongside contemporary classical music just as well as it does avant-garde jazz, it is definitive musical statement.

Read More

Matthew Shipp - Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia, 2025)

By Lee Rice Epstein

There may be nothing Matthew Shipp writes about in Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings that he hasn’t expressed or somehow meditated upon through his music. Yet, reading his words are clarifying and rejuvenating in exactly the complementary way you’d want a set of essays to lift up, not exactly unveiling, the author’s music. If this seems abstruse, in practice it is, like Shipp’s music when you spend real time with it, the opposite.

Right now, I’m listening to Shipp’s circa 2000 String Trio album, Expansion, Power, Release, with William Parker and Mat Maneri.Where Parker was born in 1952 (just after David S. Ware, born 1949), Maneri was born in late 1969, the cusp of a new decade. Shipp (and, for what it’s worth, his perennial collaborator Ivo Perelman) were born just between the two in 1960 (and 1961, respectively). Situating Shipp in time-space, for me at least, helps anchor how he emerged, a young man moving to New York City in the 1980s, and how he has been shaped by and continues to shape the practice of playing jazz piano. But then, what’s in a year, or an age, of any human’s lived experience? Shipp writes about himself being a spiritual being, channeling and expressing something deep and universal. This is something one gets from opening up to the music he’s recorded: the probing of time, his expert explorations of sound signifying space, physical manifested as aural and sonic structures. In the essays that fill Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings, he reflects on boxing, on New York City, on poetry, and David S. Ware and Sun Ra and, yes of course, the piano.

The opening essay, something of a centerpiece despite its placement up front, titled “Black Mystery School Pianists” lays out a lineage of piano players that somewhat echoes one I myself explored wading into last year’s stream of piano trio recordings, which for me started with Shipp’s trio and ended with variations on the concept. It’s worth naming the players here, Ran Blake, Andrew Hill, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Herbie Nichols, Sun Ra, Horace Tapscott, Cecil Taylor, Mal Waldron, Randy Weston, and sometimes Dave Burrell—neither Thelonious Monk nor Duke Ellington, directly, but they influence and cast a long shadow over the Black Mystery School. Once the thesis is laid out, echoes throughout the book. Sun Ra reappears later in a brief, moving tribute, and whether by name or not, Monk’s variations seem to inspire Shipp revisiting moments and themes, inviting recurrences in page after page should draw readers back time and again.

I’d highly recommend this book for two kinds of readers, without hesitation: first, fans of Shipp’s vast universe of recordings will find much of the same here, thoughtful rumination, sly humor, and numerous references to influences and mentors; the second kind of reader would be anyone, regardless of familiarity with Shipp specifically, who is interested in the history of jazz and its contemporary players.

Read More

Matthew Shipp - Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (Autonomedia, 2025)

By Gary Chapin

When I first read Shipp’s essay, “Black Mystery School Pianists,” two years after it was originally published (I saw a reference to it by someone in this parish), it simultaneously opened my mind AND brought things together in a way that made sense. I read the essay in the context of thinking about Mal Waldron, a fave of mine. In 1969 in the notes for his ECM album, Free at Last, Waldron wrote that the new album was his attempt to live in the world of Cecil Taylor (another fave)—a world of freedom. This sounds great, of course! But reading this in 1990 (when I first got Free at Last), I was baffled. I don’t know how much freedom Waldron thought he exhibited compared to how much freedom Cecil Taylor deployed—but the two, Waldron and Taylor, sounded nothing alike! How is it that they are grouped, by Waldron himself and by Shipp in this essay, as part of the same “project?”

Shipp’s words on this upended my assumptions and led me on a quest that has improved my quality of life ever since, including improving my appreciation of Waldron and Taylor. Imagine if Shipp had written a whole set of essays with comparable insights, joys, revelations, and quests!?!

Well, he has.

Nothing in this short book is as revelatory as that first essay, though so much is intriguing. Connecting improvisation to boxing is something I haven’t thought about since Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson album. His tributes to David S. Ware are moving and send you back to that gentleman’s music with a new compassion. A set of tour notes mixes philosophical observations with the practical, ground level movements of getting to spaces and playing for money. Many of the pieces are short — some seeming like excerpts from letters, almost — and there are four or five poems that beautifully and succinctly capture the spirit and rhythm of Shipp’s project. The final essay nearly matches up to the first and offers a General Theory of Improvisation that has you listening to old friends in new ways. He’s got a system or set of guiding principles in mind. It comes out in his music, but hearing it expressed in words is a new experience that adds to the whole.

Read More

Ches Smith - Clone Row (Otherly Love Records, 2025)

By Aloysius Ventham

Having now passed my fortieth year, I have started re-watching the films, re-listening to the music and re-reading the books I found interesting when I was a younger man. Much to my surprise, a lot of the media I enjoyed was actually very good! While a younger me might not have been able to articulate in any sophisticated way what was interesting about the media, as such, I like to imagine I was grasping onto something about which I had some sort of sense to enjoy, but no corresponding concepts with which to fully engage.

The most obvious, and embarrassing, example I can think of was when I was reprimanded in my secondary school history class: I was avoiding doing my work by reading, in full view of the teacher, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (this is about as violent as my rebellious streak ever got). My history teacher, a more intelligent and patient man than my frequent misbehaviour would suggest, stormed to the back of the classroom to see what I was reading – he burst out laughing when he saw the cover of the book and asked ‘do you have any idea what that’s about?’ – I said ‘yes, of course’ (I didn’t have even the remotest clue). The next day he turned up with a copy of On the Genealogy of Moralityand told me it was more accessible. I eventually went on to write a PhD thesis comparing Nietzschean models of agency (unfavourably) to Hegelian models of agency – so while it takes a long time for ideas to percolate fully from a page to my limited mind, percolate they eventually do.

The same is true for aesthetic judgments. When I was 17 I decided (for some reason I cannot remember) to try and get into jazz. I immediately fell in love with John Coltrane and Miles Davis. If you’d asked me why I enjoyed thismusic in particular, I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to give you an intelligent, or even coherent, response. Something about ‘the toots and the beats’ grabbed me, but I suspect his wouldn’t be a satisfying answer to the jazz community.

Perhaps the first time I hit my aesthetic maturity (or at least something resembling it) where I started learning, and being able to articulate why I liked the things I did came when I heard Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah’s Centennial Trilogy (Ropeadope Records, 2017). I found each track immediately accessible, it was like having my ears opened to a whole new range of information. The albums were satisfying on a technical level, and yet they were also clear . Eight years later and I still listen to these albums through in their entirety – they have neither staled nor spoiled, retaining their ability to excite and engage.

Perhaps the first time I’ve felt quite this passionately about an album was with Ches Smith’s masterpiece, Clone Row. I cannot work out, and at this point I am too afraid to ask, how to correctly pronounce the name of the album. On the one hand Clone Row would appear to be a pun based on Schoenberg’s twelve tone ‘tone row’ (living in Austria I cannot help but immediately love Schoenberg references). Thus, Clone Row would refer to a ‘line’ or ‘queue’ of clones. However, and perhaps this says more about me, when I first saw the album my brain immediately parsed this as Clone Row (row as in ‘a heated argument’), thus conjuring the image of a group of clones who aren’t getting along. Listening to the eponymous song, I’m inclined to think my initial parsing was correct - but perhaps this is the combative sci-fi nerd in me (you’ll know what I mean when you listen to the song)…anyway, I’m going to bravely call this album Clone Row (row as in argument) in conversations and I’ll look forward to the same smug social ostracism enjoyed by those who pronounce ‘gif’ ‘jif’.

Clone Row is used by Smith as a vehicle to display and showcase a talent at the height of its powers, demonstrating not only his own superlative musicianship (playing drums electronics, and ‘vibes’) but also his strengths as a composer and knower of the broader musical landscape to generate bop after bop, drawing on the extraordinary talents of Mary Halvorson - guitar (right channel), Liberty Ellman - guitar (left channel) and Nick Dunston, bass and electronics. Normally I don’t gravitate towards ‘guitar heavy’ jazz, but the performances here are all outstandingly creative, borderline otherworldly, definitely different to what I’d expect from a quartet with two guitarists (or three, depending on how you count). The performers sound energised, like they’re actually enjoying themselves, like they want you to check out this cool sound they’re making, almost as if in disbelief themselves. And perhaps they are in disbelief – Smith’s architectural edifice is astonishing to listen to – I can imagine performing it would have been mind-bending. One review (posted on Smith’s own website) describes the album thus:

So, this is a composer’s record most of all; a composer’s record performed by musicians who happen to be great improvisers.

And while I agree that this IS a composer’s record – I’m not sure I agree that it’s a composer’s record most of all– I think it is equally a record for musicians and listeners.

The opening bars of the first track (Ready Beat) sound like they’ve come straight from a Berlin night-club (non-pejorative), and just as everything is starting to feel a bit dance-y and electronic, some jarring, dial-up internet adjacent tones are thrown in alongside a meaty-sounding bass line. This first track is an excellent introduction to the album, so if you’re on the fence about investing time to listen to the whole thing, the opener will give you some (but only some) sense of what to expect there-on-out.

The album itself genre hops, taking us along Ches Smith’s astonishing technical and aesthetic range, at some points grungy, at others borderline funky; it’s not quite fusion jazz, but then it’s not quite anything. The experimentality of the album, the experimentality of New York-based (where else) Ches, is first class. If you want to convince your jazz-sceptical friends (I once heard jazz referred to as ‘the thinking man’s headache’) about the merits of free/experimental jazz, get them to listen to this. I suspect it will be my album of the year.

Read More

Maria Faust - Recent Releases

By Eyal Hareuveni

Estonian, Copenhagen-based alto sax player-composer Maria Faust likes to challenge herself with new formats, unorthodox instrumentation, or by composing music that addresses urgent social and political issues, often about women’s place and rights over their own bodies. She is a strong believer that the artist has been given a voice and is obligated to use it.

Littorina Saxophone Quartet - Leaking Pipes (NoBusiness, 2025)

Littorina Saxophone Quartet is a new, pan-Baltic supergroup featuring Faust on alto sax, Finnish Mikko Innanen on alto, sopranino, and baritone saxes, Swedish Fredrik Ljungkvist on soprano and tenor saxes, and Lithuanian Liudas Mockūnas on sopranino, soprano, and bass saxes. The quartet is titled after the Littorina Sea, the ancient name of the Baltic Sea. Leaking Pipes is the debut album of this quartet, and it was recorded by Innanen at Hietsun Paviljonki in Helsinki in March 2024, after a few performances in Finland.

Leaking Pipes proves that these distinct sax players-improvisers-composers share more than just an ancient and new, sweet and salty, wild and calm sea. Innanen’s opening piece, “Kop Kop”, enjoys the orchestral sound of the Littorina Saxophone Quartet, making full use of the whole spectrum of the sax family and the quartet’s strong-minded voices, but also highlights the immediate affinity of these gifted sax players who enjoy exploring its theme with restless, passionate interplay. Faust’s dramatic and mysterious, choral “Hells Bells” sounds as if it corresponds with the sea movements of the Baltic Sea. Ljungkvist’s “Nils Olof” suggests a lyrical, emotional story, beautifully narrated by the quartet that explores its carefully-layered nuances with commanding solos. Mockūnas’ “Shadows” follows with another dramatic, darker story that cleverly employs the sonic spectrum of the quartet. It ends too fast with the free improvised, title piece, and calls for more from this fine collective quartet.

Maria Faust Sacrum Facere - Marches Rewound & Rewritten (Stunt, 2025)

Faust grew up in the Soviet Union, where marches were a daily propaganda tool. Early on, she has learnt to read the world between the lines, and to use music as a hiding place, and about art as the only place to find freedom and truth. Marches Rewound & Rewritten is the third album of the Sacrum Facere (in Latin, human scarification) octet and continues Faust’s compositional strategies that dissect the nature of violence and tyranny in our society.

Sacrum Facere uses the march format for criticising the glorification of wars and their heroes, while repressing the voices of their victims, the horror, and suffering, and from a sober, compassionate feminine point of view. Former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, an avid music lover, mentions in the liner notes that Faust makes us understand the horrific outcomes of wars and the oppressive role of the marches.

Faust leads an ensemble of Danish musicians, or ones who have studied in Denmark, to strip this most militarized form of music from its symbolic values. Italian pianist-drummer Emanuele Maniscalco plays the snare drum and keeps the repetitive, ritualistic rhythmic essence of the march, but Faust’s nine, untitled marches turn this format upside down. Marches Rewound & Rewritten is structured as a nine-movement, choral jazz suite that leads to an emotional, peaceful catharsis. Faust’s reimagines this old musical format and strips the marches from their pompous, propagandistic lies, slowing them down, rewinding them, and allowing them to fail. The soulful, compassionate playing of the Sacrum Facere ensemble reclaims and liberates the march from being a tool of war-mongering tyranny, in our homes and between countries and beliefs.

Maria Faust & The Economics - Rahamaa/Business as Usual (Self-Released, 2025) 

Faust is most likely the only composer who can make a playful, musical drama out of a huge monetary fiasco, with some enlightening lessons. Rahamaa (Moneyland in Estonian) or Business as Usual relates to the largest money laundering scandals in European history when Danske Bank, the largest Danish bank, merged with Finnish Sampo Bank, which had an Estonian branch. Between 2007 and 2015, over 800 billion Euros of suspicious transactions originating from Russia, Latvia, and Estonia flowed through the Estonian branch's non-resident portfolio. It was unveiled as a result of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia. None of the heads of Danske Bank were punished, and all the charges against them were dropped, but this scandal had a devastating effect on the Estonian economy.

Faust composed the music for Rahamaa, a multilingual production of the Estonian National Drama Theatre that premiered at the European Capital of Culture, Tartu in Estonia, in June 2024. The production reflects on the newly independent Estonia’s naive and innocent rush to leave poverty behind and catch up with the West, and asks what happens to a person when their only measure of morality and worth is their bank account balance?

The album was recorded at the Eesti Draamateater in Tallinn in January 2025. Faust plays alto sax and leads a new chamber jazz quintet, aptly titled The Ecomosists, with Norwegian trumpeter Oscar Andreas Haug (of Amalie Dahl's Dafnie), Danish frequent collaborator of Faust, trombonist Mads Hyhne, Estonian tubist Toomas-Oskar Kahur, and drummer-percussionist Ahto Abner. Faust's clever pieces for this unconventional quintet, as well as the imaginative arrangements, suggest an ironic and absurdist perspective on the scandal, articulated in a thriller-like, follow-the-money drama that mocks the pompous, corrupt bankers who enabled such a massive fiasco.

Read More

Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose and Scott Amendola - From Here to These (Secret Hatch, 2024)

By Landon Kuhlman

Here to There is an apt title for an album that is just as interested in exploration as it is in returning home to tradition and continuing the canon of creative jazz music. Though clarinetist Ben Goldberg, bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Scott Amendola have played together in many forms over the years, there was still an ulterior, germinating idea that brought this particular album together: using extracted melodic bits from Thelonious Monk compositions as fuel for new extrapolations. Monk was known for many things, one of them being his ability to get so much mileage out of melodies that appeared simple, yet whose underlying oddities would always leave room to expand. This trio picks up where he left off, using these bits (from pieces such as “Epistrophy” and “In Walked Bud”) to create variations that are all their own.

Despite this concept, there is no hint of imitation on this album. All three musicians bring their own voices and ideas to each of the pieces, which are all original compositions—the Monk bits are sewn into the fabric of the music like quilt squares. To be frank, I didn't notice the Monk connection until I was researching the album. The trio's goal of adding to the tradition by being openly creative and musically honest is easily through this approach. 

Goldberg's clarinet investigations are as clear as ever. His sound is as idiosyncratic as Sonny Rollins’ the tenor saxophone. Expressive, vibrant, and as clear as a bell, his playing is the heart of this record. At times it’s fluid, at others articulate and speech-like. Amendola's drumming is equally compelling, providing the backbone as well as tasteful electronic textures that add significant depth. His "Lion Heart" series, appearing in three iterations across the album, showcases his versatility, from a sparse clarinet-and-drums duet to a more ritualistic, layered soundscape.

Something truly amazing happens on this record: you can literally hear the musicians listening to each other. The effect of their close listening is palpable to a jaw-dropping extent. This trio setting is ideal for their Monk concept and these compositions. It gives them the freedom to do what the Ornette Coleman Trio did so beautifully: make the listener forget where the writing ends and the improvising begins. With all three musicians engaged nearly constantly, rather than taking turns laying out for solos, the performances evoke the spirit of the classic Air trio recordings. 

This album radiates a quiet peace. The compositions do wander and explore, but with a calm confidence that washes away the restless energy that defines so much of modern jazz. Even at their most adventurous, the players seem to breathe together, like a single organism moving through a dream. There are moments that drift close to silence, not out of restraint, but out of trust—trust in space, in tone, in the listener’s willingness to lean in. It’s the kind of record that feels like it was recorded in a room with soft morning light, where time slows down just enough to hear every intention behind each note.

Aside from the achievements in musicianship, this album also sounds fantastic. The mixing matches the playing, with nothing being pushed to the sidelines and no instrument or sound taking ultimate precedence over anything else. A gentle dollop of echo is added to help this blend occur—just enough to add space, but not enough to blur the articulations or the truly organic feeling of this record. Even the sparse electronics fit into this puzzle with ease, as if the wiring from the machines contained their very own resonance. 

Through their deep interplay, compositional curiosity, and unique sense of space, Goldberg, Sickafoose, and Amendola offer a record that feels both grounded and searching. It’s a rare kind of album: thoughtful without being cerebral, and adventurous without being chaotic. Its approachability allows multiple listens, and its quality demands it.

Read More

Dan Rosenboom Quartet

It's always nice to catch up with the folks keeping music alive over on the West Coast. Los Angeles, in particular, has been in the news a lot lately - from disasters both natural and unnatural - so let's take a moment to (re)focus on something undeniably much more positive. Here is trumpeter Dan Rosenboom leading a quartet with keyboardist Joshua White, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Anthony Fung.

 

Read More

Joe Fonda - Eyes On The Horizon (Long Song Records, 2024)

By Stef Gijssels

This album is a tribute or a gift by bassist Joe Fonda to his master teacher, Wadada Leo Smith. They have asked their friends Satoko Fujii to join on piano and Tiziano Tononi on drums. The four have an interesting list of mutual collaborations, creating high expectations for this quartet performance. 

In 1982 Joe Fonda and Wadada Leo Smith had their first collaboration with the Creative Improvisors Orchestra – "The Sky Cries The Blues" and in 1989 with Smith on "Procession Of The Great Ancestry". Fonda performed many times with Satoko Fujii, and released the duo albums "Duet" (2016), "Mizu" (2018), "Thread of Light" (2022), and a trio on "Triad" (2018) and "Four" (2019). With Italian drummer Tiziano Tononi they perform in several bands released on the Italian Long Song label, as is this album, with some special other releases worth mentioning such as the Allman Brother's tribute "Trouble No More... All Men Are Brothers" (2017) and even more recently on "Winter Counts (We'll Still Be Here!)" (2023) on which Fonda plays electric bass on a few tracks. Also worth mentioning is the J. & F. Band's "From The Roots To The Sky" (2018), "Cajun Blue" (2020), "Me and the Devil" (2021) and "Star Motel" (2024) And to complete the list, Smith and Fujii collaborated on "Aspiration" (2017), "Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams" (2022). That's quite a list. 

Despite the line-up and the lead voice of the trumpet, this is very much a Joe Fonda album, with a prominent voice of the bass, both plucked and arco, often setting the basic theme for the other musicians to expand on. The music has an inherent openness and freedom of movement, an environment that suits all four musicians in a very natural way. They need just the slightest hints to move the music forward with strong coherence and depth. 

A good example is the "We Need Members Opus #4", on which Fonda's rock solid bass vamp is an open invitation for the quartet to have a more than twelve minutes meditative development, with thanks to Fujii some moments of more dramatic tension, and a great bass solo in the middle section. 

The most moving and beautiful piece is "My Song Opus #2", a gentle sensitive theme introduced by the piano, supported by Fonda's brilliant bowed bass, countered by an angular contrasting theme, full of dramatic effect, recreating the theme from the start, now more eery, more vulnerable, uncanny even. The rapid-fire pizzicato bass, the slow trumpet, the mysterious piano and the precise percussion create a wonderful sonic universe that requires great skills and artistic vision. A real treat. 

"Like No Other" is - unlike all other tracks - not dedicated to Wadada but to Bobby Naughton, the vibraphonist who passed away in 2022 and with whom both Fonda and Smith performed. The piece starts with a very dark and dramatic unison theme between arco bass and trumpet, that leads into a heartrending and moving duet, that is both ethereal and intimate. 

Boppish, angular themes act as jumping boards for bright and shiny improvisations. There is almost only light in this music, with a few exceptions. It's grand and intimate at the same time. 

The music is so great, tight and free that you wonder why these four artists never recorded together before.  I can only encourage Joe Fonda to keep the initiative. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

Read More