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Abdul Wadud, from the LP Julius Hemphill + Abdul K. Wadud – Live In New York Album Photography By G. Gallina, M. Mangiarotti |
I think every jazz lover's heart will jump up at the first drums and cello notes of "Dogon AD", the brilliant composition by Julius Hemphill on the album with the same name. Its phenomenal rhythm, its haunting bowed cello, the crisp drums by Philip Wilson, the astonishing performances by both Hemphill and Caroll on horns, make this music even today still a revelation. I can encourage you to listen to the entire album and enjoy it in full. Wadud shines on all pieces, navigating the most complex rhythms and adding a lot to the overall sound.
Wadud was born on April 30, 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio as Ronald Earsal DeVaughn. He started playing sax and cello at the age of 8, played in school bands, and later studied at Youngstown State University 1966-1967 and at Oberlin College Conservatory 1968-1970. At Oberlin, Wadud made his debut recording with the Black Unity Trio with their recently re-released Al-Fatihah. Here is a long and interesting interview with Wadud in Point of Departure, with Joel Wanek and Tomeka Reid as interviewers.
According to Peter Brötzmann, Manfred Eicher’s ECM label "cuts the balls off powerful groups," with the result that they all sound the same, which he finds awful*. Now, if you only consider Gard Nilssen’s first two albums with his Acoustic Unity** (which is Nilssen on drums, André Roligheten on saxophones and clarinet and Petter Eldh on bass), - especially the outstanding triple album Live in Europe released on Clean Feed in 2017 - you’d be inclined to agree with the German fire-breather. But of course, it’s not that simple. Already To Whom Who Buys a Record (Odin Records, 2019), the band’s third album, didn't sound as wild and free as Live in Europe, instead one could sense a strong hardbop influence. In addition, there were also ballads like "Broken Beauty," which pointed to where the journey with the Acoustic Unity could go. Moreover, Nilssen has recorded for ECM before, for example on Mathias Eick’s Skala (2011) and on two albums by the Maciej Obara Quartet (Unloved, 2017 and Three Crowns, 2019). So, the step to present their new album Elastic Wave on the Munich label was somehow logical.
Even though the Acoustic Unity doesn’t sound as brute as it did in their beginning, dynamic interactions, a sense of swinging pulse, and bold, sharply delineated themes are still among the trio’s defining characteristics. Another one is their stylistic flexibility, which has its roots in shared experiences; the three have known each other since 2005.
Many influences come together in the trio’s music. In Roligheten’s saxophone playing you can hear Ornette Coleman, and when he plays the clarinet, Jimmy Giuffre’s style shines through. In general, the Giuffre Trio has clearly influenced the sound and harmonies of this album (e.g. in “Dreignau“). On “The Other Village“, he plays tenor and soprano saxophone simultaneously, which sounds as if Roland Rahsaan Kirk was playing Mediterranean bagpipes. On the whole, the trio offers a comprehensive overview of modern jazz history. This can be heard in the opener “Altaret“, a piece by Petter Eldh that comes across as freely contrapuntal, indicating to the trio’s concept of openness and freedom in improvisation and composition.
Gard Nilssen has named Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Ed Blackwell, Roy Haynes and Jack DeJohnette as influences that have shaped his drumming style. But Jon Christensen’s well-known "Waves of Sound" approach has obviously also been an inspiration. To pay tribute to ECM’s drumming tradition, he brought one of Christensen's cymbals to the "Elastic Wave" session and integrated it as a second ride cymbal into the overall sound of his drum set. The title of the track "Lokket til Jon, og skjerfet til Paul" (Norwegian for: The lure for Jon, and the scarf for Paul) alludes to Christensen on the one and and on the other hand to a scarf that Paul Motian had once left behind in a studio, and which is used here to soften the bass drum’s resonating harmonics.
Finally, even those who appreciate the old Acoustic Unity will also find what they are looking for here: with its hard, lively drive "Acoustic Dance Music" is a piece reminiscent of the Ornette Coleman Trio’s recordings at the Circle in Stockholm.
All in all, Elastic Wave is simply a very diverse and coherent album in itself, which rather focuses on airiness and sound range. To say that the music would have no balls seems definitely too harsh.
Elastic Wave is available as a CD and as a download. You can find it on the usual streaming devices and you can listen to a short snippet here:
* Christoph J. Bauer: Brötzmann Gespräche (Posth Verlag, p. 75)
** The two album’s on Clean Feed are named Gard Nilssen’s Acoustic Unity, while the last two album are filed under Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity
By Paul Acquaro
Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Borderlands Trio. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Matt Mitchell and Sara Schoenbeck. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
John Zorn's New Masada Quartet. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
By Paul Acquaro
Ava Mendoza. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
João Lencastre Unlimited Dreams. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Rodrigo Pinheiro and Pedro Carneiro. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Nate Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain VI. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Gulbenkian Choir. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
By Gary Chapin
It wasn’t intended this way, but I’ve been listening to these two albums as a playlist along with two Mahakala discs from last year: Futterman and Hirsh’s Warp & Weft, and Fowler and Hirsh’s Two Five None. The four recordings, which feature every possible duet from this group along with the trio, has become a cornerstone to my summer 2022 listening. Beach music playlist!
Joel Futterman is the musical exemplar of the evolutionary idea of “Humans as Persistence Hunters.” This concept says that humans excel not because of spectacular structures of fierceness (e.g., giant saber teeth, or vicious claws on our hind legs), but because we persist. We keep going. We learn things. And then we keep going, having learned things.
You can see this in his own story of dogged practice over hours and hours, hunting the moment, but I also see this in my experience of Ebb & Flow, made up of two parts, each of which stand entirely on their own as an experience. For me, on these records, the unit of relevance is the track, not the album. I play “Part 1,” at 37-ish minutes, and I need to sit with it for a while. It’s a complete free jazz statement, and it becomes more sublime the longer you are in it. In this way it is like Warp & Weft a glorious monster of a duet between Hirsh and Futterman (clocking in at an hour fifty) and which pays dividends the deeper you stay under its water.
This is in the territory cleared by Taylor, Lyons, and Murray, but Futterman, Fowler, and Hirsh have their own voices and own conversations. The three are fantastically responsive to each other, in all their non-idiomatic, non-narrative glory. The invented melodies never stop surprising and satisfying. Hirsh, in particular, along with laying down a field of exploding stars, contributes and responds to the melodies in an intriguing klangspielen way. “Part 2” starts in a dark ballad space, and then runs through the tumult until, 25-ish minutes in, you’re in a sparse, bluesy space, suggestive of isolation and noir. There’s always a story, just not always the kind you’d expect. Before long the saxophone is riding the avalanche being played by the piano.
Timeless Moments , which puts Futterman and Fowler in duet, is made up of shorter statements. While still spending much time in the free jazz space, there are explicit (to me) echoes of Dolphy, Monk, McCoy Tyner and gut bucket blues. These genresque side quests set this set apart from the others. It’s a genuine blast having the duo move from outer space to earth music and back again. The two modes illuminate each other well.
I notice Mahakala has released a quartet record, The Deep, which adds William Parker to this amazing trio. While writing this I’ve gone and bought it on Bandcamp, a delightful bit of procrastination. Now my playlist will have five discs in.
Since first emerging a few years ago on Darkened, Yet Shone, in a trio with John Edwards and Eddie Prévost, N.O. Moore has appeared as a distinctly electric, even electronic guitarist (“guitarism” is his term for it). It’s evident, too, in another trio with Prévost (Nous with saxophonist Jason Yarde [Matchless]) and when pairing with the similarly electronic guitarist Henry Kaiser in the quintet of The Secret Handshake with Danger (577). Playing with the quartet Improvisers Inside Electronics on The Birds of Four Mirrors (dx/dy), Moore has forgone the guitar entirely in favour of electronics, playing “stereo field and dark energy”. His previous solo guitar recording, Dreamt Across Tangled Electron , on the Bandcamp label Breaking Up in the Atmosphere, is adamantly electronic.
Llanfechain , named for the Welsh village in which it was recorded, changes that dramatically. Playing a steel-string flattop acoustic guitar, both indoors and out, Moore reveals a musical personality as developed in the acoustic realm as in the electric. The first six pieces, from 1:16 to 6:42 in length, are entitled “inside a” to “inside f”. The first is a miniature, a brief reverie, while “inside b” immediately establishes Moore’s authority. He has a facility with complex materials that suggests a drum kit, both in its percussiveness and in the ability to both combine and move rapidly amongst multiple sounds. “inside c”, a more extended reverie than “a”, is filled with subtle resonances among harmonics, while “d” is shape-shifting, moving through a passage of micro-glissandi to single-note phrases animated anew by legacy jazz phrasing. “inside e” explores dissonances within tight-knit, microscopically varied, percussive phrases; “inside f” is almost dance-like, ranging from odd, compound arpeggios to memories of skittering jazz and even spectral syncopation.
As fine as this material is, it may feel prefatory to the ultimate “Outsides”, a 27-minute piece recorded in the Welsh countryside. From the outset, the harmonics are allowed to hang longer in the air, phrases seem to stretch further, with more space between them. A segment can mix short, scintillating, upper-register glissandi with sudden propulsive bass figures (as if some mysterious boogie is going on somewhere, somewhen, seeping through the earth and time). A muffled, reflective aside might arise, or there may be a sense of sustained wandering in a new territory, anticipation and hesitation mingling with each subtle shift in direction. Relations between adjacent tones or a single interval might be interrogated. Moments of reverie can turn pensive, and vice versa, the music reflecting and inspiring a concentration on instants, moments evolving into other dimensions with unexpected yet organic shifts in technique and mood, until by the closing moments, Moore achieves levels of complexity and intensity that suggest the oddly blues-reminiscent virtuosity of certain Indian string players.
The cumulative impact of Moore’s flattop, metal-string, indoor/outdoor acoustic improvisations is a kind of compound creative intimacy, combining something of the familiarity of the “American Primitive” school (John Fahey, Robbie Basho) with the lightning mutations and concentrated invention of free improvisation (Derek Bailey, John Russell).
Instant Composers Pool galore
By Stef Gijssels
In the slipstream of the article on Thomas Heberer, I will add this quick overview of recent ICP Orchestra Releases, on which the German trumpeter has been a member for many decades.
The Instant Composers' Pool (ICP) was founded in 1967 by Willem Breuker on saxes, Misha Mengelberg on piano and Han Bennink on drums. The trio shared a good musical education with a common aversion to conformity and reproducing what others had composed. They found each other in a new way of making music, full of spontaneity, improvisation and daring explorations. They did not reject tradition completely. Musicians like Herbie Nichols, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk were often the subject of projects that the band set up.
When Breuker left the band in 1974, Mengelberg and Bennink continued with the ensemble, making it a loose gathering of like-minded musicians, which means that over the years, the line-up and the music was very much open to change.
After the death of Mengelberg in 2017, the current core line-up consists of
Anteloper. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Black Monument Ensemble. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Tashi Dorji. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Turquoise Dream. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Voltaic Trio. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
أحمد [ahmed]. Photo: Gulbenkian Música – Vera Marmelo |
Free = liberated from social, historical, psychological and musical constraints
Jazz = improvised music for heart, body and mind