Skin of A Drum – Alexithymia (Aosmosis, 2024)

By Nick Ostrum

Emerging out of a canceled-gig-turned-studio-session, Skin of a Drum is the quartet of Pavel Aleshin, Serena Pagani, Sascha Stadlmeier, and William Rossi. (Disclaimer: Rossi is a fellow contributor to FJB.) Pagani, Stadlmeier and Rossi play guitars, Aleshin electronics, and all four contribute various other effects, loops, objects, and processing and to which Pagani also adds her voice. Alexithymiais their first release and apart from a quick warm-up session, the first meeting of these four musicians.

Alexithymia is a psychological trait wherein a person has difficulty comprehending and expressing emotions. Given the fluid and ambiguous nature of Alexithymia the album, it is a perfect title. The paints a picture finely hued, but also enigmatic. First, the sounds are often indeterminate. One hears drone, glitches, whispers, gurgles, bubbles, fragments of guitar, heavy distorted chords, howls, synthesized (?) natural sounds, space sounds. This is soundscaping, but with an emphasis on collaboration – real time and in the production stages – and live, in-the-moment improvisation, the more human elements of that oft-sterile practice. That humanity is also embodied in Pagani’s vocals, which range from the almost unrecognizable to crisp near-operatics (about two-thirds in) and the array of guitar sounds that periodically pop out of and intermingle with the less placeable elements.

The overall effect is that of a storm and, given the title, an internal storm of inarticulable and maybe inexact feelings. In that ambiguity lies the pull of this release. It is not a perfect expression of love or anger or contentment. Rather, it is, by design, a confused excavation of some emotion(s), not quite identifiable, but clearly impactful and, in its inexact state, disruptive and unnerving. But then, near the end, a series of strums, then an all-out chordal melody, over which Pagani sings, breaks out, briefly evoking Fushitsusha’s blackened prom ballads (especially the stunning track 8 on3/4). The winds still gust until the end, offering a much welcome passage of reconciliation that confirms just how well-crafted and thought-out all this cacophony is.

Alexithymiais available as a download and CD from Bandcamp: 

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Chuck Roth @ DMG

Chuck Roth is a guitarist living and working in New York City. Here, he is playing a solo set at the venerable Downtown Music Gallery, exploring the sounds of the electric guitar, following his muse where it seems to take the textured, atonal melody. Roth has a debut recording, Document 1, out on Relative Pitch Records.  

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Tom Weeks - Paranoid II (Wolfsblood, 2025) *****

By Don Phipps

Alto saxophonist Tom Weeks creates an amazing tour de force of muscular, musical intensity on his album Paranoid II, an outing he dedicates to the great Art Ensemble of Chicago founder and AACM member Roscoe Mitchell (now 84 years young). Weeks, who composed all the numbers, is joined by James Paul Nadien on drums and Shogo Yamagishi on bass. Together, the trio rip, roar, and soar – creating soundscapes of heated beauty.

The opening “I Hate You With a Passion (for Andre Nickatina)” begins with a slow sax lament, but as it progresses, it develops into a sweeping wave of hard blowing before returning to the lament. On “Dummy Data,” there’s explosive honky tonk, pushed by Nadien’s race across the trap set – no drum or cymbal untouched - and Yamagishi’s wonderful speed walk plucks. Weeks squeals in fury, a dynamism that reminds one of Mitchell at his most penetrating. And Nadien’s solo, a robust coastal storm replete with fury, demonstrates his vigor.

Heavy syncopated action is the hallmark of “Kulture Krusaders.” The rhythm section kicks up a virtuosic outburst – the listener propelled like a jet across the sky. One hears Mitchell in Weeks’ tone and prowess – his boiling romp backed by Nadien’s everywhere-at-once drumming. Weeks also shows off his circular breathing, playing a note without pausing for a breath as the bass and drums roil about - a washing machine gone haywire. Then everything comes to a sudden stop, followed by a wild and stuttered pulse in edge-of-your-seat unison.

“A New American Promise” insists on a clownish Beethoven 5th motif. Is Weeks’ wisecracking tone mocking the “promise?” Say it’s not so – LOL. Nadien fascinates with his two-hand unity cycle, and Yamagishi rifles up and down the bass neck – but always with a sense of control, while Weeks’ sax develops soulful arcs that shoot to the sky. Another wild ride, “Eleven Rings (for Phil Jackson)” lets Weeks again demonstrate circular breathing [Editor Note: I first heard this technique at a stunning solo Roscoe Mitchell concert on February 4, 1979, at Boston’s Lulu White’s Jazz Supper Club, in a tour celebrating the release of Mitchell’s 1978 highly recommended release of L-R-G / The Maze / S II Examples(Nessa Records – N-14/15). It was so innovative I have never forgotten the experience].

Weeks’ circular series begins with a long trill that evolves into controlled runs atop Yamagishi’s bowing and Nadien’s emergent drumming fireworks. Weeks continues his series, becoming more frenetic, and no matter how fluid the sax and drum, Yamagishi uses the bow to propel the music forward. As the piece ends, the bottom drops out and Weeks repeats his trilling opening. Simply beautiful!

On “A Fire Upon The Deep,” Yamagishi performs solo, his bass lines fluttering about like a fish out of water – his attack precise and willful. Weeks exhorts with powerful legato passages – and later plays in unison with Yamagishi. He also exhibits machine gun style tonguing skills and adds slurring runs to the mix. Nadien jumps in with sonic arcs - his sticks hit the drums with slick rolls and rollicking splashes. All hell breaks loose – the music’s raw energy bursts like a sun shooting out flares in multiple directions. The cut concludes with a slow Sisyphus exertion - pushing a boulder of hard notes up a steep mountainside.

Weeks concludes with the bopish Gaye Sex. Yamagishi shines, his bouncy bass complex and explosive. Then he lays down a line as Weeks joins him – a funky strut, a summer stroll along a pier, the red sun setting in the distance. This number is pure fun – Yamagishi’s bass generates head-nodding funk and Nadien plops and strikes the trap set as Weeks celebrates with a sax jubilee.

Paranoid II is special. Really. Special. It has ENERGY. It has inflamed power. And it consists of a ferocious yet controlled performance. A five-star review for a five-star album. Damn the torpedoes – full steam ahead! And, to borrow from David Lynch, “damn good coffee.”

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Archived 1979 Interview: Roscoe Mitchell Hits New Level of Musical Existence

Roscoe Mitchell, circa 1978. Photographer unknown.

By Don Phipps

Roscoe Mitchell sat down with me on February 4, 1979 before he gave a solo recital on alto saxophone in front of a full house at the now defunct Lulu White’s Supper Club in Boston, Massachusetts. This interview, published in its entirety in the September 10, 1979, edition of The Daily Free Press, where I was the Art Editor and a staff writer from 1978-1980 while a student at Boston University, has since been buried, available only on microfiche at the university library. It has never been published on the Web. To me, this interview is significant enough to warrant re-publication here. Mitchell today is 84 but when I interviewed him, he was just 38 – a good portion of his life and artistic output yet to come

Mitchell and his great jazz group, The Art Ensemble of Chicago (consisting of Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie, fellow saxophonist Joseph Jarman, and a rhythm section of Malachi Favors Maghostut and Famoudou Don Moye), had returned the previous year from a decade long expatriation from the USA. This return was ebulliently celebrated with a raucous North American debut and performance of their entire seminal Nice Guys album (ECM 1126) at Jonathan Swift’s Pub in Cambridge, MA, on October 23, 1978. At the time of this concert, I had no idea who the Art Ensemble of Chicago even was! All I knew was that Anthony Braxton was opening the concert with a series of solo alto saxophone improvisations, and that I did not want to miss the event. Imagine then seeing the Art Ensemble play without any bias, pro or con, without knowing who they were, or having any idea just how important they were in the history of free jazz.

The solo concert Mitchell performed after this interview was just as special. It came on the heels of his 1978 release of L-R-G / The Maze / S II Examples (Nessa n-14/15). I noted in my coverage of that concert that a woman in the audience remarked loudly that Roscoe could “make that thing (his alto saxophone) say everything.” I would argue that truer words were never spoken.

My introduction to the interview began with the following:

“Mitchell, 38, is a founding member of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the mastermind behind what many consider to be the greatest jazz combo of the decade, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He also plays almost every wind instrument imaginable, from the flute to the contrabass saxophone. But even above these achievements, Roscoe aspires to the principle of the artist uncompromised, seeking to extend the boundaries of musical ideas. In a number of audible ways, he and his followers are changing the concept of what we think of as music. When I talked to him, he was both attentive and conscientious. His thoughtful answers about jazz and music as a whole revealed a man who possesses a confidence in manner as well as music. Above all, he was friendly. The following are excerpts from that interview:]

After years of working with The Art Ensemble, why have you begun to record on your own again?

Mitchell: I had started to do things on my own, so my name had started to go out again. For instance… as time went on the more push and sacrifice people had to do in the music, we formed (in 1969) the Art Ensemble has a collective. I had devoted a lot of my energy to the Art Ensemble. In the mid-70s the first things that started to come out on my own was, I think, the Sackville recordings, solo things, and the quartet and that, and I think that interest was starting to build up in me again. Then when Nonaah (Nessa 9/10) came out, it got such a good critic response, it was the natural order of things.

Your new album (Roscoe Mitchell, Nessa 14/15) contains compositions unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Can you tell our readers something about the pieces on the album and explain what you are trying to accomplish?

Mitchell: The album contains a piece (“The Maze”) for eight percussionists on one side, and on the other whole side is a solo piece for soprano saxophone (“S II Examples”). On the other whole record, it’s a double album set, is a trio (“LRG”) with myself, (Wadada) Leo Smith, and George Lewis. The trio is a thing where we take the complete reed spectrum and surround it with the complete brass spectrum and then you have all of these interactions of sound going on. It’s a form of meditative music. What I really like about it is that you can be listening to it and you can go away from it, and wherever you come back to it, you can go right back to listening to it at that spot.

The soprano sax piece, “S II Examples,” is fascinating. What are you attempting musically?

Mitchell: “S II Examples” is a one to five projected piece for soprano saxophone. The Examples section is where I take all the fingerings of the saxophone, turn it all around, play it in a lot of different ways and produce different sound patterns. I then take these sound patterns, say I take one range of sound patterns, play them on tape, listen to them, then maybe take these sound patterns and start to move sound patterns around instead of notes. These are just examples of sound patterns. I’ll probably release a tape to go with the book that catalogues the various sounds. “S II Examples, tape example 1” for instance: “Delayed side B-flat key.” Play that example. You could have sound movement, Example 1 with the delayed side B-flat fingering to Example 2, a low B trill. If I have these particular fingerings happening, then I’m going to have new sounds. It can allow you to move in music in ways that can trick you. You might even think that it’s going a certain way and it goes another way.

You say you set up this recent series of concerts to do improvisational music. What does improvisation mean to you?

Mitchell: Improvisation is in a really growing stage. What happened was in the early sixties, when people started experimenting with freer forms of music, there were a lot of choices to choose from… because there were so many things that had not been dealt with. Everything felt new and fresh. Now we’ve established certain things that can happen within certain kinds of musical situations… It’s a constant thing, like being able to improvise, being able to study improvisation, to be able to take the idea of improvisation to the next level, improvise on that level, study improvisation, and go on from there. You build up all this information, and then release that information, experiment with it, and it keeps opening up all the time. What I’m doing now… is investigating the alto as much as I can in a solo context so that I can have some control over that medium. I figure that playing by yourself is the other end of playing with a lot of people.

Do you have any musical influences?

Mitchell: I just get the whole thing on people. I’ll go through a day and I’ll listen to Duke Ellington, or go through another day and listen to Bird (Charlie Parker), or go another day and listen to Bach. Whatever is appealing to me at the time. Currently I’m in a real study period in music. I’ll listen to some double record sets of Duke Ellington, and I’ll notice how much music was on these double-record sets. After you listen to the whole record, you couldn’t even remember what you heard on the first side because so many things had gone down in the music.

Who did you listen to as you were growing up?

Mitchell:When I was growing up there wasn’t such a divide between my parents and myself and what we were actually listening to musically. My parents could go out on the street and listen to Bird, Lester Young, or whatever, or go up to the club in Chicago, and everybody was coming through there, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, everybody. These are the kind of records we had at home. Now everything is so much more separated. The parents don’t really listen to what the kids are listening to.

I have the same problem with my parents.

Mitchell: Yeah, I even had that problem with my family. My father grew up in music as a singer. But when my music started to change, he said, “Oh Man, what is that?” At that time Jack DeJohnette and I were playing together a lot and Jack was playing drums and I was playing saxophone and that really took it out because there wasn’t any piano and bass or nothing. Just this thing happening.

That’s pretty wild. Anthony Braxton has recently released a new album with the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra titled For 4 Orchestra (Arista A3L 8900). Are you doing anything in the way of orchestra composition?

Mitchell: Later this month, I’m doing a thing in Austria with a quartet, a solo piece, and large ensemble. What I’m doing with the large ensemble is trying out different ochestrational techniques that I want to apply to an orchestra piece I’m going to do later this year. Eventually it will be recorded.

You mentioned techniques for orchestra. What do you mean?

Mitchell: I’m working with certain types of queuing techniques where you can shift the music all around and different kinds of things and have spaces happen differently each time depending upon the people that are playing and the way their body tempo is going that day, and how they are feeling; and checkpoints for each person in the composition, so that if you are starting to go out of it, I can slow down the pace if I want to, or speed it up; or like trying to have a lot of natural considerations in the music so that the music can flow along naturally like the way we are breathing.

Does it bother you to see yourself compared with Anthony Braxton so much?

Mitchell: No. We all came up together in Chicago. We have known each other and played together for getting close to twenty years. People are definitely going to refer to us when they talk about the music. I think the thing that is unique about the Chicago musicians (AACM) is that Anthony and Joseph (Jarman), (Henry) Threadgill and myself, to mention some of the reed men that came out of that era in music, although we all came up together, everybody has still developed their own type of style and then own type of approach to music. Then that’s even gone past that now, because people are defying styles. You have people that can give an illusion of having no style at all. It’s gone past like “he plays alto saxophone, and he plays this or that.” People are beginning to represent themselves in a lot of different lights now. Ten years or so ago, people had to go out and function as strong people inside strong individual small groups and make strong representations of themselves as soloists. Now things are beginning to open up and people are being able to do even larger projects

, so we are beginning to see another side of it.

The question of style interests me. Do you have a style you could call your own?

Mitchell: My style is just the way I go about doing things. I might play the same piece that you do. My tone will be different from yours and the way I approach a particular thing rhythmically and the type of accents I may use would make the difference. Once you make a style for yourself in music, then you can keep your style, and everything else that you can add to your vocabulary is just resynthesized in your own style. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. I want to have music where it doesn’t sound like me, but is me. That has got to be the ultimate in pure music.

Where do you think you are now musically?

Mitchell: I’m trying to develop into a state where I can be more meditative in the music, and play with longer concentration spans, and have the music going on for longer spaces of time. I do want to get into big pieces now. I think people ought to go out and hear these big extravaganzas every now and then. The musicians are ready to do it now; it’s just a matter of being able to finance these projects.

Besides wanting to do large pieces, do you have any personal direction?

Mitchell: I’m reaching for another level of my musical existence. When I started to play all the different instruments, my embouchure shattered, and I couldn’t play anything for a while. But now all these instruments are beginning to come, they are beginning to come. It’s not like if you pick up one instrument and go on to another it’s the end anymore. A lot of things… motivate me. Such as the experience of being able to go and get people that I’ve functioned with for almost twenty years now and being able to have specialized pieces of music if I want to. There are other opportunities that are opening up. We are getting fusion, not only in the jazz rock thing, but now we’re getting fusion from classical music into improvisation so that opens up so many more avenues.

You mentioned jazz rock. Jazz in the public’s eye is represented by the fusion sounds of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Chuck Mangione, rather than Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Why?

Mitchell: It’s a matter of nervous systems and how fast people’s nervous systems can adjust to these other sounds before they can start to take them in and listen to them. Now all of a sudden, “Wow man, we can have the same rhythm with a whole lot of other chords!” That started to open people up. When people hear other music now it’s not such a far place for them to go, straight from rock to the more freer forms of music. Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Chuck Mangione are really big draws, comparable to the rock stars, and I think that’s good, because it is making the transition and it’s coming out that we’re getting more and more people.

But there has been an acoustic whiplash in jazz. Some musicians such as Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor have openly criticized the very basis of electronic (fusion-based) music. You feel no antipathy?

Mitchell: You have to remain open. There is something that can be done with all different types of sounds in musical situations. What happens when you close yourself down is that you have died. No one else. Everything else is still going on. We are now faced with the possibility of the computer…. It’s a challenge to me to be able to sound like a machine if I want to. I can learn a lot from that. It’s a challenge to deal with a machine. It’s hard work just like anything else. You got people who can go in there and get songs out of the computer but that is not really that interesting. We want to try to strive for things that are on a much higher level. It’s interesting to take yourself out of the context of a melodic flow and move through sound structure in a different kind of way. The “S II Examples” I’ve been telling you about comes close to being able to match these sounds.

Music is founded upon a compositional process. With the advent of the 12-tone system and mathematical atonality, many people would say that music is cold and unexpressive. In fact, insincere. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Mitchell: If we look at it with an open mind and one considers that sound is sound and we can use it the way that we want to display a certain picture, and if you go about your work in a sincere manner, then the results will be like that. No matter what medium you’re using, it should turn out with the same sincerity.

How would a person guard against insincerity in music?

Mitchell: It has to do with longevity. People will come up and sound good for a year, but how will they sound in twenty years? This is the thing you have to look at. The thing about playing an instrument is that in the final end, you have got to face the instrument and play it. When a piece is done well and then it can be broken into a mathematical equation, especially if you’re dealing with the 12-tone system or any other system for that matter. People who do music, many times they don’t take that into consideration the type of mathematical equation they are dealing with. And sometimes they do. If we look at the music of Charlie Parker, it is a clearly defined mathematical system that he uses to play his music. However, when he was doing it he probably thought, “Well, I want to play music differently from Lester Young,” because Lester Young inspired him. Then he started to use the tops of the chords and developed a whole thing from that. It is no different.

Your music has suffered economic repression, whether it has been the lack of playing engagement or the inability to record. Does the repression continue today?

Mitchell: Sure. People play all sorts of games. The period that the Art Ensemble did not record was a result of these games. But the music is coming around so strong that it is beginning to come out. If you take something and try to press it into a wall, and it keeps trying to come out, it is going to come out. The music was able to push through… and still be alive at the end of it.

Are you bitter?

Mitchell: I’m not bitter. I’ve always managed to make it in a good way. The music has been good to me. I have tried to be loyal to what I am doing and the rewards come with that. I was able to survive.

You’ve done much more than just survive. A personal question, Roscoe. Do you feel that your influence will be discussed 30 years from now?

Mitchell: I should certainly hope so. I consider myself one of the prime innovators of this music. Whoever is a historian and wanted to check the music out, the way you would have to do it is to go back to the earlier recordings. You would be able to see what my contributions have been to the music. If you really listen to the music, you can hear something that might sound new and go back and listen to something that I did in the sixties where I covered the area already. I think it is very important for guys that are doing the work have it documented very well, so that when people go back and study these people, they can actually see their musical development as it went along and relate it to the time it happened.

Do you intend to continue experimenting with music?

Mitchell: Yes. The thing is if you don’t do it, you’re going to fall behind because there are guys out there that are doing it. My thing is that I’m not going to spend this much time in the music and not share in the rewards that are coming up now. I can’t see that at all.

It’s a shame you’ve not been able to record more frequently.

Mitchell: That happened because I put a lot of time into a group situation, and now the whole thing is turning over again. I’m finding now that most of my musical ideas are really extended kind of things, meditative. You can have one idea on a record. One whole record! And I think it’s just a matter of time and more and more things will be happening.

[Author's note: In the Daily Free Press of February 14, 1979, I published a review of the performance Mitchell gave following this interview. Some excerpts from my review:]

“Roscoe, playing on the E-flat alto sax, created what he fondly calls sound collages – a spare minimal broach of mathematical reasoning and fiery spirit…. In concert, he moved with confidence along cold floating melodies, eerie… with patience and assurance. His breathing and pacing were masterfully controlled, sparse, dry, raspy, and witty. His piercing saxophone slotted inverse textures that courted perfection….

“The fourth piece of his first set had the presence of a Bach fugue. On an audible stream of air, Roscoe transformed large bursts and running notes into the sweet space of atonal modulation. Mitchell’s instrument belched, boomed, and squeaked, sounding like Morse code. The motif were exciting exposes with unparalleled use of dynamics and pointillistic impressions….

“Roscoe’s inner sense of ecstasy found joyful expression…. Full hand trill runs, devoted concentration all flowered into beautiful lyricism. As notes filled holes while other spaces opened up, the music hung balanced between sound and silence…. His music contained elements of tribal rhythms and the native south, of swing hop and cool jazz, of the cerebral and the gut level of feeling….

“Roscoe’s many-faceted improvisation was set aglow in a radiant light. His extraordinary genius found itself in inspired proportions; the sax crumbled, decimated, disappeared – replaced by sound, pure sound on a musical plane which transcended beyond itself….

“Outside of the small group of critics who have already paid homage to Roscoe Mitchell, history awaits. His genius is sure to be recognized in the future.”

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Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem, 2024)

By Stuart Broomer

The Way Out of Easyis the second two-LP set to appear by Jeff Parker’s ETA quartet, and like its predecessor, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Eremite, 2022), it consists of live recordings from the quartet of

Parker on guitars, electronics and sampler, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone and electronics, Anna Butterss on bass and Jay Bellerose on drums. The band maintained that Monday night spot from 2016 until 2023, when the club closed

There are immediate similarities. Each is a two-LP set. While the 2022 Eremite release consisted of substantial chunks from different performances recorded between 2019 and 2021, The Way Out of Easy represents four shaped pieces from a single night, January 2, 2023. The band was still named for the club it played in and recorded, the name of a principal setting in David Foster Wallace’s vast novel Infinite Jest.

As Eremite producer Michael Ehlers pointed out in a press sheet for the first release, it is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” As with the earlier set, the band here largely improvises freely, so freely that the works here will include much that free improvisation leaves out: modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded.

In that spirit, The Way Out of Easy’s first side is devoted to an extended treatment of Parker’s 2013 composition “Freakdelic”, the sole composed element on the band’s two releases. The loose spirit of it already demonstrates the band’s special ease, its essentially conversational spirit, the loose way that Butterss and Bellerose maintain structures and the way the 23-minute jam gently wanders into strangely burbling, electronic territory in Parker and Johnson’s extended improvisations.

There’s some contrast between The Way Out of Easy and the earlier set, if only in the fact that these are complete performances rather than excerpts, but the band’s calm liberation is such that It isn’t a major shift. If The Way Out of Easy seems more refined, more assured, more interactive, those are all the things that arise and expand among convivial musicians who are collectively free to interact musically on a regular basis for years, who also choose to create elemental structures and patterns, sometimes retaining them, at other times gently abandoning them. The group is free to compound polyrhythms and include the repeating, unaccompanied, diatonic melody played by Josh Johnson at the outset of the closing “Chrome Dome”, gradually joined by Parker with a recurring tonal center before Butterss and Bellerose join in. Eventually Parker will assume responsibility for a slightly different melody and Johnson will improvise a counter melody. It’s the kind of thing that comes inevitably from a long-shared musical association, often creating a dream-like ambience suspended between an elemental tunefulness and gentle abstraction.

As with the earlier Eremite release, this record triggers a collection of positive associations. There’s something about the music’s distinctive playfulness, a slightly off-kilter, weird conviviality that might suggest The Scope, the electronic music bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , as well as Wallace’s ETA.

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Zlatko Kaučič @ 70 - Inkling (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2024)

 

By Eyal Hareuveni

Slovenian master drummer-percussionist and seminal free improviser Zlatko Kaučič celebrated his 70th anniversary two years ago, but it is never too late to enjoy this occasion with a box set of four live performances with a few of his favorite improvisers, and with personal dedications from like-minded comrades like Joëlle Léandre, Elisabeth Harnik. 

The first album, VENČKO (wreath in Slovenian) documents the first-ever recorded duo with Norwegian tenor and soprano sax player Torben Snekkestad (a close collaborator of double bass master Barry Guy), recorded at the BCMF Festival in Šmartno-Brda, Slovenia, in September 2019, and dedicated to Venceslav Pajntar-Venčko. This 40-minute set stresses Kaučič qualities as a deep listener with sharp and fast instincts, but also as a powerful, commanding improviser who can ignite intimate dynamics with a few blows on the drum set. The level of communication and synergy between Kaučič and Snekkestad is so profound, varied and imaginative, moving seamlessly between contemplative conversations that reference contemporary music, delicate and poetic timbral explorations and free jazz-tingerd energetic fireworks, that organically gravitate into instant compositions and a cohesive narrative, as if they have been playing as a duo for many years.

The second album was recorded at the same festival, four years later, and features Kaučič with fellow Slovenian and long-time collaborator, double bass player Tomaž Grom, and German experimental trumpeter Axel Dörner, in a 36-minute piece “Tiha misel zablestela/a silent thought sined-suit”. This is an uncompromising and unpredictable, radical sound-oriented improvisation that explores an array of extended breathing, bowing and percussive techniques and investigates how the unorthodox sounds of these resourceful improvisers resonate with each other and create a raw, often noisy but always enigmatic sonic entity.

The third album documents the first-ever duo recording of Kaučič with Portuguese tenor sax master Rodrigo Amado, at the 2020 edition of the same festival., titled “Free Fall” (and no connection to Jimmy Guiffre Trio’s seminal album by the same name). Amado says that Kaučič has created “a profoundly unique sound cosmos that inspires me again and again”. This inspired performance is rooted in the free jazz legacy and alternates between a muscular, fast muscular improvisation, relying on short melodic themes and fast-shifting grooves that push both Kaučič and Amado to the most extreme territories, but with an immediate, deep, and almost telepathic interplay, and poetic, contemplative, and soulful conversations. Eventually, as expected, this energetic duo unleashes its volcanic energy and spirals into dense, cathartic, and stratospheric skies. Hopefully, this set marks the beginning of a long relationship.

The fourth and last album documents a performance of Kaučič with soul mates - or inklings, as the five improvised pieces are titled - Catalan master pianist Agustí Fernández (for his 70th birthday, FSR dedicated another box set of seven performances, Aesthetic of Prisms, 2024)and British double bass master Barry Guy (who is 78 years old and plays a 5-string double bass), at the 64. Jazz Festival Ljubljana in Slovenia in July 2023, five months after Kaučič’s 70th birthday. Fernández composed two more pieces. Guy describes Kaučič as one of the warmest, kindest musicians he has ever met, with whom he has “a beautiful friendship based on who he is, both as a person and as a musician”. This is a masterful demonstration of the art of the moment by a few of the most gifted, restless, and imaginative sound poets-painters, who keep enriching their poetic yet intense and stormy sonic palettes with deeper, mysterious nuances. Fernández’ two most beautiful ballads highlight the trio's profound, lyrical side.

Watch: https://365.rtvslo.si/arhiv/dokumentarni-portret/174942547 (in Slovenian)

Kaučič / Furlan - Father, Son & Holy Sound (Klopotec, 2024)

Kaučič’s drums and percussion duo with fellow, young Slovenian Gal Furlan (b. 1990) was recorded live on Kaučič's 70th birthday at Klub Štala in Lokavec, Slovenia, in February 2023. The album's title references Albert Ayler’s claim that “Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost”. Kaučič and Forlan do not have any messianic ambitions but they have a holy sound. A highly immersive sound, at the beginning delicate and mezditative but later propulsive and hypnotic. The 40-minute, free improvised piece can be experienced as an irreverent, purifying ritual comprised of delicate, caressing and resonant sounds that suggest the colorful and suggestive sonic spectrum of these resourceful improvisers.

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Juno 3 - Proxemics (Buster and Friends, 2025)

By Sammy Stein

Han Earl Park, Pat Thomas, and Lara Jones need little introduction to fans of alluring, free music but for those not familiar with them, Park is an improvising musician who specializes in guitar and percussive music. He is a shapeshifter of a musician, a chameleon who transfers easily from beautiful passages to discordant ruminations. His music is joyful, energetic, and packed with rhythm patterns as changeable as they are engaging. He has performed with Lol Coxhill, Wadado Leao Smith, Mark Sanders, Evan Parker, and more.

Lara Jones is an experimental producer, DJ, saxophonist, keyboardist, and lyricist, who creates high-energy music and has worked with fellow artists in various ensembles and formats. Her music transcends genres, and Jones refuses to be boxed in by genres or gender definitions.

Pat Thomas began playing classical piano as a child but switched to jazz in his teenage years. Renowned for his intense, amorphic music, Thomas is an inspiration for improvising musicians. He was integral to the Black Top Project with Orphy Robinson and has performed with Hamid Drake, William Parker, John Butcher, and many others.

Park, Jones, and Thomas are Juno 3, and on Proxemics they demonstrate the achievements of a trio in live performance with intrinsic skills in listening, playing, and collaborating. The album was recorded live during the trio’s performance at London’s Cafe OTO for the EFG London Jazz Festival in November 2023.

The music is in two parts, ‘Derealization’ and ‘Proxemis’ respectively representing two sets performed at Oto. Each track, let alone six-track set, feels like an exploration into different ways guitar, sax, piano, and electronics can be melded in an improvised performance.

From the screeching eeriness created in ‘Derealization I’ where vaguely connected electronic harmonic runs give way on occasion to melodic, then non-so melodic interjections from the sax, there are themes, counter-themes and an exchange of ideas, often thrown down by Thomas for the others to reflect – albeit changed. This pattern is further explored in ‘Derealization II’, III, IV, with added melodic lines from the guitar in V and VI. Spot the opening of a melody from an old sixties track (Popcorn) in Realization II that sits alongside current, visceral electronic sounds for the briefest moment and then relish the simple melodies that interact with complex, guttural squawks, whistles, engine noises and vaguely harmonically linked lines from sax and guitar.

The ’Proxemics’ set is more intense and power-driven than the ‘Derealization’ set. ‘Proxemics I’ sees the energy building as quartets of chords chase across the background, while gentle guitar notes weave their way into and out of the sound. There is a set rhythm pattern for most of the track, under and over which the improvisers weave different, yet connected sounds. Proxemics II develops the exploration further, and Proxemics III introduces another dimension – rivulets of sound that fall from the keys, keynotes held by the sax, and the guitar deftly filling the gaps, like splashes from the pool. The quietude of the second third is dispelled as the instruments crash in to take the sounds up and loud.

The music is challenging in places–visceral with confronting rhythms and keys that merge – almost–before veering off in different directions, creating a sense of clashing ideas, yet a willingness also to (eventually) end up on the same musical path.

It is music for the open-minded and at times, the tonality is so jarring that it takes the listener somewhere else, only to be brought back to the present by a snippet of melody or harmonic progressions before another clash of sounds impacts the brain and the mist descends again.

These three musicians know what they are doing – the sound is integrated, yet audacious, swashbuckling yet provocative. This is improved music as it should be live and played well.

Park says of the recording, “During the mix, I came to realize this unapologetically unrefined music was probably unreleasable, but I also came to love it more for being delicate as a slab of granite.”

I think Park missed something, for hidden amongst the power, energy, and intensity, there is a delicate beauty that exists in all truly improvised music.

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Rupp–Rößler–Hall - self-titled (audiosemantics, 2025)

By Martin Schray

Rupp-Rößler-Hall is a purely acoustic project with musicians from the Berlin Echtzeitscene, consisting of a veteran of the free improvisation community, guitarist Olaf Rupp, Australian drummer and percussionist Samuel Hall and double bassist Isabel Rößler. The most important characteristic of the project’s music is not to differentiate between backing band (drums and bass) and solo instrument (in this case the guitar); the individual voices should be equal and on an equal footing. Rupp plays acoustic guitar here, but his technique is strongly based on his playing on electric guitar. This means that there are many of his typical harmonics, flamenco-like chords and Phrygian cadences, which he likes to merge into a seemingly atonal chaos. All three musicians tug at their strings, extended playing techniques are used and the instruments are plowed in all possible ways. The whole thing gurgles, grinds, echoes and threatens to fall apart again and again - but this never happens. In this way, sound textures and structures are created and fanned out, as the flow of the music is very purposefully controlled. Samuel Hall’s contribution is reminiscent of Tony Oxley’s playing and that of Paul Lovens on their recordings with Cecil Taylor. Ultra-fast and high-pitched, yet very precise. Isabel Rößler’s bass is very powerful and massive, she can be very loud and knows how to hold her own against her partners in crime. Joëlle Léandre and Barry Guy shine through here again and again in a very pleasant way.

Especially in the first piece, “Die schlichte Freuden der Armen”, it becomes clear how well coordinated the tonal surfaces are; the whole thing never becomes too pleasant, but is always roughened and bulky. Obviously the music also serves as a commentary on our difficult times, because the titles of the pieces (translated they mean “The simple joys of the poor“, “All the heavy sand here is language, deposited by wind and tide“ and “Darkness is in our souls, don't you think?“) point to a gloomy atmosphere.

All in all, a nice collection of three fragments, hopefully there will be more to hear from this trio soon.

Rupp-Rößler-Hallis available on vinyl (as a 7-inch) and as a download.

You can listen to the music and here:

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Pascal Niggenkemper's Tuvalu Ensemble

The German-French bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, together with his international Tuvalu Ensemble - Elisabeth Coudoux (cello), Ben La Mar Gay (trumpet), Louis Laurain (trumpet), Mona Matbou Riahi (clarinet), Joachim Badenhorst (clarinet), Tizia Zimmermann (accordion), Artemis Vavatsika (accordion), Jaumes Privat (spoken word) - developed and rehearsed the composition “d'une rive à l'autre” (from one shore to the other) at the SWR Studios in Baden-Baden.

Inspired by texts and poems in German, French, Flemish, Greek, English, Farsi and Occitan, Niggenkemper and his ensemble took listeners on a musical, lyrical and scenic journey to Tuvalu. The South Sea archipelago is symbolized in his composition by various sound curtains distributed throughout the room. The poems are each dedicated to an island and one of the ensemble members. The instrumental octet is made up of two identical quartets. The result is a tapestry of sound from which colors, patterns, melodies and improvisations spring.

 

- Martin Schray

 

 

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William Parker/Hugo Costa/Philipp Ernsting - Pulsar (NoBusiness, 2024)

By Ken Blanchard

William Parker is one of the main reasons I began listening to free jazz. His early recordings ( The Peach Orchard ‘98, Mayor of Punkville ’99, and O’Neal’s Porch ’00, to name only three) were like nothing I had ever heard. I couldn’t get enough. He might be the most consistently brilliant composer/improvisor in the free jazz kosmos. He is blessedly one of the most prolific.

Pulsar documents Parker with Hugo Costa on alto sax and Philipp Ernsting on drums. The title cut opens with Parker’s double bass laying down a bit of structure for Costa and Ernsting to get a grip on. The tendency in any small group featuring a saxophone is for the music to be all about the horn. For maybe the first three minutes you think that might happen; but the bass quickly speaks up. Parker deploys his bow briefly, about 2 minutes shy of the middle. Ernsting’s percussion begins by adding delicate but exquisite accents to the main themes elaborated by Parker and Costa. Both horn and bass produce lyrical, almost romantic novellas. Somewhere near the middle, my inner ears formed an image of Costa’s sax as an exquisite piece of sculpture traveling down a rolling conveyor belt. Brief moments of dialogue between Ernsting’s drums and Parker’s increasingly percussive bass display an amazing degree of control over the balance of the sounds. This track is worth twice what the recording costs.

I don’t know what Fogo em Escalada means. Google translate seems to think it is Brazilian Portuguese for Climbing Fire. Okay. It opens with a signature Parker melody, three and then four evocative notes repeated. Here the image seems more that of a stately grandfather clock than fire. The alto sax is more subdued and gives a precious levity to the progression.

The last cut, “Words of Freedom” opens with a frenetic triangular exchange between Ernsting, Costa, and Parker, now on a horn (I think!). Perhaps someone with a better educated ear can confirm the instrument. Later in the piece Parker switches to flute. If you are in the mood for a higher energy engagement, this will be your favorite part of the album. Only toward the end does the intensity subside.

I is a fine piece of Free Jazz. If you enjoy it, you might check out Costa and Ernsting on their duo album The Art of Crashing (New Wave of Jazz 2022). As you would expect, it gives the drummer’s virtuosity a chance to take center stage. Highly recommended.

Totally Random Suggestion File: Mal Waldron Quintet - Seagulls of Kristiansund (Soul Note, 1987). Lush, romantic bop to cleanse your pallet.

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Dikeman, Hong, Lumley, Warelis - Old Adam on Turtle Island (Relative Pitch Records, 2025)

By Don Phipps

The music created on Old Adam on Turtle Island by four skillful musicians – John Dikeman on tenor sax, Marta Warelis on piano, Aaron Lumley on bass, and Sun-Mi Hong on drums – offers plenty of heat interspersed with abstractions and quiet solemn passages. According to Dikeman, the music is, at its heart, a reflection of the horrible legacy of colonization, and how religion can lead to transcendence or tyranny (or perhaps both at the same time?).

Recorded in November 2022 at Amsterdam’s Splendor (an art space which hosts meetings, musical events, and offers artists a workspace and musical laboratory - it recently announced a “Jazzclub” as part of its offerings), Old Adam on Turtle Island covers seven Dikeman compositions over two tracks – four in the first set (“The Rev - Descent - Choral - Let's Try”) and three in the second (“Groove - Choral – Manifest”). Each track is a medley of free form development across a loose architecture, and in these compositions, the musicians generate their own intense and technically demanding variations and embellishments, creating swirling atmospheric whirlwinds and tunnels of sound.

While the two cuts cover a range of human feeling and thought processes, the second has slightly more dramatic and emotional heft, with its “camel crossing desert” opening and its spiritual and sorrowful winddown. However, each track features incredible passages that allow the musicians to create meaningful contributions. Dikeman’s sax voicings burn upward and outward – his wails, legato notes, and slurry runs generate intense arcs and dark moods. At the end of track 2, listen to how he responds to Lumley’s lines, like a kite tethered yet free to whip about in the high wind and rain, loose and unconstrained. Warelis provides pronounced Cecil Taylor-like rambles and clusters of dissonance - at times she even whisks her fingers up and down the inside of the piano. Lumley supplies a precise combination of plucking and bowing; his motifs vacillate between scratchy effects and notes that traverse odd yet fascinating intervals. Hong adds full trap set sonic riptides as well as timely colorful cymbal splashes.

When listening to the dense sonorities and cerebral soundscapes of Old Adam on Turtle Island, it may be helpful to remember that murky and somber anguish will always be a part of reconciling sinister human nature (Old Adam) and its effect on “Turtle Island,” the indigenous expression for the Earth.

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Onilu (Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl, Chad Taylor) – Onilu (Eremite Records, 2025)

By Stuart Broomer

I first listened to Onilu on Blue Monday, January 20^th, 2025, the most depressing day of the year, at least according to a notion invented by a British travel company a few years ago. In Toronto, the high temperature for the day was -6° Celsius, the low -11°. There was some snow and an Arctic chill coming from the North. There was a different chill coming across Lake Ontario from the South. Fortunately, Canada had just ended a mail strike, so there was new music in the house: Onilu immediately warmed things up.

“Onilu” is a Yoruba word for drummers and the band consists of three percussionists from three generations: Joe Chambers, Chad Taylor and Kevin Diehl. They’re best known as drummers, but percussion here extends to keyboards as well – pianos, vibraphones and marimbas, crucial melodic components in this invocation of African music. There are also “ideophones” (“an instrument the whole of which vibrates to produce a sound when struck, shaken, or scraped, such as a bell, gong, or rattle,” OED).

The credits are expansive: Joe Chambers plays conga, drum kit, idiophones, marimba, shakere and vibraphone; Kevin Diehl, batá drums, cajóns, drum kit, electro-acoustic drum kit , Guagua and shakere; Chad Taylor: alfaia, clave, clay drums, drum kit, mbira, marimba, piano, tongue drum, tympani and vibraphone. Tracking down descriptions of some of those instruments might resemble work, but listening to Onilu is an extraordinary pleasure, a world of resonant instruments that seem to vibrate, shimmer and transmit light, sounds that might suggest a waterfall of fire, something both benign and impossible. Here one feels the materiality of instruments, and the processes of their making, whether from steel, wood, clay or skin.

The eight tracks, ranging from 4’32” to 7’25”, are mostly compositions on traditional patterns by one or two members of the band. The exceptions will immediately suggest the trio’s range. “Nyamaropa”, with mbira (“thumb piano”) played beautifully by Taylor, is an ancient melody that appeared on an extraordinary collection in Nonesuch’s series of field recordings over fifty years ago: The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People of Rhodesia by Paul Berliner, most recently available on CD as Zimbabwe: Soul of Mbira. At the opposite pole is Bobby Hutcherson’s “Same Shame”, with Chambers (who played drums on the original 1968 recording) turning to vibraphone, Diehl on drum kit and Taylor on tympani.

The same levels of virtuosity and flexibility manifest themselves in different ways on every track. On the Diehl/Taylor composed “Estuary Stew”, the group stretches instrumentation to have Chambers on ideophones, Diehl on batá drums and electro-acoustic drum kit, and Taylor on marimba, creating a complex mix of acoustic resonances and electronics. Taylor’s “Mainz” (previously recorded in two different versions by Jeff Parker) is particularly tuneful, with Chambers on marimba, Diehl on drum kit and Taylor on piano and drum kit. For sheer rhythmic energy and complexity, there’s “A Meta Onilu”, with everyone playing drum kits, Chambers adding vibraphone and Taylor, mbira.

Onilu is consistently declarative work, emotionally open, sonically generous, three masters of different generations celebrating a shared musical passion.

Onilu is available at https://eremiterecords.bandcamp.com/album/onilu

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Andrea Giordano - Àlea (Sofa, 2024)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

The equation is error proof: vision + ideas + courage = a record that deserved to rotate on our turntable. Endless are the combinations and one of those is certainly represented by Alea, the work of Andrea Giordano, subject matter of this review. 

Giordano, born in 1995, is an experimental musician, singer and composer from Cuneo, Italy, who after the degree at Siena Jazz University went on with a master in jazz and performance at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she was a student of Sidsel Endresen and where she is currently pursuing a bachelor in composition. Alea, a suite for large mixed ensemble in which Giordano also performs as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, is the heartfelt tribute the her friend and mentor, the italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandro Giachero, who died unexpectedly in 2020, dating from the start of the master degree in Oslo, where she began to develop songs towards an album of ensemble music. As per the constituents, she opted for a mix of instruments with similar sounds and timbres that could blend seamlessly. 

Giordano said on Bandcamp that the tracks, recorded separately at the Norwegian Academy of Music in 2022 and assembled later, are like separate rooms (“stansias”) within the same house, each as an individual expression of tension, repetition and ceremony. Dissonances, fragmented cyclical motives and laments are rendering overwhelming the dimension of grief and sorrow, along with shamanic, Native American-like chants that seem sometimes to exorcise the immeasurable pain. Crucial to the project is Giordano’s ongoing research into the Piedmontese dialect, a Gallo-Romance language primarily spoken in the Italian northwest region of Piedmont, that is endemic to her native city of Cuneo. She had previously sung librettos of poetry in the predominant Piedmontese dialect, a process she describes as “an attempt to be honest with my roots” and for this record she commissioned Vieri Cervelli Montel, a composer and friend of both Giordano and Giachero, to write lyrics in italian that she and Montel then translated together into her hometown dialect based on her interviews with scholars and family. The result has much more to do with the musicality of the words than with their semantic, as Giordano is delivering them in a way totally devoted at the sole service of the sonic architecture of her work, reminding us sometimes even the lyricism of Bjork and the great Elizabeth Frazer. 

The album’s title has tripartite origins: it is a reference to the Italian for “to Alessandro,” a nod to the aleatoric nature of his death and an epithet of the Greek goddess Athena. The ensemble sees: Andrea Giordano: compositions, voice, organetto; Alessandra Rombolà: flutes; Cosimo Fiaschi: soprano saxophone; Ferdinand Schwarz: trumpet; Joel Ring: cello; Kalle Moberg: accordion; Emanuele Guadagno: guitar; Lara Macrì: harp; Ingrid Hjerpseth: organ; Christian Meaas Svendsen: double bass; Nicholas Remondino: percussion and gran cassa; Ingar Zach: percussion, gran cassa and vibrating membranes. We look forward to see Giordano’s next move.

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Catching up with Impakt Records: Part II

By Nick Ostrum

Impakt Records is a label dedicated to documenting Cologne’s free improvisation scene, much of which revolves around the club Loft Köln. The imprint has been in operation since 2016, and, since those early days, has accumulated nearly 40 releases. In a two-part series, I review the five released in 2024 and so far in 2025.(See part one here)

Sylvain Monchocé and Daniel Studer – Duo (Impakt, 2024) 

Although rare combinations are becoming increasingly common in free improv, I have not encountered many, or maybe even a single, other gayageum-bass combo. Leave it to Daniel Studer, who has released a string of boundary-pushing releases over the years, to partake in such an experiment. His partner on this recording, Sylvain Monchocé, is new to me, though admittedly I am familiar with few other gayageum players apart from DoYeon Kim.

The music on the modestly titled Duois measured but powerful. Studer lays into his rubbings, stabs and fat-snap pizzicato, but also holds tones, which allows Monchocé space to scrape and strain his strings. I am not sure what traditional gayageum technique is, but Monchocé seems to be stretching that beyond its limits, offering no melodies and few crisp notes (Sixth Dialog being an exception for both musicians), but (figuratively) turning his instrument on its head, much as Studer does to his bass. Sometimes this results in harsh but beautiful moments of convergence, such as four minutes into the Fourth Dialogue. Even then, however, the instruments remain separate. I rarely mistake one for the other even among all the muted pizzicato, scrapes, various contortions, and other opportunities for the strings to blend. Instead, the timbres balance one another. I am not sure I am surprised, but Duois certainly a unique but wonderfully complementary pairing that shuns the classical European and Korean idioms in pursuit of non-traditional, denationalized, and particularly fertile common ground.

T.ON – T.ON Meets Sarah Davachi (Impakt, 2024) 

Recorded at the church/gallery/concert hall Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, T.ON meets Sarah Davachi captures the trio of Matthias Muche (trombone), Constantin Herzog (double bass) and Etienne Nillesen (snare drum) in collaboration with the wonderful, and wonderfully patient, organist Sarah Davachi. The former have appeared on Impakt releases numerous times in various combinations. Canadian-turned-Angelino Sarah Davachi is quite active in the modern classical scene and has 30-some releases under her belt.

Meets Sarah Davachiconsists of one track of wonderful long drones, layering, entwining, enveloping and subduing each other. This makes sense with Much, Herzog and Davachi, but Nillesen must be in there somewhere. It seems he uses his snare more for reverb or subtle rubbings than anything conventional. The result is a cauldron of hollow, harrowing sounds of overlapping tones, wind and friction. What distinguish Meets Sarah Davachi are the fine variations, the subtle gurgles and pitch oscillations, the implications but absence of synthesized sound, and the skillful, patient and generally monodirectional development of the composition. This is insistent and exciting music, precisely because of its fine shades of monochrome. A dramatic downturn in the last couple minutes, moreover, reveals the space of the church, as the organ gives way to bird sounds, soft scrapes, and vaulted reverberation and tonal decay. This, of course, only adds to the mystery of it all.

Marlies Debacker and Salim(a) Javaid – Convolution (Impakt, 2024) 

Convolution is a duo between Belgian pianist Marlies Debacker (here also on clavinet) and Pakistani-Czech saxophonist Salim(a) Javaid, both of whom have worked for significant periods in Köln, most notably in the augmented contemporary chamber trio Trio Abstrakt. Given their history of collaboration, one would expect strong communication and responsivity. And, well, this album delivers on those fronts.

From the first notes, then silences, one gets a sense this will be an intimate and patient affair. Debacker plays soft, enigmatic tones likely elicited from playing inside the piano and Javaid whisps in reply. Both musicians exercise masterful control of their instruments, likely derived from their contemporary classical backgrounds. Although these compositions (three by Javaid, two by Debacker) would fit in such a setting – the sparsity allows for resonance that would shine beautifully in a proper concert hall – they also wend and surprise enough to point to influences from the freer musics, less jazz than free improv and contemporary extended-technique experimentation. Maybe this blending and blurring is what the album title and the track Convulted, one of the busiest on the album, reference. The latter roils and gurgles with the best of that non-idiomatic European tradition. Compulsive, the following track, consists of harsh, contorted swipes over a piano that veers from Schoenberg to Jacques Demierre to who knows where. Amplfied, one of two live tracks, transitions from Debacker rubbing her piano strings to a series of glissando striations backed by fuzzy, heavy chords to a near blow-out. Dusky, the concluding piece, consists of long piano chords and saxophone tones, possibly augmented and elongated by electronic manipulations, or just expertly rendered acoustically.

Convolutionis unassuming and understated, but entirely captivating in its technique, concentration, and emotion. Simply (but quietly) put: wow.

With that, we are all caught up. All releases are available on CD and as downloads at Bandcamp via the links above.

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Catching up with Impakt Records: Part I

By Nick Ostrum

Impakt Records is a label dedicated to documenting Cologne’s free improvisation scene, much of which revolves around the club Loft Köln. The imprint has been in operation since 2016, and, since those early days, has accumulated nearly 40 releases. In a two-part series, I will review the five released in 2024 and so far in 2025.

Simon Rummel On Water Orchestra – Der Zauberlehrling (Impakt, 2025) 

Der Zauberlehrling (English: the sorcerer’s apprentice) is German composer Simon Rummel’s first release as leader on Impakt. The On Water Orchestra he has gathered is a 34-musician strong ensemble of musicians who deploy instruments ranging from the conventional (clarinet, trumpet, various strings) to, in the orchestral world, the unconventional (accordion, recorders, glass harmonica.)

The first composition, the titular 'Der Zauberlehrling', starts slowly but soon gives way to a jumble of long high-pitched tones that wafts and waxes, in the process revealing various textures and timbral variants. At certain peaking moments, it sounds as if one of the glass harmonicas (I think) is going to break into the upper reaches of Morten Laurdisen’s 'O Magnum Mysterium' but the drone quickly pulls any valancing strands back. A close listen reveals subtle pitch changes, but nothing that distracts from the forward-moving hum. Then, after several minutes, the various elements begin to distinguish themselves, not necessarily into easily identifiable instruments but discrete units, which take over the charge propelling the drone forward. This very much sounds like an exercise in building and harnessing energy, with stray musical electrons shedding here and there but the continued gradual surge forming the unifying element. Shimmering, engrossing, and hauntingly gorgeous.

Much of the same could be said for the next piece, 'Musik für den Lehrling des Zauberlehrlings' (music for the apprentice of the sorcerer’s apprentice), though the drone here quickly gives way to flights of clustered melodies, pulses of sound, and an interesting reinterpretation of more traditional compositional structures. Whereas the first piece enchants with its patience, this one moves, periodically opening into truly radiant passages and often bobbing just beneath that. Maybe this composition is the more sprightly study for the less experienced apprentice’s apprentice before they get to the disciplined practice that the sorcerer’s apprentice (rather than the sorcerer’s apprentice’s apprentice) must go through. One is left to wonder whether the sorcerer’s own piece would be even more focused and sparing than the first composition, or if by then the lesson is learned, and he would be free to explore new structures of rival splendor. 

Stefan Schönegg - Enso: On the withered tree a flower blooms (Impakt, 2024)

Impakt’s final release of 2024 was Stefan Schönegg’s Enso: On the withered tree a flower blooms. (The title itself is a fitting if optimistic tribute to what in terms of politics and warfare, at least, was an abysmal year for many.) On it, pianist Marlies Debacker (see 'Convolution' below) and drummer Etienne Nillesen, here solely on snare, join bassist Schönegg in a 44’ realization of his composition referenced in the title. Schönegg and Nillesen have released several albums of the former’s compositions in his Enso project. Debacker joined them, it seems, for the first time on the previous release, 2023’s Enso: A Simplified Space.

The base of Enso: On the withered tree a flower blooms is a heavy ribbon of oscillating drones provided firstly by Schönegg’s arco, but also a background of mellitic churning that seems to come from either internal piano or drum and cymbal bowing, and more likely both. The various drones fade in and out, though Schönegg’s bass is the insistent trunk to a tree otherwise limp. To extend the metaphor, it is this continued repository of life on which the flowers – the twangs of resonance, whatever is going on with the percussion and piano – bloom. The analogy is imperfect. Twenty-eight minutes in Schönegg hands the leadership to what sounds like a soft organ, which picks up the tone as the bass ceases. Slowly other glimmering sounds enter, as well. But, then comes the bass again, playing lower than before and adding a different vibrational wavelength that seems to quietly ring Nillesen’s cymbals. That is, unless Nillesen himself is performing this delicate task.

I swear I hear electronics in this piece, but I have been assured all this acoustic. In that, all the more power to Schönegg, Deback, and Nillesen. This piece shows incredible control in its strange and patient sonic layers and fusions, and in that it also shows an attractive vision of music that pushes the listener to confront the mutually constitutive dialectic between stasis and movement, convention and perception, and deterioration and blossoming.

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Sarter Kit - Time Got Relative

German saxophonist Tara Sarter's video for her song 'Time Got Relative' features a cat driving around endlessly in a parking garage. It somehow does a nice job of capturing the mood of the circuitous and jaunty tune. When the cat makes it out, there is a palpable sense of relief.

The track is the latest cut from Sarter's upcoming debut album What I am and What I’m Not, with
Elias Stemeseder on piano and synths and Lukas Akintaya on drums.

 

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Benjamin Lackner - Spindrift (ECM, 2025)

By Don Phipps

The set of exquisite tone poems found on pianist and composer Benjamin Lackner’s album Spindrift create pastel colors and the hazy ambience of autumn in a cloud-shrouded forest. The subtle lines and development that give life to this introspective outing can be found in the soft, poignant, and graceful readings of Lackner, trumpeter Mathias Eick and tenor sax player Mark Turner. And the sympathetic rhythm section of bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Matthieu Chazarenc provide a solid yet buoyant bottom. The effect – a respite from the turbulence and combustion of an unsettled world.

Lackner wrote all but one of the pieces that grace the album (the exception being Chazrenc’s “Chambary”), and each of them highlight unhurried atmospheres, like breathing deep while viewing a panorama from a mountain ridge. Each song seems to reflect a natural setting. For example, the title cut “Spindrift” moves like a raft along a slow river current. Or the early morning mysterious quality of “Mosquito Flats.” Or the rocky musical perch of “More Mesa.”

There is also a sense of perspective. Take “Murnau,” where Eick and Turner, who eschew tonguing their instruments in favor of gentle slurs, create just the right tough of melancholy before Oh takes over, her wooden bass plucks carefully crafted above Lackner’s chordal backing. And on “Anacapa,” Eick and Turner’s dual voicings skip lightly above Lackner’s fingerings, creating rays of tuneful sunlight that seem to float down from a forest canopy. These tandem voicings, usually with Eick taking the melody and Turner providing the harmony, can be heard on “Fair Warning,” “Out of the Fog,” and “Chambary,” and the two players illustrate how the sounds of trumpet and sax can be cooly blended to create impressionistic soundscapes.

“I seek solace in music and the process of composing is a form of meditation for me,” says Lackner in the liner notes. “There may be bleaker undercurrents on this album, coloured by underlying sadness, perhaps even fear. But I do hear hope in there as well.” That said, one can also think of Spindrift as a warm blanket on cold early morning – a set of tunes you can wrap around yourself, alone in thought, drinking chamomile tea with just the right amount of honey to sweeten the taste, readying oneself to face the coming day. Enjoy.

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