Wadada Leo Smith & Joe Morris - Earth’s Frequencies (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2024) *****

By Jury Kobayashi

On February 12^th, 2023, I was fortunate enough to attend a concert featuring Wadada Leo Smith and Joe Morris at Morris’s concert series Improvisation Now, which is held at Hartford Connecticut’s Real Art Ways. The concert left a huge impact on me, and I spent a solid year contemplating what I heard on that day. What I did not realize was that fortunately enough the concert was recorded and has since been released as an album titled Earth’s Frequencies.

This album is an important document of two seasoned musicians performing together at the highest level. There was something electric in the air that day—I remember the audience being crammed in and watching additional chairs being set up to accommodate a larger audience than was originally anticipated. I remember looking around and recognizing faces of many musicians in the audience, all of whom were anticipating what was about to happen.

What happened that day was magic. It was one of those musical experiences that is hard to describe but you know when you are listening to it that you will never forget it. The recording captures the magic beautifully. The album itself is impeccably recorded, mixed, and mastered. The album artwork is striking, and the packaging of the CD comes together perfectly.

Describing the music in the album is not an easy task. Smith and Morris engaged in a highly precise performance where they played in an intense duet which, owing to Smith’s conception of Rhythm-Units and Morris’s careful study of Smith’s music, resulted in a complex tapestry of sound and silence. Sounds emerged from both players respective instruments sometimes with piercing accents that die away and other times emerging and growing out of silence. Morris’s guitar is breath-like in this performance, and it often sounds like an organ somehow swelling into Smith’s beautiful trumpet playing. Smith changes timbre frequently with the careful use of a mute or un-muted trumpet or simply with changes in embouchure. The result is a fantastic set of sounds and some of the most sophisticated level of music making that I have ever heard. This album is a must have and this concert series is one to pay attention to.

A note on the concert series: Improvisation Now is a concert series curated by Joe Morris at Real Art Ways a gallery located in Hartford Connecticut. Morris invites a variety of improvisers to play, and he often plays both guitar and bass. This year will see Morris also on percussion and electronics and banjouke as well. A link to the series can be found below:

https://www.realartways.org/raw-events/improvisations-now/

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Anthony Braxton Saxophone Quartet –Sax Qt (Lorraine) 2022 (I dischi di angelica, 2024) *****

By Don Phipps

“Music for me is part of spirituality. Music for me is part of science. Music for me is part of trying to understand myself.” Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton continues to amaze. After 55 years of music-making, composing, and teaching, one might think he would call it a lifetime and enjoy his emeritus status as the dean of avant-garde free music. But NO. Braxton, now 79, continues to pursue excellence, and this 4-CD masterpiece should be considered a capstone of sorts, built on several fundamental schools (he calls them “structures”) of musical thought, each structure a foundation for his next advancement. One might expect this from an alum of the 1960’s ground-breaking Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Creativity flows through his being like water cascading down a waterfall.

On Sax Qt (Lorraine) 2022, Braxton uses electronics as a mood-setting backdrop in four live saxophone quartet concerts. The performances, held in the cities of Vilnius, Antwerp, Rome, and Bologna, feature Braxton (alto, soprano, and sopranino saxophones, electronics), James Fei (sopranino and alto saxophones), and Chris Jonas (alto and tenor saxophones). The fourth sax alternates. Ingrid Laubrock (soprano and tenor saxophones) plays the Antwerp, Rome, and Bologna dates while André Vida (baritone, tenor, soprano saxophones) performs on the Vilnius date .

Sax Qt (Lorraine) 2022 might be considered a sequel to Braxton’s 10-disc box set 10 Comp (Lorriane) 2022 (Tri-Centric/New Braxton House, 2024), which was recorded in various live settings in 2021. Those 10 discs are possibly the first recordings of Braxton’s new “Lorraine” syntax.

Braxton has dabbled with electronics in the past – most notably with the late avant-garde composer and electronic music pioneer Richard Teitelbaum. The duo recorded Trio and Duet (Sackville, 1974) and collaborated on one number (“Side 2, Composition 1”) from the classic album “New York, Fall 1974” (Arista 1975). They also recorded a complete 1994 concert “Duet: Live at Merkin Hall” (Music And Arts Programs Of America, Inc. 1996). Teitelbaum was an early practitioner of electronic music, and these intriguing collaborations not only reveal Braxton’s interest in electronic music, but his willingness to embrace new ideas and technologies on his climb towards, for lack of a better expression, his destiny.

The music of Sax Qt (Lorraine) 2022 is not for the faint of heart or mind. But it is not menacing or aggressive. Instead, it voyages forth like the astronaut hurled into space to greet the unknown in Stanley Kubrick’s Star Gate Sequence from his sci-fi movie “2001, A Space Odyssey.” In fact, these quartets could easily be the soundtrack for that part of the movie – with the listener as the astronaut propelled into the beyond.

What is fascinating across the four compositions is the degree of formalism applied. All the numbers have structure and yet the musicians are given freedom at times to pursue alternative paths to the same destination. Listening to them come together in single note phrases and split apart into runs that hop from one player to the next with amazing dexterity and timing is, in a word, spellbinding. Then you have Braxton’s compositions inverting the structure of improvisation, with a saxophonist playing a hot and heavy array of notes behind saxophones playing a single sustained note (whereas traditionally, one would expect the hot saxophone to be in front of the other instruments). This is the breakthrough of Braxton’s Lorraine structure –to quote Jim Morrison, a “break on through to the other side.”

This new musical vocabulary – a language of the future - is buttressed by the amazing talents of the saxophonists Braxton performs with – each of the musicians play multiple saxophones (requiring adjusting to different and multiple embouchures on the fly), and this variety of saxophones create a riveting mix of texture and color. Behind their efforts, Braxton offers transfixing electronic sounds – sounds that achieve an almost superposition within the music. Like physics, where the superposition in quantum mechanics, to quote physicist Paul Dirac, “is of an essentially different nature from any occurring in the classical theory,” so likewise is Braxton’s Lorraine – an essentially different nature of music and sound. Momentum, sound wave properties, the sound wavefunction, the sound matrix mechanics – all contribute to Braxton’s breakthrough structure. It is as if Jackson Pollock was dripping sound on canvas - so radical a separation it is from “classical (music) theory.”

Braxton has been building up to this is whole life. From the interview (see the Lino Greco video link beneath this review), he describes his model of “Tri-centric” music as a ground level structure that consists of geometric shapes - a circle, a rectangle, and a triangle. These three shapes are based on what he says is the ancient music model: “Every region of the planet (European, Arabic, Chinese, Egyptian, Persian, etc.) has contributed to bringing us to where we are in the modern era…. All of it comes together and we learn from everything we experience.”

He expands on this: “I see my work as an attempt to build a model that is similar to what we have in actual reality,” and says that before Lorraine, his Tri-centric music was concerned with erecting ground floor-based musical structures. However, the Lorraine music takes flight above the Tri-centric structures “in the same way as clouds are separate from the earth… (Lorraine) was conceived as breath, breath and wind… the act of breathing….” As such, Braxton says the Lorraine music portrays an ethereal world.

That word, ethereal, is a great description of the music found on Sax Qt (Lorraine) 2022 . Unique might be another word. There is an unsettling, subtle nervousness to the music – a quality that is as much cerebral as it is provocative and challenging. Take the opening of Composition 436, with its eerie electronics and saxophone lines that leapfrog about and roll around in robust and driving multi-note expressions. The musical texture shifts in odd ways – from single notes to multi notes, one solo shifting to all four musicians playing simultaneous controlled improvisations. Or later, in the fourth movement, where the saxophones sound like birds flocking together – the patterns repetitive and yet unique. Then suddenly, there is silence - arcs of sound abruptly interrupted.

And to demonstrate the flexibility of his Lorraine system, you can hear bluesy slides in the second movement of Composition 437 and even a hint of kazoo! Listen to how the abstractions flow as it concludes. The third movement is even more wild. Braxton uses the electronics to erect strange and evocative soundscapes that resemble surfaces that expand limitlessly outward. On Composition 438’s second movement, listen at the end to the way the musicians engage in conversation using their instruments. Disparate parts that somehow make a whole. And in the third movement, he follows the syncopated sax lines with Stravinsky-like flutters.

Then there is the opening of the fourth movement of Composition 439, where all hell breaks loose – free(dom) form at its finest. The music flows into piercing abstract note configurations, and then – suddenly - one lonely saxophone blowing a long note that stretches like a rubber band. And on the fifth and final movement, Braxton demonstrates what he calls genetic identity, where a composer can take two or three measures from one piece and put it in another piece. In the movement, he inserts lines that recall music from his late 70s period with his excellent Performance quartet [which featured Ray Anderson on trombone, John Lindberg on bass, and Thurman Barker on percussion – Performance 9/1/79 - hat Hut NINETEEN (2R19)] and his excellent Basel quintet [(which featured George Lewis on trombone, Muhal Richard Abrams on piano, Mark Helias on double bass, and Charles "Bobo" Shaw on drums - Quintet (Basel) 1977, hatOLOGY – hatOLOGY 676)].

After listening to these ethereal masterpieces, one wonders where Braxton will go next. In the Greco video, he says he wants to develop music beneath the Tri-centric model (e.g., sound tunnels or sound caves). And he wants to continue his work on operas and sonic genomes. “I’m trying with my system to make a replica of everything that exists,” he says. But, too, he realizes time is limited. “Time is running out. Just because I am poor, it does not mean that I don’t have great dreams! …I’m grateful to be alive. I have work to do for the rest of my life! I want to do the best that I can do…. I want to evolve myself. I want to evolve my work.”

Would that Braxton could have all the time in the world to realize his visions, and that we had all the time in the world to follow them into the deep canyons, towering mountains, and vast space of sound. Even so, we can make the music of his imagination our imagination. Highly recommended.

Video of Braxton explaining the Lorraine system:

Video of excerpt of Bologna performance

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Natsuki Tamura & Jim Black - NatJim (Libra Records, 2024)

By Stef Gijssels

The fun thing about Natsuki Tamura and Satoko Fujii is their incredible versatility. Gentle mainstream jazz, folk jazz, orchestral jazz, intimate duets or jazz fusion, are just a few examples of their stylistic scope. Trumpet-player Natsuki Tamura dares to go a step further in his personal endeavours, as testified by this album with drummer Jim Black. On his previous album, "Summer Tree" (2022), all tracks were titled with the word 'summer' in them. Now the word is 'city': Morning City, Afternoon City, City of Dusk, City of Night, Quiet City, Noisy City, Calm City, Bright City. 

The pieces are short, compact and all 'composed' around a core concept : a few lines, a theme, a mode of interaction. Some pieces are completely improvised. Black shows himself the perfect companion for Tamura's enthusiasm, his pleasure of creating, with a lot of space for heavy tribal drumming. It's an ode to music, to life, to vitality. It's intense, relentless, infectious and very special. I share one track, "Bright City", below which demonstrates their art: it's wonderfully direct, with Tamura singing some incomprehensible incantations, without any constraints, raw, simple in its concept yet surely hard to perform, full of boyish passion and fun. And listen to Black's drumming. Despite or precisely because of his mastery of the instrument, his drumming sounds so simple, so straightforward, so full of life energy and so exciting. In a way it's brutal, unsophisticated, without flourishes: a musical language stripped to its core. 

Tamura and Black released their first album together already in 1999, "White & Blue", and as members of the Satoko Fujii Four, with "Live In Japan 2004" (2005), and "When We Were There" (2006). Black has also been a regular member of the Satoko Fujii Trio. 

It's only after writing this review, that I actually took notice of the liner notes, written by Satoko Fuji. Here is an excerpt that is fully in line with my own response: 

"This time, I figured nothing Tamura did would surprise me. After he completed the recording in Bern and I finished a gig in Nantes, we met up at a hotel in Paris, where I finally got to hear what he had recorded. Once again my jaw dropped. For one thing, he and Jim are in incredible form. They sound like whirling dervishes, playing with a vigor that utterly belies their ages (Tamura is 72 and Jim is 56). The tracks overflow with the sheer joy of music-making, and they let that energy take them where it will. As a musician I'm awed by their ability to unleash a performance like this, at their age, especially in the midst of jet lag after flying for hours in economy class. "

The great thing is that both men have maintained their youthful enthusiasm and energetic joy for free music. 

Whatever your age, this is guaranteed to keep you young, this is guaranteed to make you happy. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Rodrigo Amado: Two New Recordings

By Stuart Broomer

Released just three weeks apart in October, two new recordings by Rodrigo Amado represent an embarrassment not of riches but meanings and values, in a world seemingly tearing itself apart. As different as they are, each is a masterpiece. Both recorded in mid-2023 in Lisbon, they also share very rare and contradictory qualities. Each resonates strongly with the character of certain great 1960s music: that is, a collective passion that initially surmounts formal constraints, then breaks through to create ultimately original formal structures. Simultaneously, each feels as immediate as this week’s (November 4 to 10, 2024) headlines, whether it’s a flood in Valencia, an election in America, an ongoing invasion in Ukraine, or an unnameable and terrible mystery of genocides in Gaza and random stabbings in too many other places to keep track. These musics are benedictions, sometimes harsh, sometimes light-filled, always intense, musics of large and transcendent feelings, a sonic equivalent to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy .

The Attic (Rodrigo Amado, Gonçalo Almeida, Onno Govaert) and Eve Risser - La Grande Crue (No Business, 2024) 

This CD was recorded on July 31, 2023, when the Attic -- Amado’s trio with bassist Gonçalo Almeida and drummer Onno Govaert-- and pianist Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra were both performing at Lisbon’s Jazz em Agosto. The result of a first-time meeting, it’s a music of mature surprises, brilliant reactions that are somehow constantly integrated felicitously into the development of the music, resulting in work that is not just spontaneously composed, but which might be called spontaneously ordained or invoked.

Its gritty intensity is declared immediately in Almeida’s barbwire arco , something that will be matched by Govaert’s multi-directional explosions and Amado’s tenor, his sound, at once both full and mobile, resembling that of Coltrane during his last years (the sound announced on the summit that was Meditations), when the bright metallic harmonics rolled off for a warm roundness wedded to an intense, variable and taut vibrato. Along with Amado’s shifting sound, sometimes from air to Getz to gravel in a matter of seconds, there is also a surfeit of light in the music, manifesting in a stream of meticulous detail to which everyone contributes. Risser is a pianist of genius and empathy (evident since the trio CD En Corps with Benjamin Duboc and Edward Perraud [Dark Tree, 2012]) and finds varied and distinct approaches on every track, including a percussive upper register that can resemble a xylophone.

The track titles, in French, emphasize existential fundamentals: “Corps” (body), “Peau” (skin), “Phrase” (sentence), “Pierre” (stone). The physical design of the CD package represents profound reflection, even generations of reflection. The jacket illustrations are paintings by Amado’s late father, the distinguished Manuel Amado: they depict architectural interiors that have filled with water: a blank-eyed sculpture of a woman invoking antiquity appears in water; a white architectural column, similarly immersed, casts a dark shadow. There’s a poem by Portuguese poet Nuno Júdice, “Angle”, from his book Jeu de Reflets that serves as liner note, appearing in both French and English. Each track title is the last word in each of the last four lines in sequence. The book’s illustrations came from the same series of paintings, La Grande Crue (“The Great Flood”) by Manuel Amado, that supplies the images on the liner booklet as well as the CD title. The first line of “Angle” is “A luminous reflection dies on the waters of summer.” Along with leading the four movements of the CD, Rodrigo Amado, also the CD’s designer, has created monument, memorial and symphony. 

David Maranha/ Rodrigo Amado - Wrecks (Nariz Entupido, 2024) 

While one can easily go astray conflating a music’s meanings with current events, Bernardo Devlin’s liner essay for Wrecks forcefully ties its mood to the present state of world affairs:

And people, could you believe your luck to bear witness of the edgings of a system slipping through the cracks of its own making? Jokes on EU leaders abounded as Uncle Sam's prophecies tormented somebody's sleep one night and Havana syndrome appeared on the mainstream news. Further in the east things didn't look brilliant either and they were coming closer. North and south, poles were really melting and the Doomsday Clock had ran past it's time. Communications were being shut. What to do?

That aside, however, wrecks aren’t always a bad thing. This Wrecks is a continuous meditation of 44:09 during which Amado on tenor saxophone and David Maranha on electric organ construct a roaring, pulsing wall of sound, sometimes modal, often multi-modal, continuously fractured and refractive. It’s an explosion in a cathedral (to borrow an Alejo Carpentier title) in which the ecstasies of the orderly (traditionally majestic church music, clarion sound and modal reveries) combine with the ecstasies of chaos (sounds compounding into noise and layers of dissonance).

Wrecks begins quietly with a reflective saxophone gradually surrounded by scattered electric sounds and a rising drone. Soon there are fractured polyphonics, circular runs that touch the tenor’s high and low extremes, but that can turn rapidly to elegiac melody amidst the rising, thickening, bruising wall of the organ and electronics that can suggest scraped steel. At times, in the meditative moments particularly, the sounds of the two musicians will merge in a synergy of the human and the machine.

Amado pauses briefly around the 36-minute mark after a sustained reverie, leaving Maranha’s dense modal compound alone, only to return around the 39-minute mark, re-entering with a sustained high-pitch then gradually developing a final oration built largely around a single determined phrase that gradually moves from rough to sweet, a phrase that ultimately repeats against Maranha’s machine song.

A departure from Amado’s highly interactive, usually acoustic trios and quartets, Wrecks might be the most powerful recording to appear this year, a brilliant fusion of impassioned lyricism and holy noise.

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Jazzfest Berlin 2024 - Part I

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By Paul Acquaro

It is always a marker of success when a concert confounds expectations, even if those same expectations had been set by a recording from the group on stage. At Jazzfest Berlin this year, it happened at least twice for me. 

Joe Lovano Trio Tapestry. Photo by Fabian Schellhorn

 

The first time was on the second night of the festival, as saxophonist Joe Lovano's Tapestry Trio with pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Carmen Castaldi worked up an inexplicable magic. Perhaps this should not have been entirely unexpected, after all,Crispell had performed a mesmerizing solo set on the opening night of the festival, stitching her own quilt of romantic melodic lines that unraveled unhurriedly into subversive dissonances and unusual abstractions. 

 

Marilyn Crispell. (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

When Crispell's voicings, however, were laced into the fabric of the trio, the interconnecting strands of Lovano's lines, which shifted between hushed introspection and broad melodic arcs, along with Castaldi expressive percussion work, resulted in a hour long set of intellectually captivating and emotionally gripping music. The group snaked through diffuse passages, where each strand was seemingly taking its own direction, only to quickly erupt into colorful bursts of collective sound. Their music, which has been captured on the ECM recordings Trio Tapestry (2019), Garden of Expression (2021) and most recently on Our Daily Bread (2023), is flowingly expressive, however on the stage of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the music seemed to reach a whole other connective level.

 

Joachim Kühn (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

 

Then, Joachim Kühn's French Trio on the third night of the festival that was able to eliminate the distance from the stage to the audience. The trio, aside from the German pianist, featured the French musicians Sylvain Darrifourcq on drums and Thibault Cellier on double bass. The trio released The Way on another Munich based label, ACT, this past year. The album is excellent, but it took this unexpectedly engaging concert to introduce me to it properly. On stage, the sounds simply flowed from the 80-year-old pianist's fingers. The show began with Darrifourcq's drums and Kühn introducing, with a light touch, a series of melodic snipped and parts of chords. Add in Cellier's wholly appropriate response on bass an soon the tension began to build. A run of arpeggios in the middle range of piano seemed to trigger a whirlwind of activity from the bass and drums. After an abrupt stop, the trio began their next tune, picking up with the same amount of energy that they left off with. Build ups, followed by ebbing intensity only to rebound moments later, kept the audience enthralled and the musicians equally attentive. A heartfelt story from Kühn about being called out for an encore against the organizer's wishes when he played with his brother Rolf's group at the Berlin Jazzfest 58 years ago led to the audience in 2024 making sure he had the chance to reprise the moment.   

 

Kris Davis (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

Between these two shows, in the middle of the second night, pianist Kris Davis' Diatom Ribbon's took the core of her expansive group from their 2019 recording, namely Val Jeanty on turntable and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, and added bassist Nick Dunston to bring the angular music to life. The smaller group created a sound that both reflected and went beyond the recording. The set began with Dunston playing a rhythmic figure on electric bass, complimented by the sweet sounds of Davis' Fender Rhodes and Carrington's lithe drumming, resulting in a bit of an early 70's fusion brilliance. The following tune found Dunston on upright bass, Davis on acoustic piano and Jeanty adding hypnotic electronics. Their repertoire pulled a composition from Wayne Shorter, as well as from Davis' rich portfolio with tunes like 'Rhizomes,' which on the recording featured Nels Cline guitar but here was recast successfully here with the different instrumentation. So, in a sense, this was a third instance of a transformation between recording and stage, though what was presented on stage was a radical rethinking of the music into something entirely and sublimely different.

 

It goes without saying that there was plenty more to hear an see on all the overstuffed nights of the festival - which began during the daytime with concerts and collaborations with students from the Moabit neighborhood of Berlin working with the likes of Berlin's Michael Griener and Joel Grip (among many others) and spilled out in the evenings beyond the Festspiele hall to the nearby jazzclubs A-Trane and Quasimodo and even to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. 

 

At the Jazzfest proper, groups like audience favorites, the Sun Ra Arkestra, performed sans their 100-year-old leader Marshall Allen. Decked out in retro-future costumes and leading a parade through the audience, the group delivered a set of big-band tunes, the most interesting being the ostinato based 'Lights on a Satellite,' a new arrangement of an older Sun Ra tune that also happens to be the title track from the group's latest album. 

 

Decoy with Joe McPhee. Photo by Fabian Schellhorn

On the opening night, Decoy with Joe McPhee was a pleasure to see and hear. The group, which has Alexander Hawkins on Hammond B3, John Edwards on bass and Steve Noble on drums, is a powerhouse of groove and improvisational titillation. McPhee looked youthful at 85 years old decked out in an AC/DC sweat-shirt and bright red sneakers. The saxophonist relied heavily on his poetry this evening as it seemed like playing the sax was a bit of struggle. Leaning on expressive squawks and slow bluesy melodies, he provided a contrast to the churning power of the band behind him. 

 

BIDA Orchestra (partial). Photo by Fabian Schellhorn

Edwards also appeared later the BIDA Orchestra, a large group led by drummer Sun-Mi Hong, providing both a root for the band as well some of the more out parts of the their set. With powerhouse saxophonists Mette Rasmussen and John Dikeman, along with trumpeter Alistair Payne and keyboardist Josef Dumoulin, the group could - and did - stretch out in many directions. A memorable moment began with synth, bass and drums creating a slow moving molten lava groove that Rasmussen channeled into a steadily erupting solo. Rasmussen played again on Friday night at the Quasimodo jazz club, particularly packed and sweaty this evening, for the electronics-laden group The Sleep of Reasons Produces Monsters. Heavy, dense and pulsating with energy, Rasmussen again applied her volcanic saxophone to great effect.

 

After three nights of music, I got ill and could not rally for the last night. Though I wished to continue celebrate 60 years of Jazzfest Berlin by squeezing into the sold out Haus der Berliner Festspiele for the fourth and final night with the superb Darius Jones and his string group from Vancouver performing  fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s̶ suite but sacred) (see my write up from Jazz em Agosto this year where the group made their European debut) and the always stunning Sylvia Courvosier, it was not to be. To help you get an impression of all I missed, I turn to my colleague Sarah Grosser who helps fill in the gaps and made it through the last night of the festival.

 

Read Part II here.

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Jazzfest Berlin 2024 - Part II

By Sarah Grosser

 

Nov 1, 2024

Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Goran Kajfeš Tropiques 

 

Goran Kajfeš. Photo by Fabian Schellhorn

Goran Kajfeš – trumpet, synthesizer

Alex Zethson – piano, organ, synthesizer

Johan Berthling – double bass

Johan Holmegard – drums

Josefin Runsteen – violin

Leo Svensson Sander – cello

Swedish band Goran Kajfeš Tropiques starts with a 6/4 saunter slowburner. He’s got a good, broad brimmed hat on, accentuating his indie, folky vibe. The Moog piano, drum, contrabass, violin, and cello make for a thoughtful constellation; a nice soft accompaniment for the bright trumpet to stand out from. Easy on the palette to kick things off. Accessible, passionate, warm, and pretty. It’s lovely watching the cello and violin in perfect sync, swaying together.

The show is made up of instantly likeable and memorable compositions. Long journeys, made up of playful time signatures that, although they are subtly complex, give the illusion of simple grooves. Goran's reverby trumpet floats effortlessly over the top of it all adding a dreamy sheen. Towards the end there is an almost aggressive, arpeggiating solo on violin and piano. When the cymbals/ride join the trio of piano, violin, and cello, the release is like a summer rainstorm… and the trumpet is a rainbow.(Multi-talented violinist Josefin Runsteen also plays a mean drum n’ bass triangle.)

Upon exiting the theatre, vague negativity could be overheard in german:

"I expected more from Goran and his trumpet."

"This is just music to listen to at home."

There is simply no pleasing some people.

I enjoyed it very much.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Quasimodo 

 

Part I

Photo by Lea Hopp

Mariam Rezaei – turntables

Mette Rasmussen – alto saxophone

Gabriele Mitelli – piccolo trumpet, electronics

Lukas König – drums, electronics

The venue permits 100 people and the view from my seat is mainly heads, but from time to time we get a glimpse of the queen Mette Rasmussen on sax. The spirit of the band is wild. The electro-acoustic sound is almost primal in nature while simultaneously hypermodern; frantic and immediate.

The mix and sound in this club is surprisingly clear, despite how loud it is- there is a lot going on sonically- it's very dense. The textural effects add a trippy modern twist, immediate and freaky. A distorted vocal adds a '90s grunge flavour. The crowd is super diverse: chicks with cocktails rockin' out, long-haired musos swayin', plenty of old boys too but well balanced with inspired, motivated youth. It’s pleasantly surprising to see such an enthusiastic, packed-out audience – it seems crazy that a band this intense would be so popular, but their fame is certainly well earned.

This band is totally psycho – it's just right for the environment. The sub-bass is visceral and crushing. Berlin was made for this. 

 

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Nov 2, 2024

Wrens

Quasimodo 

 

Photo by Lea Hopp

Ryan Easter – trumpet, electronics, vocals

Elias Stemeseder – piano, synthesizers

Lester St. Louis – cello, sound design

Jason Nazary – drums, synthesizers

An electronic-flavored jazz-hip hop fusion. Spoken-word improv-poetry vocalist Ryan Easter is rebellious, political, and justifiably angry. He spoke of all sorts of injustices throughout history, using examples of jazz having stemmed from a place of struggle. Even today, playing in these spaces in Berlin, he incites everyone to come together to recognise and respect the history of the genre. In response to these spoken-word elements the receptive crowd cheered along in total support. This lyrical element created a satisfying mesh and the suitable timbre of Ryan's voice made for an enjoyable listening experience with a powerful context to boot.

Nazary drumming was virtuosic and very busy. Including him, each band member had their own electronic set-up. Even Easter’s trumpet had effects with added electronic elements to its sound, melding it well in the mix with the other instruments. The cello sound was slightly buried, but St. Louis also had his own sub-bass electronics and effects which hit just right. Keyboardist Elias Stemeseder was completely decked out with an assortment of all different sorts of synths, a piano, and various effects. He effortlessly danced from one to the next, creating waves of random glitches and pops, flittering around his 360 setup like a hummingbird.

The performance had loads of good grooves, with the occasional freakout, and peppered with original beats that the crowd was able to get into with ease. Overall, a wonderfully unique, thoroughly engaging show, from a diverse and exciting new band. 

 

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2024-11-03

Artist Talks - Sylvie Courvoisier, Darius Jones, Otomo Yoshihide

Haus Der Berliner Festspiele

 

Darius Jones

First up to the panel, Darius told the story about getting to spend some time staying in the Western Front; a Vancouver non-profit artist-run centre where he was introduced to Josh Zubot's String Quintet, which left him “blown away.” He wrote and lived there for one month, watching dancers, poetry readings, and learning about indigenous, native American culture and the community. For him, it was a profound experience, getting to connect and work with “beautiful, precious musicians.”

Compositionally, Jones mixes graphic with standard notation and improvisational notions to create "a melding within" and a “visual experience” for the listener, asking himself the question, "How do I distort… [the] expectation?" For the piece, "fluXkit: Vancouver," Jones wanted the strings to be "muscular” - aggressive and not simply a support troupe for the saxophone.

He also dropped a big announcement: "fluXkit: Köln" is officially happening. It is planned to be centered around a piano, “prepared to the point where it's destroyed.” They are also seeking funding for this so if you would like to support the project, do get in touch with Mr Jones!

Sylvie Courvoisier

An essential factor for Sylvie when putting a band together is that the players are people she just likes to be with. “Patricia [Brennan] is funny and fun to be around.” Sylvie wants to work with people who are younger than her, saying that, “If they are younger than me, they are better than me... Younger musicians are faster. They can absorb any sheets.”

When writing for Chimera she was dealing with writing for a horn. On composing for trumpet, she claims, “You write differently. You have to be careful.” But when writing for vibraphone she confidently states: "I don't have to be careful with Patricia!" The audience laughs, and so does Patricia, who is watching on from the crowd. In their duo, she composed for two "keyboards," the process made all the more easier as she and Patricia have “similar phrasing.”

Sylvie is totally nonchalant when addressing her previous work. It’s refreshingly down to earth to hear her refer to 2023’s exceptional “Chimera” as “Music for stoners… like, with Fennesz and everything.” But she assures us that tonight’s performance will be a far cry from this. “Poppy Seeds is not for stoners – you should be more alert!”

 

Otomo Yoshihide

"I'm a really bad jazz player. I'm not a skilled guitarist, not much technique, but electronics! I'm like a technician."

Otomo confessed that before 2000, he almost gave up guitar. After his 1990 band Ground Zero ended, he started thinking about new adventures. When asked if he would be playing the guitar tonight, his response was a slightly deflated, but obviously joking: “unfortunately.”

On the influences for his big band project: “I love American free jazz history. [In the music] You can hear all the development from 1920 to now.”

Beyond his passion for American free jazz, Otomo talked about the experience of going to Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake. There he worked with non-musicians, to establish a kind of “community influence.” Traditional “Bon dance” music was popular in these areas, and the people there wanted them to play Bon dance music.

"In Europe, not many people know this style of music, but in Japan, it's well known… If we can make an encore, we will play Bon dance music!"

Otomo’s big band has eighteen members normally, “Tonight… just sixteen.” This elicits a chuckle from the audience, as the downsizing of eighteen to sixteen still renders a mighty number of musicians on stage all at once. Not everyone in Otomo’s band has had experience with European touring before, but according to Otomo, traveling with a 16-piece Japanese band is still "really fun!”

---

Darius Jones fLuXkit: Vancouver (i̶t̶s suite but sacred)

Haus der Berliner Festspiele  

 

Photo by Fabian Schellhorn

 Peggy Lee – cello

Jesse Zubot – violin

Josh Zubot – violin

James Meger – double bass

Gerald Cleaver – drums

Darius Jones – alto saxophone, composition

One has to wonder what the sheet music looks like, after hearing Darius's Artist Talk. The combination of sax and strings sounds like a gaggle of wild geese – the drums are tom-heavy and thudding, plodding, almost militant, and methodical. Occasionally Darius wanders to the back of the stage entirely, allowing the strings to take centre stage in focus. He watches on proudly, and confidently. Although the beat is a continuous pulse, this allows space for the fierce strings to do all the talking. There is a great deal of control. It’s immediate, frantic, percussive, commanding, and indeed "aggressive", but not violent. It’s a statement.

"If you are with your friend tonight- squeeze them tight," is how he introduces a song about friendship. Darius only occasionally articulates, watching the strings tell their story of friendship in a wonky, descending melody. This piece is dedicated to those “friends who are really there to help you out.” It's not a happy song, but through this crazy life, we forge our weird paths, and find our ways to work together. Pushing through, connecting with other weirdos along the way.

Towards the middle, it's a psychotic whirlwind: a massive crescendo like a chest-tightening panic attack. The crowd is totally engrossed. It’s like a mayday alert as the plane is going down or some kind of screaming alarm of danger. But when it's over, there is a soft place to fall. There are even jovial moments on violin, like little jokes to break the tension, and start the healing process. The friend is there at the end to make things seem brighter and better. There is hope and clarity beyond the most tortuous times in our lives.

And the crowd goes ape.

Negative German comment: "Das ist too much."

"Ich brauche meine 'aus zeit'" - "I need my 'out' time."
“Anstrengend. SEHR anstrengend.” - “Stressful. VERY stressful.”

Sylvie Courvoisier Poppy Seeds 

 

Photo by Cristina Marx/Photomusix

 

Sylvie Courvoisier – piano

Patricia Brennan – vibraphone

Thomas Morgan – double bass

Dan Weiss – drum

So here it comes - “NOT music for stoners” - as Sylvie described Poppy Seeds in her Artist Talk. Does it live up to that proclamation? Yes, indeed, it does command attention! The opening piece is very fast with lots of switch-ups and sudden changes. Are you paying attention? Be alert!

Sylvie morphs from a rolling wave to a solid triangle in stance, shifting her pose and changing moods in an instant. Thomas Morgan plays bass with an otherworldly sensitivity. Patricia's vibe solo has you wondering, "Who's show is this anyway?"

And why is every Sylvie show so damn sexy? There is always at least one song with a sultry allure… It's in her blood. This piano was unprepared, but only in a metaphorical sense. Her long back skirt is a glorious statement. She looks and sounds like an icon, together with commanding song titles: “Queen of Spades,” and “King of Hearts.”

The speedy playoffs between drummer Dan Weiss and Patricia are accurate and articulate. Sylvie chimes in with rapid notes from her highest register, emulating crystal icicles melting in some secret cave. The women are the standout here but supported by an outstanding rhythm section - it's the friendly chemistry that makes it work. Sylvie said she only works with people she likes to be around. The last song is a song she wrote for her cat.

(Unfortunately I missed out on seeing Otomo Yoshihide’s big band but I can confirm that Otomo did earn that encore, and they did play Bon dance music!) 

 

Continued from Part I.

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Two organ duets

 By Stef Gijssels

The organ has never been one of my favorite instruments: it conjures up memories of heavy and ponderous religious ceremonies in dusty churches, of an artificial search for drama, of pompous and bombastic effects, as a great ponitifical tool to impress and subdue the impressionable.

Luckily, in the hands of creative people, the instrument can mean more and different things, even if the setting for playing the instrument is almost inevitably in a church. 

Seijiro Murayama & Jean-Luc Guionnet - Balcony Inside (Ftarri, 2024)

French alto saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet and Japanese percussionist Seijiro Murayama have already released several albums together. We reviewed "Le Bruit du Toit (2007)" and "Window Dressing (2011)". They also released "Mishima, Day & Night" (2015) and "Idiophonic" (2018). The latter album is also the first on which Guionnet switches to organ. Their previous album was "March 2017" (2020) with Guionnet on alto. 

On "Balcony Inside" they offer us a long live performance of around fifty minutes without interruption. Like on their previous albums, silence plays a major role, as a kind of anchor point in between the sonic bursts, that occasionally transform into drone-like passages. Murayama punctuates with wordless high-pitched vocalisations or shouts. The music and the sonic environment they create, with both the silence and the space of the church giving it an additional dimension, are mesmerising. Also Guionnet's use of the organ is anything but predictable or common. There are long stretched notes, yet equally sudden multiphonic bursts on many keys, intentionally without real harmonic coherence. At times the volume is so low that you are inclined to turn up the volume, but I would recommend against that to protect your ears. The music is unpredictable but coherent in its total form. 

It's a great testimony of two artists who created their own sound within the avant-garde. 

The album was recorded live at the Taborkirche in Berlin on the 11th of June 2023 (picture below).

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Tabula Sonorum Organum - Sub Aere (Cylinder, 2024)

"Sub Aere" is the work of Bart van Dongen on organ, and Gonçalo Almeida on double bass. Van Dongen is a Dutch conceptual sound artist, composer and musician. Gonçalo Almeida is a Portuguese double bassist and a determining voice on some of the most creative musical projects of the last years. 

On four tracks they present their art, which combines drone-like sounds with moments of strong agitated phrases. The result is strong and full of paradoxes: meditative moments clash with moments of agony, beauty with abrasive sounds. Van Dongen's organ is the primary sound, yet it would never have the same effect without Almeida's deep bowed lines, his piercing sound, his lengthy repetitions. 

It's beyond description. I can only recommend that you check it out. 

The performance was recorded on the 18th October 2023 at the Sint-Martinus Church in Sint-Oedenrode, The Netherlands (picture below). 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Samo Salamon - Sunday Interview

Photo by Janin Vezonik

1. What is your greatest joy in improvised music?
   
   Definitely the moment of unpredictability and the communication with other musicians on stage.
   
   
2. What quality do you most admire in the musicians you perform with?
   
   Openess in music and kindness and humbleness in life.
   
   
3. Which historical musician/composer do you admire the most?
   
   Hmm, tough question since there are so many. But let's from the jazz world, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Bill Frisell, Kenny Wheeler, Ben Monder, John Abercrombie and many others.
   
   
4. If you could resurrect a musician to perform with, who would it be?
   
   Would be interesting to improvise with Bach I think and yeah, I would have loved to play with Eric Dolphy.
   
   
5. What would you still like to achieve musically in your life?
   
   Just trying to stay creative and that music and playing would still present a challenge and bring joy. Where that road takes me doesn't even matter so much. As long as I enjoy it.
   
   
6. Are you interested in popular music and - if yes - what music/artist do you particularly like?
   
   Oh, yes, definitely. I follow a lot of indie music, am a big fan of Ben Howard, Wilco, Band of Horses, Dave Matthews Band and Wolf Alice as well as many singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and others.
   
   
7. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
   
   I wouldn't. I'm happy the way I am.
   
   
8. Which of your albums are you most proud of?
   
   Hard to say since every album has a unique story and is placed in a specific musical and personal period in my life. But let's say I'm definitely happy about the albums with Arild Andersen and Bob Moses (Pure and Simple), with Tony Malaby (Two Hours, Traveling Moving Breathing), with Tim Berne and Tom Rainey (Duality), with Drew Gress and Tom Rainey (Almost Almond) and my solo acoustic album Dolphyology (including all the compositions of Eric Dolphy arranged for acoustic guitar) to single out a few.
   
   
9. Once an album of yours is released, do you still listen to it? And how often?
   
   After the release no, since I have listened to it before the release a looooot. I usually mix and master all of my own albums, so that means a lot of listening and adjusting levels, eqs, etc.
   
   
10. Which album (from any musician) have you listened to the most in your life?
    
    Hmm, heavy question. Probably the album Dirt by Alice in Chains.
    
    
11. What are you listening to at the moment?
    
    Currently listening to a lot of Paul Simon, Neil Young and Steely Dan.
    
    
12. What artist outside music inspires you?
    
    Mainly poets like Robert Creeley or Wallace Stevens and many others. But also visual artists like Kandinsky, Dali, Chaggal, etc. 
    
    

Samo Salamon on the Free Jazz Blog 

• Guitar Week - Closing Statements (almost)
• Samo Salamon, Vasil Hadžimanov & Ra Kalam Bob Moses - Dances of Freedom (Samo Records, 2024)
• Samo Salamon - Dolphyology: Complete Eric Dolphy for Solo Guitar (Samo Records, 2022)
• Samo Salamon & Sabir Mateen - Joy and Sorrow (Klopotec Records, 2022)
• Samo Salamon, Arild Andersen & Ra Kalam Bob Moses - Pure and Simple (Samo Records 2022)
• Samo Salamon and Hasse Poulsen’s String Dancers (Samo Records, 2021) ****
• Guitar - Duos (Part 1): Leading tones, sympathetic harmonies, and unobservable mysteries
• Guitar Roundup
• Guitars! (Part 2 of 2)
• Samo Salamon Sextet - The Colours Suite (Clean Feed, 2017) ****½
• Samo Salamon Bassless Quartet – 2 Altos (Steeplechase) ***½
• Balkan jazz - Top albums

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William Parker & Ellen Christi - Cereal Music (AUM Fidelity, 2024)

By Don Phipps

A heartfelt beautiful effort, bassist William Parker and vocalist and composer Ellen Christi’s Cereal Music will warm your soul. Parker, an acknowledged bass virtuoso and an accomplished performer on bamboo flutes, shakuhachi, flute, and double reeds, combines these instruments with Christi’s compositions and vocals to create an evocative and fascinating backdrop for his poetry. And what sublime poetry it is!

Parker, who performed and recorded with the late great poet David Budbill (check out Parker’s collaboration with Budbill on the excellent “Zen Mountains-Zen Streets: A Duet for Poet and Improvised Bass -Boxholder Records, 1999” and “Songs for a Suffering World: A Prayer for Peace, a Protest Against War - Boxholder Records, 2003” where the pair is joined by percussionist Hamid Drake), uses his own, as he puts it, “text” to offer words of wisdom and spiritual guidance for this dark and troubling moment in history. The music, then, becomes a backdrop to the “text,” like a stage for an actor, as he makes his appeals to humanity’s better angels. And when united with Christi’s tender and soulful voicings and her choice sound production, the compositions pack an emotional wallop.

Music of great beauty permeates the album. And Parker’s gentle reading of his text plays a central role as the music unfolds.

Excerpts from Parker’s poetry:

From “Ode to Kidd Jordan:” “Life is not fair. Only beautiful.” “Hallelujah and the joy of sound.”

From “Baseball:” “I’m concerned about the president who drops bombs on other human beings without blinking an eye. What’s wrong with this guy? What’s wrong with us? Why do we sit back and allow this to happen?”

From “Do Dreams Sleep:” “I want to live in between the rainbow.” “Do dreams sleep? I wonder. Does sadness weep?” “What is, is not, and what is not, is.”

From “Plea:” “The most precise measuring tool is love…. I would mend the world with sound.” “We’re angry because they would not put Willie Mays on the cereal box.”

From “Into My Heart:” “When I see - feel the sound of you, tells me hope is on the way. Today is the day all dreams will fall into my heart.”

From “Sonny:” “I want to be the music.” “Recycle your mind. Renew your membership in the human race…. Lay in the sun on the sparkling rocks.” “Sound of light, vibrating of sound, speech into sound, sound into light.”

From “Uninvited Guest:” “Do your own dirty work Mr. Politician…. If you want someone killed, do it yourself.” “We will not be used any longer.” “You are mentally ill. You have been since 1492.” “It is time to wake up. Step out of the nightmare.”

From “We Were Very civilized:” “I see. I-s-e-a.” “Where is where?” “We have lost our identity.” “We were very civilized before we were civilized.”

From “Batala:” “Every sound is precious.” “Touch the box labeled old song and it comes out new.”

From “Windshield Wipers:” “I was born to be. Born in the middle of two saxophones and three trumpets.”

From “Prayer:” “From above I can see the entire world. I see little children standing on the edge of clouds waiting for angels to return.” “We are not born over the rainbow but inside the rainbow.”

Behind the text, the music often evokes urban environments, the subconscious, and spirituals. Parker’s bass lines are prominent in many of the numbers (for example, his work on “Into My Heart”), with bowing and string plucking in a graceful, poignant manner (check out “Ellen and Leaves Floating” where the bass blends perfectly with Bea Labikova’s striking, haunting alto sax and Christi’s buoyant vocals). And Parker’s gliding butterfly flute work greets the listener on the opening of “Sonny” – maybe the most sonically complex work on the album.

Christi’s strong yet graceful vocals add just the right touch of soulful earnestness to the tunes, and her production throughout the album provides sweet dissonance – trombones, trumpets, orchestration, percussion, saxophones, bird tweets, all wander in and out of the music and sometimes take over (check out the syncopation Christi offers up on “Touring” and “Batala”).

Cereal Music emphasizes the maxim that music can add beauty to even the bleakest landscape or moment in space time. Perhaps that is the message that wraps around this album like a sky-blue hopeful ribbon. Perhaps that is what is meant by “inside the rainbow.”

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Oliver Schwerdt / Axel Dörner / Julian Sartorius - Jul Fuel (Euphorium Records, 2024)

By Martin Schray

When we reviewed (and very often praised) Oliver Schwerdt’s projects on this website, it has usually been about his quintets with two basses, drums and piano plus a saxophone hero (Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Peter Brötzmann or Akira Sakata) or the reduced version of these bands in the form of a trio. But Schwerdt can also do things differently. In 2021 and 2024, he released two trio recordings with Barry Guy on bass and Günter “Baby” Sommer on drums, which musically pointed in a slightly different direction compared to the powerhouses of the quintets. Schwerdt had already played with trumpeter Axel Dörner in 2016, but the drummer at the time was Roger Turner. On Jul Fuel, however, Julian Sartorius took over.

In the liner notes for this excellent recording, Schwerdt mentions that at the 2024 festival in St. Johann the Dutch vibraphonist Els Vandeweyer told him - after watching his show with the above-mentioned trio with Guy and Sommer - that his “playing has reminded her of the style of the late Fred Van Hove“. Although Schwerdt confirms that he was impressed and influenced by the “greatness of this grandmaster’s buttery rolling performance“, I still see a lot of Cecil Taylor in his playing. Jul Fuel starts with a solo by Schwerdt, in which he first lays out a sound tapestry of runs and clusters, letting the notes bump, clang and whir back and forth. The improvisation throbs like an enormous but irregular heartbeat, before it comes to an abrupt stop. Both Van Howe and Taylor can be heard here.

On “Drain Delicacy“ the drums enter, and even if Julian Sartorius uses the bass drum very pointedly, his playing with his high-pitched drum set is reminiscent of Tony Oxley, Taylor’s preferred drummer in his late phase. Schwerdt is also pushed by Sartorius’s style, he knocks out short, almost crazy, super-short passages, he works the inside of the instrument, it sounds as if he’s angry at the piano itself, before he drives the improvisation forward with dark runs. The whole thing is stretched further with whip-like strokes of the right hand and before dissolves.

It all sounds like an homage to Taylor, but it’s not at all, because anyone who thought Axel Dörner was doing the Raphé Malik (Taylor’s trumpeter on some of his most famous records) when he joins the duo was on the wrong track. Because the whole concept of the show makes suddenly sense. With Dörner, the European avant-garde finds its way into this set, we leave the paths that free jazz seemed to have set and move into the exploration of sounds that are darker than those of similar projects. The construct thrives on the contrasts between the deep growl of Schwerdt’s left hand and Dörner’s crushed, ultra-high notes (these are the greatest moment of this recording). “(Slip Fit) Fizz Blitz (Slit Kit)”, at more than 23 minutes the centerpiece of this album, is like a showcase of what modern avant-garde improvised music is capable of in the second decade of this century, what traditions it builds on and where it’s heading. This is also visible structurally, as the set ends with a spectacular ten-minute solo by Axel Dörner. If you want to see how Jaimie Branch must have felt when she first heard his recordings and why she was so enthusiastic about his style, then this is the right place for you. The way he transforms his instrument into an abstract sound generator with a variety of extended techniques and how he switches from a quiet, dense phase to a noisy passage, which he interrupts with pauses, is simply incredible.

Jul Fuel is another construction stone in Oliver Schwerdt’s very independent, consistent musical building. It’s a pleasure to accompany him as a listener.

Jul Fuel is available as a CD and as a download.

You can listen to it and buy it here: https://euphoriumrecords.bandcamp.com/music

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