Summer Bummer in Focus

At the end of this summer, the Free Jazz Blog will be heading to Antwerp to check out the Summer Bummer festival. Held over the last weekend of August, it's been on the 'bucket list' of festivals over the past few years as its reputation has leaked across the ethers. Today, we present an interview with festival programmer Koen Vandenhoudt, but first a short impression of event from the festival itself:

Paul Acquaro: How did the very first edition of the festival come into being?

Koen Vandenhoudt: The first edition of Summer Bummer came into being as the celebration of 25 years of Freakscene, my radio show at Antwerp’s Radio Centraal, so originally it was Freakscene’s Summer Bummer. But even then it was a combined effort of music enthusiasts, supportive artists and a lot of volunteers that made and still make it happen.

PA: What do you think distinguishes your festival from others in Europe?

KV: We work purely by content, and though we pioneer many artists and give chances to lesser known and emerging artists, we go less by trends or commercial choices. At Summer Bummer we often present artists in constellations that have never happened before or that are brand new. That’s super exciting but hard to promote. People want the hear and see things before hand. So to see people coming from all over the world to witness this musical adventure, gives us a good feeling. It’s a trust kind of thing built over the years.

Another important thing is that we never do overlaps. We use multiple stages but always make sure that people can see all the shows -- and very important, it’s a community thing, where people can hang out, meet the artists, participate in an installation, enjoy some nice homemade food or score some excellent records.

PA: What guides your programming choices from year to year?

KV: We would like to say the artists and the ever changing amazing music they make. The international network and knowledge we built from within our Sound in Motion organization - volunteers, professionals, artists and like minded organizations - over all the years is pretty vast. This means that from all over the world we are continuously fed with the ins and outs of the music world.

On top of that, we support musicians over the long term, from the early stages, where the artist is new and unknown, to the moment where the international stage starts noticing.

PA: How do you decide when a project is “right” for the festival?

KV: That’s a very subjective process and impossible to pin-point exactly. We sometimes set out a kind of wish list or some minor themes but this very often gets overruled by the sheer quality of surprising offers or by the fact that every day is a day of potential musical discovery. Being able to keep this flexibility, this room to manoeuvre is crucial...

PA: How do you balance presenting established artists with discovering new voices?

KV: Since the first Summer Bummer edition and also in our nomadic concert series, our Dropa House residencies and our Dropa Disc label, we always balanced the older generation with established artists and the up and coming generation. In an age where pioneers of improvised, adventurous and experimental music are rapidly forgotten and disappearing, it’s super important to stage these different generations together. Sometimes we can combine them, like Peter Brötzmann with Farida Amadou and Thurston Moore, or Cel Overberghe with Adia Vanheerentals and Ornella Noulet (60 years of age difference), and Joe McPhee with Mette Rasmussen and Dennis Tyfus is also a good intergenerational and genre defying example. 

And sometimes it’s exemplary of how the past is still more than relevant and moves into the future, like the trio of Barry Guy, Evan Parker, Paul Lytton or the historic duo of Fred Van Hove and Brötzmann. As said earlier we support musicians over the long term. Therefore some artists who are considered established these days still have a strong bond with Summer Bummer and Sound in Motion as an organization. Being able to show how these artists evolve is something very beautiful and exciting to witness. 

This year we have some beautiful examples of this with the world premiere of Rodrigo Amado, one of the hardest working reed players around, in a trio with the legendary bass player/icon Joëlle Léandre and the genre hopping genius drummer and electronics manipulator Gerald Cleaver, not a trio we requested but a proposal by the artists themselves. 

And what to say about one of the all time greats, Alexander von Schlippenbach, who will play this years Summer Bummer in a duo with phenomenal drummer and one of the most prominent representatives of the scene Paal Nilssen-Love, another request by the artists themselves and super exemplary of everything we stand for. And maybe the ultimate example of mixing up generations, gender, established and new artists is the passage at Summer Bummer in 2024 of Fire! Orchestra CBA and Fire! Orchestra CBA Youth. Mindblowing and very inspirational indeed.

PA: Are there artistic boundaries you intentionally avoid—or intentionally cross?

KV: Crossing artistic boundaries is inherent to the invited artists. Creating the platform to cross potential boundaries is the essence of Summer Bummer as a festival and to Sound in Motion as an organization. Just look at this years program and you know what we mean.

PA: What do you hope musicians experience here that they might not elsewhere?

KV: We once published a book with the title Food For Thought asking the artists how they experienced playing for Sound in Motion. One of the answers was: 'Feeling at home away from home.’

We like to think and hope that we are part of a handful of organizations and festivals that actually make this happen. That we can create the perfect environment for artists so they can focus 100% on their craft and artistry.

PA: What do you hope audiences experience here that they might not elsewhere?

KV: That there’s more than just mainstream music, forced upon everyone by mainstream media. And that, unlike mainstream channels will make you believe, it is not by definition difficult music. Even alternative channels struggle with this, shying away or being apologetic when music is abstract or noisy or not following known paths, as if there’s something wrong with it. No, embracing the unknown and enjoying it full on is the way to go.

PA: How do you see the festival’s role within the local music community?

KV: By showing the international dynamic of adventurous, improvised and experimental music and putting local musicians in the spotlights, introducing them first hand to international mainstays the Summer Bummer Festival tries to open international doors and opportunities.

PA: What is one thing that we didn't ask you that you think we should have?

KV: Sound in Motion is a nomadic organization, how does that relate to the concert series and the festival, and what's the importance of this within the field of improvised and experimental music and free jazz?

Sound in Motion uses a "nomadic" model that fundamentally shapes both its ongoing concert series and its annual festival. In fields like free jazz, improvised, and experimental music, this structural fluidity is not just a logistical choice—it is an aesthetic and philosophical necessity. Experimental and improvised music has historically suffered from being ghettoized either as purely academic or overly elitist. By refusing to stay inside a traditional, high-art institution, Sound in Motion actively de-academizes the genre. Bringing free jazz into a rock club one week, a community art space the next, or a cultural center the week after meets diverse audiences where they already are, embedding avant-garde sound into the community fabric.

Free jazz and free improvisation are built on the rejection of rigid frameworks, fixed charts, and predictable patterns. As a nomadic organization, Sound in Motion mirrors this artistically. When an organization is not connected to a physical building, it avoids the institutional inertia that forces venues to book "safe," commercially viable acts to cover high overhead costs.The organizational structure is as improvisational, adaptive, and high-risk as the music itself.

Because we must constantly collaborate with different physical venues and artistic spaces, Sound in Motion inherently builds an inter-connected infrastructure. We do not guard our audience; instead, we aim to cross-pollinate with the crowds of the partner venues. This creates a robust safety net for touring experimental musicians, making Belgium a vital European hub for artists who rely on agile, grassroots bookers to sustain their careers.

Find out more about Summer Bummer here.

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Reza Askari Roar Quintet - xAYb v8v dYAx (Boomslang, 2026)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Reza Askari is a German (son of an Iranian-born father and a German mother), Cologne-based double bass player, composer, and educator (he is a professor of jazz bass at the University of Music Wuerzburg). His main band is the Roar trio - with clarinet and tenor sax player Stefan Karl Schmid and drummer Fabian Arend, augmented by vibes player Christopher Dell (who is also an educator who teaches architecture, urban design, and planning) in its last two albums - the self-titled album (QFTF, 2022) and Zen World Cables (Boomslang, 2024). The fifth album of Roar has a cryptic title, xAYb v8v dYAx, and the trio hosts Dell and Canadian trumpeter Lina Allemano (who splits her time between Toronto and Berlin). The album was recorded at Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal in Cologne in April 2026.

Askari was mentored by German double bass players Dieter Manderscheid and Sebastian Gramss, but has played with other innovative double bass players like Barre Philips and Mark Dresser, and is well-versed in the free jazz legacy. But Askari sees the acoustic, unamplified Roar quintet as an improvising modern jazz band that adapts the logic of extreme metal bands with their asymmetrical or symmetrical cycles, collapsing forms, obsessive repetition, abrupt ruptures, and overwhelming physical force. He mentions metal bands like Meshuggah, Car Bomb, the Melvins, and the Dillinger Escape Plan that have a distinct architectural and emotional language that he wanted to transform into a detailed improvisational context.

xAYb v8v dYAx distills the powerful, physical, and constantly shapeshifting rhythmic patterns of metal bands into layered, more nuanced, and spacious yet still restless patterns. Askari, Dell, and Arend sketch complex, polyrhythmic architectures of a modern jazz trio or a chamber music ensemble, while they keep trading leading roles, often reaching surprising reductionist or atonal territories. Schmid and especially Allemano act as free agents who can add disruptive, sometimes even abrasive touches, and they always do so, but thoughtfully and poetically. Allemano’s economic interventions always charge the music with intense, emotional impact. This tension stimulates and enriches the unpredictable, often fragmented rhythmic dynamics of this quintet.

The Roar quintet does not seek to replicate the massive polyrhythmic patterns of Meshuggah or other metal bands, but captures the nervous, punkish rhythmic spirit of such bands. This quintet refuses to subscribe to the common, familiar order and instead challenges itself with shifting contrasts and structural chaos, always questioning, negotiating, negating, and reassembling Askari’s compositions. The code-like, palindromic titles of most pieces intensify that feeling. The outcome is thought-provoking, epic, and makes you return to the album again and again, not to decipher the cryptic titles, but to enjoy its free spirit.

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Flo Stoffner - Bijou (Relative Pitch, 2026)

By Martin Schray

Bijou is a French noun meaning “gem”, “treasure”, or “jewel”. It’s often used in a formal or figurative sense to describe something particularly beautiful, precious, or valuable, similar to the term “gem” when referring to a beautiful house or object. And it’s the title of Flo Stoffner’s new solo album - his first since Norman (Veto Records, 2014). However, it differs significantly from his earlier recordings.

Stoffner has been an integral part of the European free jazz scene for many years. As a guitarist, he ranks among the best in his field alongside Fred Frith, Olaf Rupp, and Noël Akchoté. No wonder - when John Butcher and Paul Lovens choose you as a collaborator it certainly counts as a mark of distinction.

After many duo and trio releases, Bijou highlights Stoffner’s unique style as if he were freed from the constraints of having to communicate with others. “This time, I made short recordings here and there over the course of several months. I deliberately wanted to immerse myself in this process over a longer period of time. For me, it was really all about the process itself, since I learned and discovered so much through this engagement with myself and the instrument. I also wanted to make the very quiet playing styles audible - the ones that are hard to hear when other musicians are playing along”, Stoffner emphasizes. Therefore, Bijou is more purist than the solo albums before, on which he used effects more frequently. On the one hand, it becomes clear that his technique is shaped by the British school, especially Derek Bailey and John Russell; on the other hand, his sound has clearly emancipated itself from his role models. Flageolets are at the center of his style, he contrasts them with hard, individually struck notes. The result is a very open sound, as if a wild ECM album was being played in a DIY style by a post-punk guitarist (e.g., Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly). You won’t find any ethereal lightness here, it’s more like being Nero in the first Matrix movie, dodging the ricochets, which come flying at you not in slow motion, but in real time. The whole thing sounds like a hailstorm descending on an abandoned Tibetan monastery where the chimes have been left behind. This becomes particularly clear in the album’s final track, “Bijou 6.” Amid all the roughness and harshness, a stark beauty flashes through consistently, so that despite its jarring contrasts in high and low flageolets, the piece is reminiscent of ambient music. But even though Stoffner seems to play with a greater sense of freedom, he still feels that it was a major challenge to play without a partner because it was sometimes difficult to get to the point. But don’t worry - on this wonderful gem, he has succeeded without exception.

Bijou is available on CD and as a download.

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Toc + Jean-Luc Guionnet - Quelques idées d’un vert incolore dorment furieusement (Tour de Bras, 2026) *****

By Richard Blute

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

-A sentence proposed by Noam Chomsky that he claimed was grammatically correct, but meaningless.

In 2015, I attended a concert of the band Kaze in a downtown Ottawa nightclub. Between sets, the musicians were selling CDs, surrounded by a crowd of fans. I picked out a few CDs and was still hunting around when I saw one I didn’t recognize. The print on the back was tiny, the room was dark and I didn’t have my reading glasses. But I figured I’d try my luck and purchased it without even knowing who was on the CD. It was TOC’s album Haircut and it became one of my favorite albums of 2015, and I’ve been an enormous fan of TOC ever since.

TOC consists of Peter Orins on drums, Ivann Cruz on guitar, and Jérémie Ternoy on keyboards. (Peter is also the drummer for Kaze.). On Haircut, TOC creates complex rhythms that are a delight to listen to, with Cruz in particular treating his guitar like a percussion instrument. The rhythms have an almost hypnotic effect which I found fascinating.

I very much liked the idea of adding a saxophone to TOC. They had previously collaborated with Dave Rempis on Closed For Safety Reasons, and that was a terrific album. On this album, Jean-Luc Guionnet proved to be an excellent choice for collaboration. FJC readers will recognize Guionnet from multiple reviews, including a 5 star review for his duo with Will Guthrie, his more recent album with Diatribes, as well as his work with the band The Ames Room.

This album consists of a single 33 minute track, and the band is more than capable of sustaining the listener’s attention throughout the piece. It begins subtly with TOC playing some textural percussive sounds inviting Guionnet to join them. As the rhythms build in complexity, Guionnet’s playing builds in urgency. He plays beautiful serpentine lines, but occasionally sounds like he’s calling out to the others as he plays a single screeching note. As the piece proceeds, Guionnet’s overblowing ratchets up the tension and TOC responds with their own intensity. The last 8 or 9 minutes of this album are pure, thundering bliss.

This is my album of the year so far.

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Fie Schouten, Vincent Courtois, Sofia Borges, Pierre Baux - Open Space (Relative Pitch, 2026)

By Hrayr Attarian

French writer and filmmaker Georges Perec was known for using wordplay to explore identity, loss, and grief. His 1974 book Espèces d'espaces is equal parts essay and prose poetry, exploring the concept of space from an individual bed to the universe. It also serves as an inspiration for one of the most intriguing albums of 2026, Open Space.

On it, veteran French actor Pierre Baux eloquently recites Perec’s writing, and a trio spontaneously creates music inspired by it.

The album opens with “SPACE”. French cellist Vincent Courtois plays muscular refrains, off of which Dutch clarinetist Fie Schouten bounces her plaintive lines. Portuguese drummer Sofia Borges provides the percolating cadence that drives the haunting melody, which not only echoes the essay's words but also goes beyond them. Thus it forms a lyrical fusion of two forms of expression

A cinematic ambiance permeates the entire recording. For instance, on “The Bed and The Room” Courtois and Schouten engage in a tense duet that shows influences of Western classical music. Borges’ crashing cymbals, chiming bells, and rustling brushes add to the mysticism.

The three musicians demonstrate sublime camaraderie, with the focus primarily on the collective performance rather than individual solos. On the poignant absurdist “The Country-Borders”, in response to Baux’s emotive monologue, Schouten lets loose fiery, urgent wails while Courtois bows out crystalline and angular phrases with passion. Borges’ thunderous polyrhythms underscore her bandmates' improvisation and the anti-war message of Perec’s poem. Meanwhile, on “The Letter” the serene ensemble sound is laced with melancholy. Borges contributes soft, jingling percussion that dramatically punctuates Schouten’s languid, undulating clarinet and Courtois’ darkly smoldering cello.

This collaborative record perfectly marries provocative poetry with equally stimulating musical extemporizations. Its singularity, though, goes beyond its structure. Each of the performers brings their idiosyncratic styles and seamlessly overlaps them for a multilayered work that is moving and memorable. Open Space makes for a rewarding listening experience even for those who may not know French.

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The Black Nothing & Anders Filipsen - Midt i en Fremtid (Ilk Music, 2026)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Anyone who has experienced someone close, and especially a young one, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, would be familiar with the existential and emotional rollercoaster that awaits all around those ill ones, along with the grief-filled, compassionate yet helpless years to come.

Danish keyboard player and composer Anders Filipsen, the leader of the local experimental, electroacoustic ensemble The Black Nothing, experienced Alzheimer’s disease when his father was diagnosed four years ago. He composed a ten-part suite, Midt i en Fremtid (In the Middle of a Future), about the time he spent with his father, which composed passages, free improvisation, and graphic scores. He says: “This album is the sound of a time when what once was ceased to be, and something new emerged. It is a loving song to the moments we share now – in the midst of all that has disappeared”.

The different parts of the suite function as tableaux of moments marked by gradual decline, filled with silence, relating to the inevitable time when the ill ones can not share their thoughts anymore, repetition, and intensity- a landscape where presence and memory meet in sound. The ten musicians - vocalist Qarin Wikström (who sings in Danish, but the lyrics were translated to English), trumpeter Emil Jensen, clarinetists Carolyn Goodwyn and Jeppe Højgaard (who also plays the flute), cellist Soma Allpas, double bass player and cellist Nils Bo Davidsen, electronics player Mads Emil Nielsen, percussionist Victor Dybbroe, drummer Bjørn Heebøl, and Filipsen on synths - use their idiosyncratic voices to create a unified expression in which individual playing and collective sound merge.

The introspective, reflective, and chamber spirit of this suite emphasizes the vulnerability and the often helpless feelings of attending to those suffering from Alzheimer's when “everything that’s known is gone”, as Wikström sings in the opening piece, “Synker og Stirrerr (Sinking and Staring). “Nelly” captures Filipsen’s father's last memory and gently addresses the realization that when time, with its many memories and experiences, loses its meaning, and all that is left is the present.

The power of this thoughtful, insightful suite lies in its emotional restraint, best expressed by Wikström’s fragile voice, and its kaleidoscopic individual colors, suggesting a nuanced yet abruptly shifting, unstable, and not always comprehensible new reality, faithfully representing life with Alzheimer’s disease. But Filipsen orchestrates this suite not as an expression of melancholy and loss, but as a statement of compassion and love to the most closed ones, and the opportunity to let them go, embraced by their dear ones. Or as he wrote in “I stilhed findes ord (In Silence There Are Words): “...Room for honesty, peculiarity, and unbearable sorrow / Come take my hand”.

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Take a ride with Helicopter ... live at the Loft

Today's Sunday Video is from the power trio Helicopter, which looks to be 2/3 of Free Jazz Blog favorite Gorilla Mask with Simon Camatta in the drum seat. "Brighton" from Camatta is a taut, fist-pumping number that should help get your day started right!

Recorded live at Loft, Cologne Germany, February 23rd 2026 Peter Van Huffel - alto saxophone Roland Fidezius - e-bass Simon Camatta

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Ensembles with electronics: rewiring the imagination

By Stuart Broomer

These are recent and distinguished bands united by the extent to which they’re refined, defined and expanded by electronics, harbingers not of the future but of the immediate present, multiplying and expanding through degrees of transformation, each a legitimate heir to the kinds of informed complexity pioneered by musical outsiders like John Benson Brooks and Sun Ra and literary outsiders like Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.

Alexander Hawkins -- No Nation but Imagination (Intakt, 2026) 

 

Pianist/composer Alexander Hawkins has already covered a broad musical spectrum in his career, from Togetherness Music for Sixteen Musicians featuring Evan Parker to Carnival Celestial, his brilliant reinvention of the piano trio with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis. No Nation but Imagination may be his most striking work yet, with a trans-Atlantic quintet that links Chicago-resident flutist Nicole Mitchell and drummer Hamid Drake with British musicians Rhodri Davies, here playing harp and electronics, and turntablist/sound artist Matthew Wright. That’s not a predictable combination, and it immediately lives up to that promise of the unlikely: it’s music that can find a groove, but it’s a groove that hasn’t exactly happened before, suggestive in some ways of the unpredictable musical culture of Intakt label-mates Elias Stemeseder and Christian Lillinger and their Umbra series of recordings.

Liner note author Peter Margasak has traced the project’s complex lineage and associations, beginning with Hawkins’ enthusiasm for the Mandingo Griot Society, a band that Drake played in in the 1970s with Gambian kora master Foday Musa Suso. Mitchell has played with a kora master more recently, the Malian Ballaké Sissoko. Those associations with the harp-like kora triggered the inclusion of harpist Rhodri Davies, who has also worked extensively with electronics, also the arena of Matthew Wright. The resultant ensemble bears a certain resemblance to Wright and Evan Parker’s Trance Map in its integration of acoustic and electronic instruments and processing, the result here a mix of live and studio recordings with further processing.

It’s music that has covered tremendous ground just coming into being, and it’s fascinating how the most exotic of technological procedures admit of a certain alien prettiness, a provocative banality, evident here from the opening “Solo Way Far Gone”: mysterious electronic piano tinkling, at once bearer and judge of the merely pretty, is here elevated by degrees of mystery and alien artifice. The first real group track, “Resolution Each and Every,” suggests that some 1950s exotica by Martin Denny (e.g., “Quiet Village”) has been recovered by some distant and unknown civilization (perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s refined Tralfamadorians), then altered, expanded and broadcast back to earth, with Mitchell’s flute assuming multiple identities amidst the complex percussion and a certain general wobbling of harp and synthesizer, with the music stretching far beyond the merely exotic. So too does “Mirror No Border”, which bristles with Hawkins’ percussive piano flurries and Mitchell’s alternately piping and soaring lines.

The more extended pieces create increasingly complex spaces. “Lullaby Much Further” combines near silence with a dauntingly mysterious collection of sounds and a complex web of connections, while “Hocket Fierce Peaceful” achieves the contradictory character of its title by setting a flute of almost unearthly tranquility amidst a maze of abstract and decorative electronic keyboards. 

 

Sofia Borges - Rieko Okuda - Peter Van Huffel -- Lagrangian Points (4daRecord, 2026) 

Equally mixed in its combinations of the acoustic and the electronic, Lagrangian Points differs significantly in being a documentary recording of a live performance from Berlin’s Morphine Raum, all the electronic processing going on simultaneously with the acoustic. Sofia Borges plays drums. percussion and electronics; Rieko Okuda, piano, keyboards and electronics; Peter Van Huffel alto and baritone saxophones and electronics.

According to the liner note “ Lagrangian Points are zones of delicate balance where forces align and bodies can remain suspended. In that sense, the trio forms a system of its own: each voice holds and is held by the others, maintaining a moving equilibrium, with enough space left open for the imagination to drift beyond its edges.” That particularly double identity is linked to the presence of electronics employed by each trio member, to the extent that instrumental identities can blur into one another.

The opening “Ghost Currents” initially seems to emphasize Okuda’s electronic keyboards and Borges’ percussion, but within moments the music’s distinctive complexity is apparent, many of the sounds traceable to their acoustic origins, but nonetheless operating in a transformative state, the three elaborating waves of sound that might suggest a wholly electronic extension of an improvising ensemble akin to Cecil Taylor’s trio with Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons.

“Parallax” introduces a subtle world of discreet electronic distortions, near-invocations of piano strings and metallic percussion all of these combining to suggest alien transmissions from space as well as a distinctly human music. Just as Alexander Hawkins’ electronic webs on No Nation But Imagination can make Nicole Mitchell’s flute seem alien, Van Huffel’s alto here might be purely acoustic at times, yet his aptitude for abstraction is such that his alto suggests something quite different, almost a harmonica, its voice swimming in an electronic maze, until electronic alterations to the saxophone draw it wholly into an intermediate zone floating between the acoustic and the electronic.

With the final track, “Hypnopompia”, Van Huffel’s saxophone initially provides an acoustic line in an alien soundscape, but as the surrounding sound grows increasingly menacing (there is a suggestion of hybrid alien predators), his sound gradually mutates, becoming closer and closer to the world that surrounds him, achieved with a brilliant combination of acoustic and electronic techniques. As Van Huffel moves further towards the electronic, Borges briefly inhabits the acoustic role, but the ultimate group movement will be almost wholly electronic.

These two remarkable recordings together articulate a new terrain, reflective of an increasingly mediated world, one in which the likelihood of deception conditions interpretation, one in which art and its appreciation might increasingly stretch both creative and interpretive acts toward surveillance.

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Abdelnour/Loriot/Meier/Niggenkemper – Et il y aura… (Veto Records, 2026)

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos 

The music made by this quartet possesses agility and versatility at the same time. They move quite easily from organized sounds to more improvised territories, while at the same time the sounds they produce seem fluid like modern composition and edgy as any good improvised, but jazz based, recording. Veto records has done it again, producing extraordinary music that defies boundaries.

Christine Abdelnour plays alto saxophone with long notes and phrases, Frantz Loriot utilizes his viola in many ways, David Meier reserves his bass drum (and some objects) for rhythmic reasons and not, while Pascal Niggenkemper is always a chameleon with his double bass.

The quartet is not in a hurry, takes it’s time to build, like a slow sculpture procession, the sounds and the atmosphere in both tracks of the cd that plays nearly for an hour. Improvising is a way, a path that allows many ways for the players. Here, all four of them choose to follow a path and follow four different trajectories, in parallel, but play in unison at the same time. I could comment that their music derives from the European avant-garde, a term I do not like because it has so elitism within it. But there are times that it is a proclamation of new ideas and of the willingness to explore sonically.

This is the case here with this cryptically titled CD. Both long tracks are open fields of audio explorations that don’t want to be labeled as anything. Only good, adventurous music that cannot be tagged. One of the best for 2026 so far.

Listen here:
 

@fot.isn

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[AHMED] - Play Monk (Otoroku, 2026)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

It was only a matter of time. In the cosmology of our music, one thing was certain: the orbits of Thelonious Monk and [Ahmed] were destined to overlap, after having crossed in the name of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Monk's bassist in the late 1950s quartet, heard on 1958's Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, as well as on the album with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall unearthed in 2005. Pat Thomas (piano), Seymour Wright (alto sax), Joel Grip (double bass), and Antonin Gerbal (drums) "make music about (Note: bear in mind this "about" because is the key to almost everything) Ahmed Abdul-Malik, they excavate, re-inhabit, and use a-new the now overlooked documents and fragmentary plans of his mid-20th-century synthetic vision to produce a new jazz imagination for the 21st century. 

[Ahmed] and Abdul share a critical engagement with time, specifically in challenging its linear trajectory and offering sites and modes of synthesis and rupture instead. In their music, fragments of time are scattered and re-arranged in the present". So says the band's official statement, which theoretically should explain everything. Theoretically. Malik (1927-1993), son of Caribbean immigrants, was a NYC bassist, oudist, composer, educator and philosopher, he played with Art Blakey, Earl Hines and Randy Weston and his albums Sahara (1958) and East Meets West (1960) fused aspects of Arabic and East African musics and thought, his committed long-term relationship with Sufi Islam and then-modern jazz and thinking, in revolutionary and vital way. But, as well as honoring these traditions, Malik's straddling, synthetic and inclusive vision is one of the great projects of imagination in jazz. He mixed sounds and ethics, meanings and beliefs in open, experimental ways, without any dogma and this became the true north for [Ahmed]: to visit and re-think his compositions and the process potential in them. This is why we emphasized the adverb "about": neither covers, nor lab experiments in cold musical eugenics; neither free jazz, nor classic (even two super skilled listeners and reviewers like Lee and Fotis, in past reviews, scratched their heads between amazement and ecstasy) but a hypnotic Black Monolith that has cast an enigmatic and fascinating shadow for some years, writing a new chapter destined to remain in the Annals of Music. 

From the very first time we heard them, the immediate reference for us, rather than the music, was the cubist painting, in which we found all the elements expressed by [Ahmed] and vice versa: the break with traditional perspective; the geometric decomposition; the simultaneity of views; the reduced color palette and the use of collage. Art must not portray reality but interpret it, like a cognitive tool, as per cubists’ First Commandment, and Pat Thomas & co. are exactly abiding by that. After 6 albums, (all excellent but “Giant Beauty” and “[Sama’a] (Audition)” are two real, unmissable, t-rex carnivorous records) and a 7-inch, here finally, after having engaged with Monk’s standards in various individual or collective ways, the hesitation is broken and [Ahmed] “Play Monk”: when a title says it all. In 2 CDs recorded in March 2025 at Fish Factory Studios (the same “Sama’a” recording sessions), with a cover photo of the legendary pianist at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, portrayed by the lens of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter that alone is worth the purchase of the album, 6 standards (“Bye-Ya/Epistrophy,” “Friday Thirteenth,” “Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy,” “Evidence,” “Oskar T.)” are atomized in the particle accelerator, “transforming each composition into a shifting quantum time artifact. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and spatial gestures of each piece become complex vernacular forms, creating a dialogue in time and a (red)shifting lens through which to view our material present. Into the fissures of Monk’s form, [Ahmed] pour their own play, colliding and dancing with Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Caribbean diasporic music, European improvisation, and Jah Shaka in their pursuit of future music,” to borrow Otoroku’s notes. Too much? If you trust just a little bit in your humble writer: NOT.AT.ALL. As usual, they set out and ride pedal to metal, no self-indulgence or self-referential (or falsely free-form) rotating solos, but a “wall of sound” that Phil Spector would have liked to produce, where more than playing the notes, they use them and the ideas in and about them, as a vehicle for their unique imagination, moving from what they know into new uncharted, creative lands. 

It’s too easy to predict that this album will take no prisoners in our end-of-year Top Tens, but it’s even really hard to imagine what other albums will live up to it. We’d like to close with the words of the great Luke Stewart, certainly much more titled than us, in expressing a reflection on Abdul-Malik and [Amed]: “The journey of self-discovery, communing with the eternal sound. A musician steeped in multiple worlds; oceans apart yet closely connected in ancestral memory. Musicians such Abdul-Malik were able to experience the global community of sound warriors, drawing inspiration from ancient cultures to support personal investigation. The connection was made clear, the music of Africa would certainly influence the African in America despite the atrocities of the Middle Passage, chattel slavery and continued racist violence that sought to sever any connection to the continent. The beauty of Malik’s investigation is this original fusion of new music (Jazz) of the African in America with ancient music of Africa. It is a shining example of collaboration in culture, where the music is allowed to shine for itself. This is the inspiration that is being tapped, being explored in this collaboration where rhythm is the basis for the sound. Just like Malik, [Ahmed] allow the spirit of the collective push the sound as the music develops into exalted chaos. Joy Be Upon Us!”I

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