John Coltrane 100: A Celebration

As you are likely well aware, this week marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth and writers and friends of the Free Jazz Blog were asked to contribute their personal thoughts on his music and influence. The parameters for the contributions were loose, only that it should be something personal and if it so happened that an album appeared more than once, that was fine, as what it meant to the writer was surely different. We ended up with our biggest feature ever! For the next two weeks we will be featuring reflections, reviews, and anecdotes about Coltrane and his groundbreaking music. We begin today an introduction from Sammy Stein.

Enjoy!
Paul Acquaro 

John Coltrane. Src: wikipedia

By Sammy Stein

FJC is celebrating John Coltrane’s 100^th year. For anyone unfamiliar with his music, the following offers a brief overview of why Coltrane is ranked amongst the greatest of musicians.

Through his approach, style, delivery, and unmistakable sound, Coltrane powered through the door that Ornette Coleman and others had left ajar, revealing jazz’s powerful, emotive, and transformational heart. Nothing post-Coltrane is untouched by his influence. His was not a deliberate subversion of traditional jazz, but an uncalculated stream of events, personal, spiritual, and historical, that converged in a confluence that formed his music.

Coltrane’s mother bought him a saxophone when he was sixteen, and he was influenced by players including Illinois Jacquet. His grandparents were ordained ministers, his parents met through the church, and Coltrane grew up influenced by religion. He chose a different path – that of music and was not discouraged by family, yet later in his life, it was God who helped him save his music and career.

Without his spiritual reawakening, Coltrane’s career may have faded. Early on, he was supported by musicians who recognised his prodigious talent. However, he became addicted to drugs and would arrive for gigs unshaven and in smelly, wrinkled clothes. He might fall asleep on stage. Miles Davis fired him, and Dizzy Gillespie didn’t follow suit only because of their friendship and his respect for Coltrane’s talent.

At the nadir of his life, Coltrane reached out to God. He described a revelation he had when God spoke to him, and he set about composing exquisite music, praising God and teaching his followers. He said, “My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it through my music. If you can live it, there’s no problem about the music, because it’s part of the whole thing.”

Coltrane’s first wife, Naima, was central to his early spiritual journey. A practicing Muslim, she helped him understand God’s presence in their lives. With her support, he overcame addiction within a year. His second wife, Alice, became his spiritual partner and musical collaborator. A pianist and harpist, she understood Coltrane’s desire to contribute to a greater purpose through music.

Some of Coltrane’s music has an intangible quality. He understood the spiritual and temporal worlds, and his music fused the two, expressing deep spiritual inquiry alongside the mortal complexities of personality. Jazz became a place where the human condition could be expressed with unflinching honesty and transcendent beauty.

Coltrane was playing at a time when conditions were ripe for rebellion and change, and he was profoundly affected by events of his time, especially the civil rights movement, initially siding with Malcolm X before aligning with Martin Luther King Jr’s belief in peaceful but persistent protest. He performed eight benefit concerts to support Martin Luther King Jr’s cause.

His music channeled anger at racism and discrimination, despair at humanity’s darkness, and the beauty of praise and worship. He had faced the demons of addiction and won, and his music reflected beauty, was personal yet spoke to millions.

The murder of four African American girls in the KKK bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 profoundly affected Coltrane. Two months after the event, he took McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones into Rudy Van Gelder's studio and recorded ‘Alabama’, later released on the album Live At Birdland (Impulse 1964).

As discontent rose, Coltrane’s modal technique challenged preconceived ideas about traditional jazz. Under his and other musicians’ tenure, jazz, ever the mirror of society, became more dissonant and unruly.

Coltrane’s music is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. The messages are clearly and profoundly expressed and cut to the core impulses of humanity. Because of his uncloaked humanity, listening to Coltrane feels as emergent and alive for someone encountering the music today as it did to listeners forty years, or ten years ago.

Coltrane’s near-mythical status was helped by the Blue Note label, which signed Coltrane and other players, seen as risky at the time, and some iconic images, notably photographs by Francis Wolff, a skilled photographer and executive of Blue Note. Of over 33,000 pictures Wolff took (probably more), his images of John Coltrane in moments of intense concentration or creativity seem to capture the musician's essence.

One of Coltrane’s gifts was his ability to perform as a soloist or as part of an ensemble. Pieces like Davis’s’ ‘Milestones’ with ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (alto sax) and Coltrane (tenor sax) responding to Davis’s trumpet with twists and turns within the original mode laid a template for modal playing (try also Coltrane's’ Spiral’ and ‘Naima’ from Giant Steps (Atlantic 1959)). Modal jazz led away from traditional jazz and toward free jazz. Free playing was where Coltrane was headed.

In the 1960s, some journalists described early free jazz as a poison to jazz, and Downbeat critics described Coltrane and Dolphy’s playing as ‘nihilistic exercises’ and ‘anti-jazz.’ Miles Davis found free jazz difficult to embrace initially. However, a few years later Davis, like Coltrane and others, found free jazz liberating. Coltrane, like many free-playing musicians, connected the evolution of the music with a deepening of self-realization and the strengthening and expression of their beliefs. Alongside fellow musicians Yusef Lateef, Sonny Rollins, and others, Coltrane pursued musical mastery and self-realization.

In his suite A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965), Coltrane expressed his love and awe of God, and the final movement is based on a devotional poem he wrote. He studied different religions and philosophies, including the Indian philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, which he was introduced to by Bill Evans.

Coltrane perhaps expressed his love for God most during his free playing. His tracks ‘Love’ and ‘The Father, And The Son And the Holy Ghost’ on Meditations (Impulse 1965), albums Ascension (Impulse 1966), Om (Impulse, recorded 1965, released 1966), and ‘Peace on Earth’ from Infinity (Impulse, recorded 1966, released 1972), reflect his beliefs.

Coltrane used the ferocity of his playing and complex techniques as a way of worship. He said he created music for God and others and wanted to be the opposing force to evil. Even those unaware of his driving beliefs find something special, untouchable, and unique in his music.

Coltrane, Art Blakey, Yusef Lateef, and other musicians became part of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, which forbids the intake of drugs and alcohol. Coltrane said, "My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being. When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups…I want to speak to their souls.”

Some found Coltrane’s later music, with its contradictions and unresolved transitions, less pure than his earlier recordings, but for many, they remain some of the best work produced by any jazz musician.

Two weeks before his death, Coltrane discussed opening a music venue without alcohol as he realized this had masked his creativity.

After Coltrane died in 1967, aged just forty, Alice kept pushing musical boundaries, and her music took on a profoundly spiritual element. She collaborated with Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, and many others, and her music traversed from blues-infused melodies to unfathomable sonic journeys, but it was beautiful, and her talent won armies of devotees, so, partly through Alice, Coltrane’s legacy remained. Also through his sons. John Jr, Ravi, and Oranyan. Oranyan started playing jazz with his brothers but has gone into trance and electronic music production. John Jr was a promising bassist but was killed in a car accident when he was 17, and Ravi is a jazz musician. Alice’s grandnephew, Steven Ellison, AKA Flying Lotus, is a record label owner, producer, rapper, and DJ. Many of his recordings feature jazz samples.

Coltrane’s music and persona continue to influence music and musicians. From those who followed directly, including Pharoah Sanders, Lonnie Liston, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and John McLaughlin, to nearly every jazz musician today.

In 2016,’ Alabama’ was included in John DeJohnette's 2016 album In Movement (ECM), and on this recording, sons of the original artists, including saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of Coltrane) and bassist Matthew Garrison (son of bassist Jimmy Garrison), played.

Coltrane’s music has been sampled on recordings by hip hop artists, younger jazz musicians, and many others. FJC is celebrating the fact that Coltrane left his influence, and there are some great pieces following this introduction. It is impossible to adequately record the influence of John Coltrane on the music that followed, but we can try. As a jazz musician recently said to me, ‘Don’t worry, just stick on some ‘Trane.”

Perhaps more than any other jazz musician, John Coltrane showed there is a way to play from the heart without constraints. When you can do that, you allow your true spirit to reveal itself. Like ‘Trane.

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Pendulum (Benoît Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard & Peter Bruun) - Opening Arcs 1-8 (Ilk Music, 2026)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Pendulum is a singular piano trio featuring French pianist Benoît Delbecq with Danish double bass player Jonas Westergaard and drummer Peter Bruun (both Westergaard and Bruun have collaborated before with fellow Danish pianist Søren Kjærgaard). Bruun initiated this trio in 2024 as part of his ambitious research project exploring new approaches to musical time (Multitemporal movement and embodiment through Rhythmic Design at The Danish National Academy of Music).

The Pendulum trio investigates all aspects of this classic format, including the most basic sensibilities of space and time, avoiding rigid structures, allowing instead for balance, elegance and fluidity. It challenges us to listen to its music as resonant arcs or shared fields of presence rather than defined by linear time, and explores new ways to transform free improvisation gravity into groove. Delbeq suggested that the trio will play with the presence of physical pendulums on stage, symbolizing the elasticity of time and giving a sense of pulse. These oscillating bodies guide the subtle, cyclical shifts in the music, which, paradoxically, feels familiar: music that sways and breathes, while finding rhythm in the inevitability of motion.

The trio releases its eight-volume EP series, Arcs, nearly three hours of music, in a monthly release cycle that began in May and will conclude in December 2026. These Arcs offer Pendulum’s idiosyncratic, enigmatic, lyrical universe, in which metric relations, shifting balances, and elastic phrasing are woven together in a kaleidoscopic manner. Each volume swings on its own terms, with no intention to offer a linear narrative, and uses distinct compositional fragments, notated and graphic scores. But the whole project accumulates into an open body of work that allows us to feel how time bends, breathes, and searches for an elusive balance. The Pendulum trio invites listeners to form their own path through the eight volumes and discover different insights and relations in their own time.

Arc No. 1 

Pendulum describes this volume: “Time leans before it moves. Motion unfolds patiently, stretching and rebounding with quiet elasticity. What propels the arc is not force but attentiveness, which allows duration to bend and return without breaking. Each swing carries clarity and restraint, revealing time as something more shaped than measured”.

The trio suggests sparse, deep listening, labyrinthine architectures with patient and subtle, cyclical-rhythmic shifts, best captured in the aptly titled, 17-minute minimalist “Exercice Elastique”, that patiently gravitates into a most delicate, vulnerable, quite irreverent groove.

Arc No. 2

“Afterwards appears before it is recognized. Movement writes itself into space, leaving subtle traces that guide listening rather than direction. Rhythms form paths, both adaptable and responsive, where perception stretches between memory and anticipation. The arc remains fluid, shaped by change rather than arrival”.

Pendulum sketches an almost abstract, empty map, from which it begins to imagine possible contours and paths, and how to find its inner, spatial logic, and its subtle rhythmic shifts, finally realized on “Plasticity”.

Arc No. 3

“Movement turns inward. Each gesture is weighted, deliberate, and reduced to necessity. Time thickens as motion slows, inviting attention to settle inside the smallest shifts. The arc transforms discreetly, as intensity is held beneath restraint. Balance is discovered through presence, not display”.

The 31-minute “Buto” corresponds with the hyper-slow and hyper-controlled motion of the Japanese avant-dance theatre, Butō (舞踏), that resists and fixated conception of time. Pendulum’s fragile balance was realized through an austere, cryptic, and often almost silent presence that keeps triggering our imagination, and not by technical display or mastery.

Arc No. 4

“Wooden time moves with grain and resistance. Motion creaks, sways, and negotiates its own structure. Oscillation becomes tactile, shaped by friction and patience. The arc holds multiple possibilities at once, allowing form and freedom to coexist without resolution. The rings of time are both counted and counting”.

The trio focuses on its essence, the ever-negotiated arcs that blur the distinction between form and freedom, and question our conception of linear time, turning it into a spiritual riddle, a kōan.

Arc No. 5

 “A phase shifts nearly unnoticed. Motion lightens, stepping carefully through softened contours. Layers thin and overlap, revealing phrasing where gestures begin and fade. The arc listens closely to its own balance, finding meaning in nuance rather than emphasis. The push and pull are their own reason for being”.

Pendulum refines its fragile, nuanced equilibrium with melodic threads that patiently, hesitantly flirt with familiar, playful, and resonant piano trio dynamics.

 Arc No. 6 (to be released on October 10)

“Momenta accumulate through return. Motion becomes practiced, framed by shared gravity and memory. Energy circulates without urgency, shaped by repetition and transformation. The past is present and future at once”.

A further, urgent, cyclical rhythmic refinement is offered, faithfully captured in the short pieces “Arc” and “Dance”, shaped by nuanced repetitions and transformations.

Arc No. 7 (to be released on November 9)

“Time folds into itself. Multiple cycles coexist, asymmetrical yet connected. Movement breathes across layered durations, allowing contradiction to remain unresolved. The arc sustains density without weight, continuity without uniformity. Listening is wide enough to hold all the all of it”.

Pendulum’s music plays a touch-and-go game in its own fragmented musical continuum, sustaining density without weight, continuity without uniformity, but with more structural focus.

 Arc No. 8 (to be released on December 9)

“Strange tools reveal their logic through use. Motion disperses, leaving resonance rather than momentum. What remains feels everywhere at once, absorbed into space and attention. The arc settles without closing, as stillness carries the last trace of movement forward. It is the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning”.

The concluding volume is not an end to this fascinating journey but a sort of beginning. The Pendulum trio already inhabited its own elastic conception of time, as the devoted listeners to this journey, and has established its idiosyncratic language. But Pendulum’s music tells us something deeper about life and the inevitable changes we experience throughout life. This trio asks us to adapt our time sensibility to its subtle transformations, fully embrace and be deeply attuned to our own ubiquitous cyclical and oscillating arcs, as we move forward, attempting to maintain an elusive balance.

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LOUNGE LIZARDS - Live 79-81 (Analogue Pulse, 2026)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

"All Art Has Been Contemporary”

This sentence is a neon installation by conceptual artist Maurizio Nannucci located on the roof of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Torino, that takes up a similar concept expressed a few decades earlier by Pablo Picasso. Such a fundamental axiom, around which rivers of ink have been spilled, seems to lose its actualization in the late '70s, early '80s, with regard to jazz: this art form is out of sync with the “here and now” and doesn't dialogue with contemporary, ontologically expressed by young generations. Totally deprived of any chance to become aware of free/improv artists, the teens of the time (your humble writer among them) relate to jazz in the same way they approach Dante, Seneca or Milton in highschool or uni: respect, awe, in some cases sincere passion, more often distance. Wright or wrong, a matter of fact. Moreover, those years were destined to write one of the brightest chapters in the Great Book of Music, through amazing groups like Clock DVA, PIL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, X, Television, Bad Brains, Wire, just to throw out some names in bulk. Would it have made sense to spend the very little bucks in our pocket on Chet Baker instead of Meat Puppets and Husker Du? C’mon, a no-brainer. This inexhaustible cornucopia of punk/post-punk gems experiences a small, apparently insignificant, intermittence, which leads us, aboard the only ISO-certified Time Machine (the music), to where almost everything happens: New York. Here, while the ruins of CBGB's and Max's Kansas City are still smoking, a patrol of sappers (Contortions, Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), pushing far beyond punk, lights up the charges of the “No Wave”, generating a shockwave that transcends the scope of music and involves the most extremist artistic fringes of the East Village and the Lower East Side: poets (Lydia Lunch), writers (Kathy Acker), painters (Basquiat) and filmmakers (Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe) are up for It. Among them, relocated from Minnesota, John Lurie, iconic muse actor from Jim Jarmusch’s early movies, who in his unmissable autobiography, The History of Bones, offers us a snapshot of that sparkling, bohemian milieu: “We were so sure of ourselves, we never doubted anything. We were powerful, intelligent, energetic, confident, self-centered, and incredibly naive. Nothing outside our fourteen-block radius mattered. From Houston to 14th St., from the Bowery to Ave. A, that was the only universe.” John alternates between filmmaking and musical practicing, not on a third-hand Telecaster or on a battered Precision bass, but on alto saxophone: "At 4 p.m. on Main Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, the universe gave me my first saxophone. Nothing special happened, except that a man, driving around with a wheelbarrow, gave me a saxophone. I became like a monk. I slept on the floor, I didn't have a TV, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't fuck. I played the saxophone until my fingers bled and I devoured music: Varese, Stravinsky, Mingus, Dolphy, Monk, Bird, Ornette, Hendrix." From there, it was a short step to form a band, and with his brother Evan on keyboards, the rhythm section of Steve Piccolo and Anton Fier (of Feelies “fame”), and the abrasive guitar of DNA’s Arto Lindsay (a very distinctive element of the ensemble), the Lounge Lizards were born, self-described, out of respect for the Masters of the Past, as "fake jazz." The Purists, losers by definition, take the bait and move on, while those with heart and soul stop, listen to and understand the new hybridization of tradition with the metro, iconoclastic, infectious, no-sounds: a sabotage of the “status quo ante” of jazz but, definitively, a Sabotage of Love. None of them graduated from Juilliard (does it matter?), but the Lizards' sound reflects like few others the zeitgeist of Downtown and the mood of those courageous and visionary prime movers who animate it. Their debut album was released in 1981, packaged with Peter Saville's splendid artwork, featuring a black-and-white photo of the musicians on the cover that always reminds us of Jimmy Giuffre's stunning "Free Fall". At the helm, the mighty Teo Macero who infuses the album with the nocturnal atmospheres that made it legendary, sitting the listener at the bar counter of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks At Diner" or amidst a Raymond Chandler novel. The quick band’s development during the couple of years preceding it is captured on "Live 79-81," a reissue of the 1985 Roir cassette, containing live recordings at Hurrah and CBGB's in New York (June, August 1979), Her Majesty's Theater in London (June 1980), Cleveland Radio (June 1981), and Berlin Jazz Festival (December 1981). It's all there: contractions and swing, dissonances and post-post-bop, Earl Hagan (Harlem Nocturne) and Monk (Epistrophy), boredom and coolness, dark streets and streetlights. Jazz in its pure form. Did Lounge Lizards change the course of events? No. Did they spearhead a new musical stream? No. Did they contribute to ensuring that kids who grew up on punk could relate to jazz in an updated and conscious way? ABSOLUTELY YES. Same as it happened to John Lurie just some years before, then let him have the final words to come full circle: “When I was 17, someone made me listen to John Coltrane and it was as if he was speaking to me in Chinese. But how? Is there music I can't understand? And so I started listening to it all the time.”

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Josh Berman Trio – Everybody Else’s Life, Too (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2026)

By Nick Ostrum

Everybody Else’s Life, Too is the latest from Josh Berman, a stalwart of the Chicago scene still somewhat underappreciated outside of his hometown. He has played the gamut of Chicago improvisors (including Mars Williams’ A Very Ayler Xmas project, the all-too-short-lived Michael Zerrang and the Blue Lights, and Ken Vandermark’s Audio One), sneaked across the Atlantic to record with Paul Lytton, Edward Perraud, and Jon Rune Strøm, and led several of his own bands. On this one, he is joined by bassist Jason Roebke – a reliably punchy oft-times sideman of Chicago circles - and the indefatigable drummer Chris Corsano for a live date at Chicago’s Constellation from 2025.

I cannot say there is much surprising here if you are familiar with Berman’s previous headline albums. That said, this is more of what this listener wants rather than simply more of the same. Berman clearly has a thing for bop, in its various forms, and maybe the title is even a nod to his appreciation of those who came before and inspired him. The songs on here start with a catchy head, or a few more plodding, smokey ones, and from there break down into spurs, knotty angles, and spindly striations. One could play this album for someone who thought Miles went too far when he went electric, or Coltrane with Ascension, and they would happily bob their head along with Roebke’s walking bass or Corsano’s steady patter behind Berman’s jumpy melodies. But restricting this to such a palatable bridge would miss the other point, which lies in the free form sections that, yes, are tied to the head but in a sensual way that deviates from its rhythm, tune, and key in favor of capturing, extending, and straining the intricacies of a spontaneous moment. Those sections are when Berman stretches into flutters, crackles, and bites, when Roebke leans into timbre, and Corsano eschews rhythm for sound.

Those sections are limited; in this case I think for the better. That is not because trio cannot stretch out into the unknown. (Take the eighth cut, Scale, as an example of their exploratory chops.) Instead, it is because they do so within Berman’s bookending melodic confines that set the direction and mark the terminal point. And were those themes not inspired, this would fall flat. But they are and do not. For doubters, just listen to the wonderfully lonesome and wistful closer, Second Look, where Corsano’s brushes lay a soft-rain backdrop to Berman’s and Roebke’s melancholic dialog.

Everybody Else’s Life, Toois much in the vein of a different Josh Berman Trio’s A Dance and a Hop (2015) and should be considered an expansion of that project. Again, you might well know what to expect if you have been following Berman already, but that does not make what you hear any less satisfying.

Everybody Else’s Life, Too is available download from Bandcamp and a CD from a few choice independent music outlets. See the CvD website for more.

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Kuhn Fu!

Happy Sunday, here’s a quick shot of some irreverent fun for the end/beginning of your week (depending on how you set up your calendar): Kuhn Fu, the eight‑member ensemble led by guitarist‑composer Christian Kühn mixes a bit of rock energy with jazz freedom. "Free improvisation-only" folks may wrinkle their noses at such a description, but take a listen - would Frank Gratkowski, John Dikeman or Ziv Taubenfeld lead you astray? Video is from Zentrifuge, Berlin in October 2025.

 

Christian Kühn - guitar, composition 
Frank Gratkowski - alto sax, flute, clarinet
John Dikeman - tenor sax
Mateusz Rybicki - tenor sax, clarinet
Ziv Taubenfeld - bass clarinet
Sofia Salvo - baritone sax
Esat Ekincioglu - bass
George Hadow - drums

More: https://kuhnfumusic.com/

2026 FILMED BY EAR is a series by @berta.berlin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Magda Mayas - Chant (Unsounds, 2026) Sculpting Silence 4

By Stef Gijssels

On "Chant", another sculptor of silence shows her art. The magician is Magda Mayas, whose explorations of the outside and inside of her piano keeps astonishing us, including her inventiveness to create unheard sounds. Mayas is not only a musician, but also an academic researcher with several publications to her name, getting her PhD on the subject of "Orchestrating Timbre – Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance" (2019/20), which examines improvisation through timbre, space, movement, objects, and listening.

I'm adding a few videos here to show her art. 

The first is an exercise that Magda Mayas developed for the Hochschule Luzern called "Thinking Silent Matter". The excercise focuses on improvisation in a large ensemble context, bringing attention to silence and reduced sound material with slowly changing parameters, starting with the relevant quote : "... silence not only as absence of sound, but also silence as part of the sound". In the video she guides her students through the concept of the exercise. 

  

Indeed, silence matters. It is even essential to anything we hear, whether we are aware of it or not, so why not actively use it in music? 

On the tree pieces of the album, she shows this in very different formats. The first and last piece were recorded in Australia, with two years apart, the middle track was recorded in Berlin in Tony Buck's Brief Sand Studio. 

The opening track, “Embodied,” recorded live at the SoundOut Festival in Canberra in February 2025, establishes its language through restraint. The piano notes arrive slowly, and the silences between them are as significant as the sounds themselves. Rather than functioning as a conventional prelude, however, this spaciousness becomes the central compositional device. Against the sparse piano framework, elusive sounds emerge from objects and tools used to activate the strings, producing a shifting field of resonance whose sources remain deliberately indistinct. The music is notably sparse, but never static; its intensity lies in the sustained concentration with which each sound occupies the space.

“Halcyon” extends this approach while pushing the sonic material into considerably harsher territory. Carefully paced piano chords are subjected to feedback from a guitar amplifier, alongside a guitar pickup and various other objects. The amplification and feedback transform the piano’s familiar timbre, extending each chord into a dense, sustained resonance. Despite the expanded textural palette, the harmonic language remains remarkably focused: pitches occupy a restricted register and coalesce around a clear tonal centre. This tension between harmonic simplicity and increasingly abrasive resonance gives the piece its mesmerising quality.

Developed in 2023 during the Harringtons Lane artist residency in New South Wales, “Chant” approaches the piano from yet another angle. The piece’s playback was recorded on sixteen different pianos, foregrounding variations in tuning and the subtle differences between instruments. Its structure is deceptively simple, built around the quiet repetition of two chords whose minute variations in tuning and timbre continually alter their perceptual weight. The effect is both soothing and strangely intense. Through repetition, small shifts become magnified, turning what might initially appear static into something constantly in flux.

Across these three works, there is a consistent interest in reducing musical materials to their essentials while expanding the possibilities of resonance, texture and perception. The music derives much of its power from this paradox: the means are often minimal, yet the listening experience is anything but. What emerges is an aesthetic that feels simultaneously rigorous and intuitive—fresh, inventive and deeply attentive to the physical properties of sound.

The title piece was also performed by Mayas at Roulette, streamed live on 30 Apr 2024. The video gives a great insight in her music but also on the added ingredients in the interior of her piano, things you can assume when you see a concert, but can usually at best only guess at. 

Enjoy!

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Alexandra Grimal - Marée Basse (Self-Released, 2026) Sculpting Silence 3

By Stef Gijssels

Our third iteration of the "Sculpting Silence" series, brings us to France, for a trio with Alexandra Grimal on saxophones, voice, harmonium, nōkan, shakuhachi, Naoto Yamagishi on percussions and Alexandre Saada on piano and harmonium. 

The title, Marée Basse, is French for “low tide”: the moment when the sea withdraws, leaving behind a wide, empty stretch of beach scattered with shells, tiny creatures, and fragments the waves have carried ashore. The music evokes much the same landscape. It takes this open space for granted, allowing the notes of saxophone, piano, and percussion to appear sparsely, sometimes only for brief moments before disappearing again.

All three musicians are minimalists, deeply attentive to the overall sound yet reluctant to impose themselves upon it, as though the tones themselves should determine whether, and when, they wish to interact. Every sound feels tender and fragile, unobtrusive and gentle—and often completely absent. Silence is not merely the space between the notes; it is an essential part of the music itself.

This is particularly striking in the thirty-minute second track, where, roughly halfway through, there is almost a full minute of near silence, with only faint crackling sounds barely audible in the background. When the music gradually returns, the instrumentation has subtly shifted: the harmonium introduces a handful of sustained tones, joined by Grimal's wordless singing, equally elongated and sensitive. Towards the end of the piece, the sound becomes fuller and more agitated, as though a sudden gust of wind were stirring the waves and awakening the distant cries of seagulls.

Once again, silence plays an essential role in this music, much as it does in Japanese art, which has fascinated Grimaldi in recent years. Here, absence is not a lack but a presence of its own—a space in which the smallest sounds can emerge, linger for a moment, and then quietly disappear.

Enjoy!

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Earth Tongues - Phases (Neither Nor, 2026) Sculpting Silence 2

By Stef Gijssels

This ensemble will always carry a deeply personal connotation for me. In 2015, they released their first album, Rune, at a time when I was hospitalised for two weeks, waking at irregular hours. Despite the dire circumstances, listening to Earth Tongues at four in the morning, alone in the darkness, was a strange and deeply soothing experience.

There was something about the ensemble’s careful, almost cautious little sounds—the tiny sonic points that gradually accumulated into a landscape that absorbed, captivated, and ultimately elevated you—that created a uniquely powerful listening experience. It is difficult to explain how important it became for me to return to this music again and again, and how much it taught me about the value of life, the value of art, and the value of improvised music.

When everything collapses around you—and inside you—you begin to realise that whatever remains, however small or fragmented, can still be enough to create something meaningful. You learn to cherish the smallest isolated event - "at least I still have this", to pay attention to what might otherwise go unnoticed, and to welcome the spontaneous connections with and between people who can, together, create beauty out of those tiny fragments of luck.

And in many ways, that is what this music does. Little sounds, little fragments, little pieces surrounded by silence, which, when brought together, can still constitute something beautiful, something meaningful, something valuable. It gave me hope against all odds, and with it a profound insight: to cherish every moment. Life is not necessarily a long story with a clear plot. Perhaps it is instead a collection of small, random events—fragments that, taken together, become a life, and that are all worth living.

The trio, so many years later are still Joe Moffett on trumpet, Dan Peck on tuba, and Carlo Costa on percussion. 

Like their previous albums, their sound is deeply organic, drawing on the textures and rhythms of the natural world: the drip of water, pebbles falling, animals growling, birds twittering. Each of the three long tracks has its own distinct character, while the music gradually evolves from pointillist blips into increasingly stretched-out tones in the final piece. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, these scattered sonic fragments begin to coalesce. The subtlety of this shift is deliberate, shaped by carefully considered compositional ideas and structures.

Silence is an essential part of their music—the white space between colours, an open realm of possibility waiting to be filled. What makes their work so compelling is the extraordinary value they give to each individual sound, with an intense attention to precision, texture, and timbral quality. When you enter their music attentively, it seems to slow down rational thought itself, allowing you to surrender to the sound and, for a while, simply be the music.

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Susana Santos Silva & Vasco Trilla - Mushin (Defkaz, 2026) Sculpting Silence 1

By Stef Gijssels

A short intro on "Sculpting Silence"

The nature of art is to make you stop you in your tracks, to stop doing what you're doing and thinking, and to start using your senses, your eyes and ears, sometimes your touch and smell to be surprised, to be confronted with the unexpected, to admire, to see things differently. 

We will have a short series of music that we describe as "sculpting silence", music in which sound is used like the black lines of a pen in zen art, a few strokes that capture the essence on a white canvas. And the first album in the series explicitly refers to the Zen concepts of 'Mu' and 'Shin' : "The term combines the kanji Mu (nothingness) and Shin (mind or spirit), and is often translated as “no-mind.” It refers to a state of consciousness free from fear, anger, or ego—where action arises naturally and without obstruction. In musical terms, this becomes a space where sound is not forced or premeditated, but emerges with clarity and immediacy", we read in the liner notes.

So the few strokes on a white canvas - on 'nothingness' - are like the ripples on a still pond, the barely visible effect of the slightest breeze. Here are some descriptions I found on the value of the colour 'white' in Zen art, comparable to silence in music. 

In Zen art, white is not merely a blank background or an empty void. It represents 'ma' (negative space), functioning as living breath, silence, and the infinite potential from which all forms emerge and return. 

The unpainted white paper or silk is an active, essential presence equal to the black ink strokes. 

Zen painting uses intentional emptiness, asymmetry, and abbreviated forms to point toward direct seeing rather than decoration.

Blank space is not “nothing”; it functions as breath, silence, and the field in which forms appear and dissolve.

Common motifs—enso, bamboo, landscapes, and solitary figures—teach non-attachment and ordinary clarity.

I also found some sayings about listening. 

"Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things."

"What is this mind? Who is hearing these sounds? ... What is it that hears?"

"The quieter you become, the more you can hear."

Now about the album.

The cover art is bizarre, to say the least: a cigarette-smoking armour seated on a toilet in a hilly landscape. It's in bad taste in my opinion, and not because of the toilet, but also because it does not truly reflect the nature of the music. It's a surreal digital artwork created by Aki Karano (also known as Akis Karanos) a visual artist and experimental musician, based in Greece.

In retrospect, it looks familiar when you see the likeness with the traditional Japanese drawings of monks contemplating the world, and also seen from the back. There may be a reference, or it might just be a coincidence. Admitted, the monk is not smoking and not wearing an armour, and he's contemplating a circle and not a square, yet it might be a more modern, more surreal rendition of the same experience.

Now really about the album. 

Both Susana Santos Silva on trumpet and Vasco Trilla on percussion explore the boundaries and sonic potential of their respective instruments, creating ringing tones, whistles, droplets, swooshes, rumbles, gurgles, swishes and many more sounds without name or description. 

The album begins quietly, with uncommon sounds cautiously flirting with silence—touching it slowly and gently, as if aware of its fragility. The result is a kind of soft intensity, with no obvious path or predetermined concept beyond the simple act of producing small fragments of sound and welcoming their clarity, their unexpectedness, and the ways in which they interact.

This is music that has nothing to prove. It does not seek to impress, move, or even necessarily engage a listener or an audience. It exists simply for its own sake: to be savoured, appreciated, and perhaps approached with the same state of mind as the artists themselves—with no attachment and no anticipation. Such an experience can only emerge from going beyond the expected, allowing the music to develop organically and naturally, as if arising from nothingness.

Contrary to the liner notes, I would recommend simply listening, rather than reflecting while you listen. Let yourself become part of the experience. Be there in the moment.

Both Santos Silva and Trilla are masters of their art. They share a remarkable sensitivity and an innovative ability to draw sounds from their instruments that are rarely heard, while employing a wide range of techniques and tools to sustain the listener’s attention. As with much improvised music, the album may surprise you on a first listen, but it reveals more of itself with each return.

Be the music.

 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Caktus x OJKOS - Øyeblikk (Sonic Transmissions, 2026)

By Hrayr Attarian

Danish saxophonist and composer Maria Dybbroe has fast established herself as a unique voice in contemporary European music. With her collaborative quintet Caktus, she fuses influences from various genres into captivating, improvisation-heavy works. On her third release with Caktus, the cinematic Øyeblikk, she blends her group with the Norwegian Jazz Composers' Orchestra, OJKOS, for six interlinked pieces of sublime beauty and depth.

The album title means “moment”, and each tune has an ephemeral immediacy at its core. For instance, “Kalvøya”, inspired by an island near Oslo, opens with a pastoral segment of bowed strings and flittering of the woodwinds. After setting a meditative mood, the dual drums of Knut Kvifte Nesheim and Tobias Andreassen add urgency with their sparse beats. The interaction between the booming brass and the twittering reeds builds delightful tension that leads to a warm, poetic trumpet solo. The 15-member band weaves a dynamic tapestry of sound from which emerges Dybbroe’s yearning, incandescent phrases. Nocturnesque, shimmering refrains usher in the conclusion.

Another track that bears the name of a location is “Fornebu”, a peninsula in Bærum, Norway. The clattering of percussion and the fluid clarinet notes are like a bird calling in the early morning hours among stems blowing in the wind. When the rest of the ensemble enters, they build a quasi-symphonic performance. This is best heard when the muscular trombones blow in unison against the clarinet’s tender melody. As various sections trade lines over percussive rhythms, a peaceful harmony ensues. Hence, it reflects the town’s perfect balance of architectural beauty and natural preserves.

The melancholic “Det nye år” (The New Year) consists of long, languid passages from the horns with sparse accents from the drums. Hints of mysticism infuse the serene atmosphere as lone musicians play nostalgic and celebratory melodies. Guitarist Arne Martin Nybo weaves a haunting, incandescent ballad, followed by cellist Thorbjørn Kaas’ lyrical soliloquy. The rustle of brushes and cymbals, together with deep, resonant basslines, color the backdrop with muted hues. The music perfectly reflects the joy, the regrets, and the anticipation of another turn around the sun.

Øyeblikk is a captivating recording with stimulating multilayered motifs. It is both thought-provoking and emotionally moving. It is a perfect example of what collective improvisational music should be: creative without pretensions and enjoyable without being pedestrian.

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