Marilyn Crispell and Harvey Sorgen - Forest (Fundacja Słuchaj 2025)

By Gary Chapin

Marilyn Crispell has been, for me, for a long time, the most mystic of our beloved piano-playing chaos magicians. Sometimes it’s obvious. For example, when, in the past, she has played Coltrane’s “Dear Lord,” for example, or Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear,” beginning at the deconstruction, bringing it slowly back to coherence, you are almost involuntarily transported into the music.

Even the most raucous playing—the stabbity-stab, stochastic melodies, and the thoom thoom thooming—invites me to altered consciousness in a way no one else’s playing does. I’ve had less experience of Harvey Sorgen, who has a strong list of collaborations, including with Joe Fonda, Karl Berger, and Michael Bisio, but I had no real doubts about what he brings to the table. Crispell has a great track record finding duet partners.

The two come together beautifully. “Forest,” sets the tone and demonstrates the dynamic of conversation, which starts civilly, but becomes deeply impassioned. “Overtones” is ruminative and leans heavily on the snare, and refuses to grow in tempo or dynamic, while absolutely growing in intensity and perseverance. “Dulcimer” left me thinking, “Why dulcimer?” But after a few moments I did recognize a hammer dulcimer-ish vibe—hammers hitting strings—and it made sense. Not that making sense is a criteria for greatness. Maybe I’m reading too much into titles. I don’t know if “Woolf Moon,” is a Virginia Woolf reference, but I want it to be. Either way, it’s a great piece of music. For “Seascape,” Sorgen takes a solo turn with bells and brushes, as beautiful as the landscape it purports to represent. We close with “Green,” a gentle, three-minute experience, inviting you to stop thinking, for just a bit.

The free jazz duet is on my short list of favorite things in the world. It feels like the purest and truest form of musical conversation one can imagine. Both Crispell and Sorgen have each made the duet a significant part of their respective oeuvres, with brilliant examples going back decades. The consistency of excellence in their outputs sometimes make it seem like a new release is no big deal. Forest is a big deal. A wonderful listen. Five stars.

Read More

Stefan Keune / Steve Noble / Dominic Lash - Black Box (scatterArchive, 2025)

By Martin Schray

In recent years, Stefan Keune has mainly been involved with the reformed King Übü Örchestrü and the orchestra’s nucleus, XPACT (at least that’s how it seems to me). Keune, who has replaced the late Wolfgang Fuchs in the new outfit, is the perfect substitute, as he is a master of subtle, abstract and elegant playing. However, he can also play differently when his fellow musicians demand it. His trio with Dominic Lash on bass and Steve Noble on drums, with whom he has been playing for more than ten years now, brings out a more powerful Keune without pushing the nuance and the intricacy into the background.

In 2017, the trio played a few gigs in Germany, the last of which was at the Black Box in Münster, a renowned venue for free music in West Germany, before they played at the Moers Festival a few days later. Two days before the Münster gig, I saw them in Schorndorf and was impressed by how well they worked together and how organic the musical interaction was. In the liner notes to this new recording, Keune mentions that he plays too rarely with the two "but whenever the opportunity arises. There is a great familiarity and security, even in the freest of contexts, that I really enjoy." Black Box is the perfect example for these words.

The music simply kicks in and you’re thrown straight into the action. Keune’s lines smear around, while Lash and Noble rumble darkly. However, the music immediately becomes more precise, exploring its possibilities, bouncing against the limits of the registers. The musicians stretch out time, but then condense it in the next moment; the whole thing happens at a rapid pace and with the greatest possible elegance. In the trio’s music, the loud-quiet-passages, which structure the sets, are decisive. The improvisation then seems to implode out of nowhere, e.g. when saxophone and bass simply stop playing in the first piece and briefly leave the field to Steve Noble’s drums. But then they immediately feel their way back into the piece. And as is so often the case with excellent saxophone trios (and we are dealing with one here), it’s the quiet passages that are the most convincing ones. Keune, Lash and Noble create an enormous tension here, an urgency, a presence that we only know from the best of their genre, e.g. Evan Parker’s trio with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton. Keune’s rough melodies are turbulently taken by surprise by Noble and Lash, drum beats patter, rimshots hail, the bowed bass jerks and twitches and churns, the strings purr, bolt, creak and boom. It’s pure joy to listen to.

Anyone hoping for new magic and adventurous kicks from new chamber music, magic ignited by sparklers and a captivating interplay between cacophony and subtlety, melancholy and expressiveness - here is what you are looking for.

Black Box is available as a download.

You can listen to it and by the music here:

Read More

Let’s Prego: AngelicA Secondi

By Andrew Choate

This is the second part of a three-part review of the full 35th edition of the AngelicA festival in Bologna. The first part can be read here; the third part can be read here.

Unless indicated otherwise, photos are by author

May 12, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Iancu Dumitrescu & Hyperion International Ensemble

Iancu Dumitrescu - conducting

Tim Hodgkinson - bass clarinet

Dyslex - electronics

Dan Antoniu - acoustic guitar, vocals, electronics

Octav Avramescu - piano, prepared piano

Andrei Kivu - cello, flute, trumpet

Ciprian Ghiță - double bass

Simone Beneventi - percussion

Chris Cutler - percussion,

Supradynamic Music

Axis Mundi

Cycloides

Spectogramme

Stellar Points

During this ensemble’s more than two-hour performance, the audience divided into two camps: those who would have stayed for twice as long, and those who felt it should have ended much, much earlier. I’m firmly in the former group. A devoted listener to Iancu Dumitrescu ’s music for decades, I’ve traveled to Bucharest to see him conduct the Outernational Ensemble, and I’ve read Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu (edited by Andy Wilson). Allow me a brief anecdote, which may symbolize a certain relationship to this music. In the 1990s, while living in Chicago, the apartment I shared was broken into. During an ultimately unsuccessful search for anything valuable, the burglar opened a drawer of my CDs and grabbed a substantial handful from my collection of Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram releases on Edition Modern. When I returned, I called local record stores to see if any had recently received a large batch of such specific recordings. One had. And because a photocopy of an ID was required to sell used CDs at the time, the thief was identified—his attempt to offload Dumitrescu’s music, with nary a care for the energy contained therein, led to his arrest.

No crimes were committed—nor solved—by the music in Bologna, but its earth-shattering force did seem to augur something momentous. When I arrived, about fifteen minutes before the show, I heard sporadic percussive crashes from the hall. Knowing how extensively this performance was rehearsed, I assumed Dumitrescu was still coaxing something particular out of the ensemble. I entered and sat down. The room was relatively quiet until he raised his arms and summoned another blast, this time with the addition of scrawling strings. The audience murmured; he shouted, “Silence please!” More scattered sounds from the stage, more low talking from the audience. Then a definitive “SILENCIO” rang from his lips. Shortly thereafter, without any formal announcement, the house lights dimmed, the stage lit up, and the music continued – unchanged, unaffected. It would not stop for the next two hours.

Dumitrescu. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

Many members of this iteration of the Hyperion International Ensemble—Dumitrescu’s umbrella term for the rotating cast of international performers under his direction—were new to me. Two in particular deserve special mention. The electronics of Dyslex (Gheorghe Iosif) were a gritty fit in the ensemble’s fundamental maelstrom. Whether channeling fuzzed-out theremin distortion or squirty analog-synth bleeps, his timbral contributions deepened the music’s texture exponentially. So deftly employed, his sounds didn’t just layer onto the music; they seemed to emerge from within it, amplifying its evocative unease. Just as notable was the acoustic guitar and voice of Dan Antoniu. His guttural growls—reaching the gravelliest vocal registers—added depth to an already dark palette. And his bowing of the acoustic guitar, positioned upright on a table (take that, Keith Rowe!), summoned dazzling, high-end squeals at key moments. Dumitrescu, of course, controlled all these dynamics; his conducting movements not overly elaborate, but clearly effective due to rigorous rehearsal. Each performer responded with a rich variety of attacks, textures and energies, shaped under his unmistakable direction.

Maybe you’ve never heard Dumitrescu’s music before. If so, let me say: the title of Andy Wilson’s book Cosmic Orgasm is perfect. Like the poetry of Will Alexander, this music is nearly impossible to describe without using the word cosmic. Reinforcing this association is the fact that most of the releases on his and Avram’s (rest in pulsars) Edition Modern label feature graphics of nebulae, galactic formations, lava flows and constellations.

What struck me first on those early recordings was the extreme use of strings: huge groups of players bowing the outermost edges of their instruments in unison, creating the kind of caterwaul that seems like the most intense kind of scream – the one on the inside. Percussion detonations pound and scatter across the sonic field. And then: eerie quiet, a single string vibrating, tension so heightened it’s almost molecular. One could listen and hear darkness, villainy or a sinister undercurrent – there is something truly abrading here. But there’s also pleasure to be had in confronting the reality this music poses: it feels like the real, actual situation of life. It’s violent, and it’s beautiful—and not always separately. Luigi Russolo would have loved it.

This particular night gave us cavernous winds and a shocking mid-register bass clarinet blast from Tim Hodgkinson. A lightning ball of discreet eruptions shot diagonally through the ensemble, following Dumitrescu’s lines drawn in the air. More vocals surfaced than I’ve ever heard in his work, thickening the atmosphere with raw nerves in action. I’ve already noted Antoniu’s role, but Chris Cutler, Simone Beneventi and Andrei Kivu added vocalizations too.

Tiny, rippling objects buried between string clusters were framed by massive, dramatic poundings and scrapings. It felt like falling and dissolving – not shooting stars, but staggered, cascading descents. This music is the flipside of the same existential elegance revealed in the austerity of Walter Marchetti’s Per la sete dell’orecchio, where large stones are dropped at irregular intervals down a deep well. Dumitrescu, however, pursues more sumptuous cataclysms sprawling within the abyssal grandeur. Tonight that grandeur stirred to life in the quiet, creeping ripples from the bass-clarinet and flute pads as they forebode an inevitable barrage. The woman next to me jumped when the percussion strike landed.

Every performer in this band is miraculous. I had never heard a piano sound like a three-second waterfall – and I’m counting the Fluxus bucket brigade. I especially admired the choice to have two percussionists with almost identical setups mirrored on each side of the stage. The uniqueness of their responses to Dumitrescu’s cues revealed just how personal this music is to perform. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, even if it often feels like entropy is one gong away.

Chris Cutler. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

~ Sidenote on Chris Cutler. Beyond his books championing boundary-pushers in music, beyond his longstanding stewardship of the superb and crucial RēR Megacorp label and beyond his own outstanding and legendary career as a performer, I have to highlight Probes , his podcast produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA). It is, without a doubt, the most insightful and ear-opening introduction to the history of music ever created – thirty-seven episodes and counting.

The entire Radio Web MACBA project deserves recognition. Instead of the perfunctory sound art installations that elite institutions like MoMA, Tate Modern and their ilk trot out every so often—always featuring the same names, the same experts with the same pedigrees moving in the same circles— RWM presents a plethora of micro- and macro-scholarship that acknowledges the reality and diversity of centuries of artistic investigations into sound beyond the narrow confines of urban-superstar cultural hegemonies from the expected capitals.

May 13, 2025

Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi – Bologna

Charlemagne Palestine

Schlingen Blängen OrgAngelicA

This concert took place in a new venue, the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi. Posters advertising concerts featuring works by Haydn, Schumann, Mozart and Mendelssohn adorned the outside. Upon entering, the space opened up unexpectedly, its vast interior and seemingly endless arched colonnades defied the modest façade. When I commented on this disconnect to the woman showing me to my seat, she said that many of the churches in Bologna are like this – meant to suprise and awe you once inside. I settled in and noticed a thin organ chord already humming through the space. The instrument, suffused in red light, already felt active within the ritual.

Palestine began by moving from the organ at the side of the church to the center aisle, where he stood swaying in silence before launching into chanted vocals rich in overtones, with a hint of the naturally angelic. Without a microphone, his voice leapt with playful precision, hopping like a rabbit through a field: purposeful, unpredictable, chipper. The overtones were mesmerizing in their complexity without feeling formal or cerebral. After about eight minutes of singing, it felt as though the air itself still trembled where his breath had been, as if his sound had warped the space, which was now shimmering with the kind of distortion you see when heat bends space. (I swear – all I had was an amaro before the show.)

Onto the organ. Few experimentalists besides Jean-Luc Guionnet and Bengt Hambræus have made pipe organs so integral to their musical practice and vision as Palestine, attentive as they all are (or were, in Hambræus’s case) to each instrument’s singularity. Their approaches embrace the volatility and mass inherent in each organ, treating them not as vessels of order but as living, resonant forces to unleash unstable physicalities.

Bear with me for a critical digression: I don’t include artists like Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro and Sarah Davachi in this lineage. Their work, while acoustically refined, leans toward harmonic tidiness. It functions more like exercises in sound design than explorations of the organ’s alchemically corporeal charge. Meticulously tepid, their relationship to the instrument feels purely procedural, as if each organ’s astounding physical presence were incidental rather than indispensable to their aesthetic. They represent a large swathe of the contemporary brand successfully marketed as “post-minimalist” organ, which has ossified into ideologies of tuning and generic pleas to “reveal listening as an active process of creative participation.” This is where elegant arrangements, introspective stasis, conceptual overdetermination and sonic lifelessness come together. I wish I weren’t contrasting the work of older men with that of younger women – perhaps the latter’s is, in part, a reaction against their predecessors. My critique is specifically about how the organ is treated: as a profound material force, or a polished backdrop for meditative kitsch. That choice determines the aesthetic and affective weight of the music, to my ears. I’d be less harsh if I could find a single, scant syllable from my professional peers that acknowledged the difference between these two strategies. Maybe the popularity of the consort I’m criticizing lies in how fluently their music mirrors a listening culture conditioned by seamlessness: they make work calibrated not for experience or confrontation, but tailored for passive coexistence with a life of scrolling by. Satisfying for audiences in need of reprieves and time-outs, not reckonings and transformations. (For what it’s worth, I was born halfway between Davachi and Guionnet, if demographic framing is your default habitat.)

Fret not, salvation is nigh! Not all recent pipe organ music by young women adheres to this decorous restraint. The pioneering and egregiously underrecognized Austrian pianist Ingrid Schmoliner has begun incorporating organ into her already esteemable keyboard practice. Though she has released only one album featuring the instrument, she’s been performing on it at festivals across Austria for the last several years, reshaping how the organ can function as both a kinetic reservoir and sensitive vessel for intimate expression. The title of her work says it all: I Am Animal . Amen.

This was the second time I’d heard Palestine perform on the organ live; the first time was in 2009, on one of the largest pipe organs in the world, at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. I remember him maximizing the volume until you could feel the bass rumble through your pew. The set was a long, raw whirl through the full range of the entire instrument. This bout, playing a version of the same piece, felt much more condensed and synthesizer-y: tones layered on tones creating an electrically vibrating mass of sound. Palestine confirmed my experience in a brief message to the audience after his performance, proclaiming the instrument “the greatest synthesizer that exists,” extolling what it is capable of in stretched, reverberant architecture like this. It’s possible that this show was less performance than invocation: the organ summoned itself, and Palestine rode the waves.

Charlemagne Palestine. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

The overall effect was like a perfect broth – clear and concentrated, yet built from an abundance of ingredients and flavors coming together. Huge bellows gave way to slanted blue simplicities, like the wind nudging a column of haze awry. At times the horns seemed to double themselves, sounding impossibly more horn-like than actual brass; don’t think, feel. There’s a kind of gentle ferocity to racecars circling a track––relentless within bounds—and Palestine’s quivering pulsations summoned something similar. Then suddenly it was as if a chasm had cracked open in the Dolomites and a wild bloom of squeals and howls burst forth. I sensed the nearby flower petals palpitating, still trembling post bee-plop.

May 18, 2025

Secret Location – Bologna

Essaira

Paola Paganotto - vocals, multiple voices

Angelo Gelo Cassarubia - guitar and noises

Nico Pasquini - guitar and electronics

Secret Show

Though not an official part of AngelicA’s proceedings, I was invited by the festival bartender to attend a “secret show”featuring her band on one of the off-nights. It’s not like I was desperate for music during the week without concerts, but I should admit that a few days before, in my avidity for listening, I followed what I thought was an intriguingly unusual sound emanating from the open windows of the Chiesa Santuario Santa Maria della Pioggia just after 9pm. I knocked on the door to find out. Alas, this was not a concert; they were just cleaning the floors with an exceptionally high-pitched propeller vacuum, scouring some oddly arhythmic residue. I want this tool.

Based on the space for the Essaira show––an informal collective of small stations where artists are building instruments, screenprinting and designing/refurbishing gear––I felt at home. Downstairs, Essaira launched into one of those surprisingly invigorating live sets that grab you by the heart-hairs. Post-punk WTF in extremis: industrial rhythms and textures spun with psychedelic slashes . Momentums established and deliberately sabotaged. You’d start to dance, then be forced to halt and relish the stasis…until grooved immediately back into distorted submission: but boss, I already clocked in! Momentum derailed in a rewarding, tension-building way.

Cassarubia’s wild, processed guitar strums reminded me of Martin Siewert at his most flourishing: acid for cats. Paganotto—dancing, chanting, audience-penetrating—delivered lyrics that were political, confrontational, lyrical and physical. And by the latter I also mean danceable. Some lyrics were in English, but the meaning transcended language: when she sang the word fashion—dripping with disdain and bounced-back brutality—you knew she was referencing fascism. I know she wasn’t repeating the name Frances-Marie Uitti but I leaned into the mishearing, delighted by the fantasy of a future where that exquisite virtuoso’s name would be regaled and chanted like an icon we should all be devoted to. (Well dang, of course there's a coincidence: I just did a little research and discovered that Uitti actually premiered one of Scelsi’s last-discovered cello works at the AngelicA festival in 2006. I guess everything makes sense if you hallucinate attentively enough.)

I’ve listed their official instrumentation above, but Pasquini also adds drum programming to his guitaring activities – contributing heavily to the band’s updated industrial framework. I loved his sensibility: dark, savage and frisky. He concentrates on the low-end frequencies (I actually thought he was playing electric bass, but I didn’t look that closely, jamming as I was). The band wouldn’t work without the interplay of Cassarubia and Pasquini’s electric strings: Pasquini’s rhythmic boisterousness grounds the punk and Cassarubia’s effects set free the abstractions that make the sound so full. Paganotto live-mixes what everyone contributes while slipping between multiple vocal identities. One loop featured a chant of “DADA REM, DADA REM, DADA REM” repeated to infinity, which I interperted as a hymn to the best kind of sleep you can get: aggressive, artistic and vividly immersive. A slow cascade of guitar noises unfolded over an ominous beat, and she sang in earnest over the now-dense but still discernible layers. The dada realm turned out to be the waking one, where we make responsible choices informed by dreams. I probably projected a lot onto what I comprehended of her lyrics, but the repetition of what I heard as “you’ve been chaste” made me realize: chaste is a homonym of chased , and I wasn’t running. I was elated: Essaira combined zones I thought had either been abandoned, codified into irrelevance or gone extinct. But volatility is alive again, and the edge of noise-punk activism on the dancefloor is a centerfold I slaver for.

May 21, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

b-l duo

Bertram Wee & Lynette Yeo - keyboards, electronics, objects

my body, broken for your amusement [vessel II] (2022, Bertram Wee)

Scapes (2023, Chua Zi Tao)

NUN IV (2021, Sarah Nemtsov )

Dance Fantasia: Chromatic Eccentric Weaves (2025, Hoh Chung Shih)

Cam11us (2025, Christoven Tan)

b-l duo. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

This ambitious evening of four works by contemporary Singaporean composers—and one German woman—performed by two Singaporean musicians was framed before it began by the presence of a large metal sheet in the middle of the stage: bent, folded and twisted. Though never struck, it served as a projection surface, cycling from dazzling (green and pink together, yum) to obscure (was that a body?) to obtrusive (a retina-searing white that made it physically painful to look at the stage). But as the title of the first piece—my body, broken for your amusement [vessel II]—made clear, these performances were not about comfort and cookies.

That opening work by Wee, for keyboard and talkbox—he was also one of the evening’s two performers—began with the talkbox mic half-submerged into Lynette Yeo’s mouth. Subtle bubbling sounds—like the last desperate sucks slurped from a straw at the bottom of a drink—transformed into growls over Wee’s loom of slowly shifting electronics. Two layers defined. Abrupt stop. Defined Pause. Begin again. Now a little denser, more growl than bubble. Flutter-tongued breath mirrored by fluttered electronics: a wheel spun, wobbling. Abrupt stop. Noise blast and screaming. Lightning flashes. Pig squeal* vocals. Keyboard armageddon and grunts galore. Stop. Silence. Return to initial haze, now recontextualized. Flipsides established. Back to the blasts. Louder, longer, more metallic, shrill and dark – a deathcore-style barrage. What’s not to love in such exquisitely executed entrenchment?

*Listen to episode 10 of Cutler’s Probes for a deep dive into vocal experimentation, including an especially deep look into the special category of pig squeals.

The other pieces in the program didn’t quite reach the same intensity for me. Chua Zi Tao’s Scapes (for keyboards) suffered from a foundation of thin digital timbres—thankfully not as dire as the nadir of brittle digitalia, George E. Lewis’ Voyager—plus plinky piano that never gained momentum. Its gestures and vocabulary felt stranded in a proto-INA GRM wasteland, a hangover from the early days of electro-acoustic composition. At just twenty-six, Tao may still be emulating his influences, but his instincts for timbre modulation are promising. NUN IV (for keyboard, electronics, video) by Sarah Mentsov felt like a sci-fi soundtrack, full of sweeping gestures that suggested artificial drama rather than musical tension. The blindingly bright white light projected onto the metal sheet during this piece rendered the stage literally unwatchable. I have no idea what the intended effect of this video by Rosa Wernecke and Heinrich Horwitz was. Sonically, the piece came off like an encyclopedia entry on how to generate whirled sounds via electronics – though none approached the acoustic apex into this space reached by Whirled Music by Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, Paul Burwell and David Toop .

Hoh Chung Shih’s Dance Fantasia: Chromatic Eccentric Weaves(for keyboard and melodica) focussed on the interplay between the sonorities of harpsichord (keyboarded by Yeo) and melodica (played by Wee.) Just when a kind of vampiric antagonism developed—each instrument consuming the timbre of the other—the piece ended. I was left hoping that Shih expands from what he attained here. The program closed with Christoven Tan’s Cam11us (for keyboards, objects,electronics, video), a complicated conglomeration of object-based sound. I say “object-based” because most of the sounds remained tethered to the objects that produced them, in a netherworld between sound and music. Wee crunched on something crispy, Yeo activated wind-up toys; train-track warning klangs fired, bursts of radio static erupted. Samples of cartoons at the wrong speed clashed with heavy-metal rumbles. Paradoxically, the accretion and layering of all these distinct non-musical sources created a form of coherence, something incongruously and unexpectedly musical.

The uncategorizable is standard fare at AngelicA – this piece and the night’s program epitomized that ethos. Why is such eclecticism actually so rare at other festivals, when every self-proclaimed music lover swears by their own “eclectic” tastes? Even if I didn’t fall in love with every piece on this night, I appreciated many things: exposure to new performers and composers from a generally under-represented region in the contemporary music world, the embrace of sonic (and visual) extremeties and, most of all, the context itself. This concert was bookended by a seminal, soul-bending organ performance a few days before and incandescent multi-generational improvised music the next night – if good fences make good neighbors, good juxtapositions make better listening.

May 22, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Ava Mendoza/ Hamid Drake/ William Parker

Circular Pyramid

There’s only one word for Hamid Drake’s playing tonight: voracious. No matter how many times I’ve seen him over the past 30+ years, the profound funk of his polyrhythmic attack is startling. (Though attack sounds harsh – he doesn’t assault so much as unfurl and envelop: it’s a gift.) He and William Parker, longtime collaborators, are practically interwoven: their interplay is more like shared breath than dialogue. Ava Mendoza brought a wistful, yearning lyricism to the dense exchanges, her guitar sound laced with just enough distortion in the first half of the set to bend the trio’s groove into something edgy and restless. The real magic here was the chemistry: everyone elevating each other, no one playing the star so everyone could shine.

Mendoza, Parker, Drake. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

The rhythms were breathtaking and invigorating, accelerations intricately interlaced with decelerations until another explosion, polyrhythms spread like butter through the folds of perception. Downbeats felt like discoveries, not anchors, plucked from the æther for maximum noggin wallop and limb shake. Imagine a staircase, with nice and even steps. Then it bifurcates. And the steps become teasingly skewed, but in a way your body somehow recognizes. Then the bifurcations are squared. Hello syncopated imbalance ,my old friend. Now each jut and strut spirals out in an exponential array, a firework display of Escher-like illusion and impossible geometry. Except the rhythms are real. And you’re not stepping – you’re floating.

Mendoza channeled shades of Steve Vai’s otherworldly harmonic sophistication, crafting runs so plaintive and full of soul that even their inevitable disintegration felt fulfilling. The highlight for many in the audience—there were hoots, there were hollers—was a supernatural funk vamp anchored by Parker’s repetition of a simple, hypnotic yowl of a phrase on the shukahachi. Mendoza locked into a taut, understated rhythm-guitar stride and Drake plotted out an impeccable groove, fully accented and embellished down to the last fractal of funk. The high wail of that double-reeded shakuhachi pinpointed the sweet spot between the ancient and the ecstatic, the blessed and the coiled. A serenade to neigh by.

Photo by Massimo Golfieri

May 24, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Erik Drescher

Against Nature (2020, Peter Ablinger)

My introduction to Peter Ablinger’s music came through Weiss/Weisslich 22 (1986, 1996), in which layers of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century symphonies are condensed into 40-second bursts. It was the early 2000s, and I was in grad school at CalArts—in the writing program, not the music school—taking a class with James Tenney. After I turned in a tape piece of my own, Tenney invited me to his office to play me the Ablinger recording. The stunning shifts in color between the dense blocks of noise—each drawn from a different musical century—were a revelation, even for someone accustomed to sonic revelations. I’ve relished every opportunity to hear Ablinger’s work since then. Now, following his untimely death last month, each encounter feels all the more poignant, a feeling tonight’s performance deepened.

Ablinger and flutist Erik Drescher collaborated on this nearly hour-long piece—for glissando flute, voice, ultrasonic flute, bottles, bird whistles and ribbon—for six weeks during the Corona lockdown. Multitracked tape supplemented additional flute and voice recordings with birds, toads, telephone rings, alarm clocks, honking horns and other field-recorded assortments. The piece is built from 59 miniature sections, though the formal logic behind the sequence was difficult to perceive in performance. I found myself simply absorbing the interplay of slurred glissandi, multitracked samples, booming jug blows and uncanny organ pipes pushed into the ultrasonic range. At one point, a digital–acoustic clash at those extreme frequencies produced that airplane-taking-off rumble that seems to materialize from nothing and then consume everything. It reminded me of Tenney’s For Ann (rising), where the illusion of perpetually ascending pitch never resolves. A high-pitched ricochet followed, dropping me back into the room.

Erik Drescher. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

It wasn’t always a comfortable place to be. At times, shrill whistles had me plugging my ears. But there were moments of pleasure too, like raindroppy pad-taps on the glissando flute. In retrospect, I realize they referenced the toads that inspired the piece’s creation, though in the moment it felt somewhat disconnected even if sensually satisfying. Speaking of mmmhhmmm, I’ve always loved bottle music—from John White’s “Drinking and Hooting Machine” to Percy Mayfield’s “My Jug and I”—so I was especially drawn to the appurtenances of volcanism I perceived in how the bottles were played: it’s all about the pressure, baby. Field recordings of honking traffic were cleverly intertwined with Drescher’s flute playing the role of police and ambulance sirens in full Doppler swirl. The whole thing unfolded as an algorithmic labyrinth of the expanded flute spectrum: we’re all minotaurs now.

May 24, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Rafael Toral

Spectral Evolution

I arrived at this second set of the evening more familiar with the electronic side of Rafael Toral’s work, having seen him in MIMEO a few times and listened to recordings more aligned with that side of his practice. Tonight was primarily a guitar-centered affair: a made-for-performance, expanded version of his latest album, Spectral Evolution . Playing electric guitar alongside pre-recorded material, he sounded like Oren Ambarchi OD’d on chamomile tea and was resuscitated by a faint vape of MDMA. Quite good. Calm lines sprinkled over thick symphonic warbles; giant waves of harmonically throbbing overtones; a fog of hum rippling in all registers, eddying in whirlpools of lapsed finesse traded for the glory of succumbing. Ahh, full succumbation.

Rafael Toral. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

I liked how he physically reacted to his own music – even when not playing, as the pre-recorded bits moved from background to foreground. He danced with his hands and surfed with his shoulders, then dropped back into pizzicato noise twiddles, like squeezing and twisting a sponge soaked with guitar licks that dripped out unpredictably. Toward the end, he laid his guitar across his lap, arms outstretched to either side in a yogi-like pose of perfect stillness. Burpy, warty, squelchy electro-gurgles and Indian chanting mixed with monolithic swells of infinitely sustained guitar chords played back as he remained seated. As the recording faded, he added a few concluding strums. Then he rose for the final coda: a theremin solo stylized like birdsong, arriving just as the projected photograph (by Sylvain Georges) of a bird behind him was extinguished. Reincarnation via medium switch. It was all quite pleasant—and I can see why he’s built a loyal audience for his raptures.

Photo by Massimo Golfieri

Read More

Stef.in – Icterus II (Barnyard Records, 2025)

By Nick Ostrum

Stef.in is a quartet led by Toronto drummer Stefan Hegerat. Joining him hereare Mark Godfrey on bass and Robyn Gray and Patrick O’Reilly, both on guitar. As the accompanying notes indicate, Icterus II, their second album, is electric fusion inspired by 70’s Miles that doesn’t really sound like 70’s Miles and isn’t really fusion! Maybe we can just call this non-dogmatic music for the 21 ^st century schizoid moment?

The music is heavy and makes ample use of guitar pedals that sound gooey, glitchy and eerie. I cannot shake the impression that this is space music, as well. It is cavernous, deep, and lonely, at times, likely to reflect the last few years of distance and interaction mediated and distorted through nonhuman technologies. Then again, it can be pensive and even consoling, conveying acceptance and adaptation, as well as, in its tension, confusion and resistance. Icterus II plays particularly skillfully with that divide between invitation and familiarity on the one hand and estrangement on the other. It undulates and pulses like a heat-induced fever that elicits lucid dreams of a soft and warm but disorienting place that is just too far away to touch and is therefore covered in a cold, sterile protective film.

There are juicy bits of cosmic funk, wacky 8-bit zig-zags a la Zappa and Henry Cow, deep water ambient pulses, and a surfeit of doubled psychedelic noodling that bring to mind the Orchestra of the Upper Atmosphere. Then again I am sure any listener will bring their own connections from early kosmische Musik to myriad prog icons to, again, electric Miles and the milieu around those recordings. It’s all there, though, in Hegerat’s drums, I hear much more rock than jazz. His pedigree, however, includes Michael Formanek, Tim Berne, Nick Fraser, Gerald Cleaver, and others that might make the listener expect more of the latter. Of course, that’s all here, as well.

All in all, Icterus II is deeply engaging. It sounds very much of its time, and had it been composed just a couple years later (2025, rather than 2023), I would wager it would sound different, maybe more scattered and aggressive than dreamy and introspective. That is no criticism in itself, of course. It is just a means through which I can place this recording, which, for better or worse, I cannot avoid attempting. That is likely because this album can be so gripping, especially in the ways in which it plays with and transcends time (stylistically, changing time signatures, shifting fore- and background, stretched prog-rock constructions) and the various passages where Gray and O’Reilly face off, one pixelated guitar vine-scroll entangling with another.

Icterus II as a download and on vinyl via Bandcamp:

.

Read More

Victoria Jordanova & Jérôme Descamps - A Second Orb (Aut Records, 2025)

 By Stef Gijssels

The joy of being a reviewer is to get exposed to both known and unknown musicians, to be enthralled by novelty and totally different sonic universes. This album offers such a unique experience. Serbian classical harpist Victoria Jordanova and French jazz trombonist Jérôme Descamps meet for a minimalist conversation, a dialogue between two seemingly unrelated instruments. 

The music is calm, slowly moving forward in a strange sonic environment, with the fresh and delicate ringing tones of the harp contrasting sharply with the deep gliding sounds of the trombone. The effect is ethereal and mesmerising, soothing and fascinating at the same time. 

Jordanova was trained at the Music Academy of Belgrade University, she resided at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, during which time she studied harp with Jacqueline Borot, professor at the Conservatoire National de Paris. She also holds a Masters of Arts in Musicology from New York University. Jérôme Descamps began his career as a classical trombonist in symphonic orchestras, then came the discovery of improvised music, free jazz and contemporary music, with a strong leaning to the free improv sound of the United Kingdom. We reviewed his album "Antipodes" with the Sakay quartet several years ago. Descamps also plays the cello. 

The duo brings us nine relative short tracks, clocking a little over thirty minutes in total, but that's fine. It makes the music even more precious, gem-like. 

You can describe the music as dreamy, meditative, slowly evolving, searching and probing, in a gentle and kind way, tender. The duo embroider a feathery fabric that is at once frail and breakable as well as solid. Every sound has its place. The fragility of the harp sounds find security with the deep sounds of the trombone. It is the contrast of the timbre of both instruments, together with the steady evolution of the high quality improvisation around a thematic structure that determines the success of this album.

A new listening experience. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Read More

Ava Mendoza, gabby fluke-mogul & Carolina Pérez

The trio of guitarist Ava Mendoza, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, and drummer Carolina Pérez are releasing what seems to be a promising gut punching, ass-kicking, hard-riffing album this summer called Mama Killa. This (sort of) video of the first track appeared in the Free Jazz Blog in-box a couple of days ago and shook us out of a mid-week stupor. Not sure if it fits so neatly in the category "free jazz" but if it were a slice of pizza, it would burn the roof of your mouth -- and you'd like that it did.

Read More

The Hemphill Stringtet - Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill (Out Of Your Head Records, 2025)

By Gary Chapin

It’s amazing to me that this is the first string quartet to record a set of Hemphill compositions. I may be reading too much into his friendship with Abdul Wadud, but Hemphill’s writing and affinity for cello make this idea feel natural. Also, instrument-family quartet’s are exactly in his pocket, if we’re to judge by his tenure with the World Saxophone Quartet.

The quartet—Curtis Stewart, violin, Sam Bardfeld, violin, Stephanie Griffin, viola, and Tomeka Reid, cello—all bring strong histories of innovation, performance, composition and improvisation. The opening track, “Revue” is also the opening track for the World Sax Quartet’s second album, Revue(1982). It’s a bluesy, riffy piece which gets very infectious before going off into out solos. It felt like WSQ’s theme, for a while, or its anthem. The fact that the Hemphill String Quartet programmed it right up front feels like a declaration of intent—and I support that intent.

Tracks 2 through 4 are Hemphill’s “Mingus Gold” suite, three Mingus tunes arranged for string quartet, and played by the Daedalus String Quartet. Their recording can be found on Hemphill’s massive posthumous box set,The Boyé Multi-National Crusade For Harmony (reviewed here). At first I wondered about the decision to put Mingus tunes on what is ostensibly a set of Hemphill compositions, but hearing Hemphill writing in conversation with Mingus is just as mystical as hearing Hemphill composing out of whole cloth. Further, the improvisers play extraordinarily well—as one would expect—and the fact that this is (I think) Hemphill’s only piece written for string 4tet makes it essential.

The final two tracks—”My First Winter/Touchic” and “Choo Choo”—are also sax quartet pieces and give this group ample space to shine, especially on the longer “My First Winter/Touchic.” Overall, this group could stand arm-in-arm with Hemphill and the WSQ. I very much want them to record more, and specifically, more Hemphill—if ever a composer deserved it, ‘tis him. Five stars. 

Read More

Cosmic Ear - TRACES (We Jazz, 2025)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Cosmic Ear is a new Swedish supergroup that follows the traces of legendary trumpeter-multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry (1936-1995), who in the late 1960s settled inSweden with his wife, Swedish visual and textile artist Moki Cherry, and collaborated and recorded with many local musicians, among them clarinetist-multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén, now 85 years old. Bothén played in Cherry’s albums Organic Music Society (Caprice, 1973) and Eternal Now (Sonet, 1984), and in Bengt Berger’s Bitter Funeral Beer (ECM, 1983).

Bothén leads this quintet and plays the West African string instrument, donso n’goni, bass clarinet, contra bass clarinet, and piano; Mats Gustafsson on tenor sax, flute, slide flute, Ab clarinet, live electronics, organ, and harmonica; Goran Kajfeš on trumpet, pocket trumpet, synth, electronics, percussion; Argentina-born Juan Romero on congas, berimbau, and percussion; and Kansan Torbjörn Zetterberg on bass, donso n’goni. All five musicians played in Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra.

Cosmic Ear does not offer a nostalgic trip. It owes much to Cherry’s spiritual free jazz meets world music legacy, especially with the presence of Bothén and his deep kinship with Cherry and Gustafsson's history with The Thing, titled after one of Cherry’s iconic pieces (The Thing covered other pieces of Cherry, and collaborated with Cherry’s daughter, Neneh Cherry, The Cherry Thing (Smalltown Superjazz, 2012)). But the other musicians also searched for their own spiritual musical ways. Kajfeš’ Magic Spirit Quartet explored West African music with Moroccan oud and guimbri player Majid Bekkas, and his Subtropic Arkestra explored Turkish and Ethiopian Music, and also covered Bothén’s composition. Zetterberg’s practice of Zen Buddhism informs his music. This quintet suggests a deep, seductive and uplifting, meditative journey that flirts and updates the legacies of Cherry, Alice Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders, but takes the music into a fresh territory of its own.

“TRACES OF Brown Rice”, after Cherry’s jazz piece, is now dressed with a hypnotic global groove, thanks to Romero’s Brazilian barimbau, but also with Kajfeš vintage synth and Gustafsson’s flute. “Love Train” is an original, emotional ballad that best captures Cherry’s timeless music and influence. “Do It (Again), for vocalist Sofia Jernberg (who was born in Ethiopia and played in Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra, and The End quintet), is a mysterious, sparse song, led beautifully by Zetterberg’s double bass Kajfeš’ reserved trumpet playing. The album ends with “TRACES of Codona and Mali) (available only in the digital and disc versions of the album), after Cherry’s trio with the late Colin Walcott and Naná Vasconcelos. It is an inspiring, poetic conclusion for this engaging and most beautiful cosmic, musical journey, that, hopefully, has just begun (or renewed).

John Corbett summarized it in his poetic liner notes: “The globe is a glove, a hand warmer that radiates with extraterrestrial power, returning the fingers to their place at the center of the galaxy; the Cherry path is a balm that restores essential moisture to the lips that blow life back into the megacosm. Let us all praise warm fingers and moist mouths”.

Read More

Zwei aus Berlin

Berlin Art Quartet - live at MIM (uniSono, 2025)

By Paul Acquaro

 

This review picks up, a few years later, from where my colleague Martin Schray's review of the Berlin Art Quartet's Live from B-flat, released and reviewed in 2020, leaves off. The band is the same, though a couple years more experienced, and the creativity and spontaneity that marked the first release is just as delightfully present in this recording made in 2019 at Berlin's Musical Instrument Museum (MIM).*

Just for a little scene setting, the MIM houses a dazzling collection of over 3,500 instruments dating from the 16th century onward. Some of its show pieces are a travel-friendly harpsichord once owned by Prussia’s Queen Sophie Charlotte (1744-1818), a Glass Harmonica designed by Benjamin Franklin (apparently known for its ethereal sound) and the Mixtur-Trautonium, an early electronic instrument designed in Berlin which helped shape the mysteriousness in film scores like Hitchcock’s The Birds.

 

So perhaps the setting has something to do with the music that was made that day? A day-time concert in a 200 person music recital hall that places the audience around the musicians, who play on a raised stage in the middle. Surrounded not only by an expectant audience but also by the history and sound discovery embodied in the instruments themselves, how could one not be a little bit nudged by the creative spirits flowing through the halls? Whatever may be, the group was certainly feeling moved. In fact, drummer and band-founder Reinhard Brüggemann said, "Truly an inspiring place to make music! Not at night in a jazz club in the basement on a small stage in front of greying fans, no, in the Olympus of a museum for musical instruments ... in the centre of Berlin." Ah, to have only been there. We, however, luckily now have the sounds, plucked from the air and presented on live at MIM by uniSono records.

 

The music begins without hesitation. 'Aufsturz' (collapse) is introduced spiritedly by all four musicians at once. They follow up with a tangle of lines, colorful and zestful, that within a minute-and-a-half begin disintegrating into fraught interplay. The four proceed with wary attentiveness, each note sure but every next one unknown. This charged moment does not last too long, as soon the tempo is racing and the actions and reactions brisk and relentless, taking them to the eventual end. 'Bewegung in Stille' (Movement in silence) follows and the approach is opposite the opener. Anchored in the pregnant gaps between the sounds, each strum of Matthias Bauer's bass strings or tumble of Brüggemann's drums carries the music further, and the sounds of Matthias Schubert's breathy blows through his tenor saxophone and Matthias Mueller's spluttering saliva in his trombone add new tonal dimensions.

 

It is on 'Gegenseitkeit,' (Reciprocity) the album's center piece, coming in at 13-minutes, that the group really has a chance to stretch out. By the middle, the walking bass and pulsating drums give the two horns the perfect setting for their simultaneous soloing, and the menacing bass solo that follows, which is adorned with percussive sounds, is ganz großes Kino (particularly impressive). More follows of course, lively interplay and reflective anticipation (the closing tune 'Hymnus' illustrates this last phrase quite well).

To close, perhaps it is apt to quote Brüggemann again, who said, "It is new music, but always also jazz - call/response as in the blues, collective improvisation as in New Orleans shimmers through." Recorded live, capturing the composition of the music in the moment of its creation is probably the best way to experience the Berlin Art Quartet. Here we have that magic bottled.

*Do read Martin's review of Live at B-flat for more background on the group's origins and connection to the legendary New York Art Quartet from which they derived their name and instrumentation.

  

Unzeit Quartett - self-titled (Trouble in the East, 2024)

The Unzeit Quartett features a mostly different set of Berlin based musicians, connected to the previous group physically by bassist Matthias Bauer and musically in the spontaneity of musical creation that is at once jazz, classical and uniquely a result of the four personalites involved. 

 

Prominent in the foreground is saxophonist Frank Paul Schubert. His tone can be spine-tingling at times, hitting extended notes that he tweaks and twists as they stream from his horn. The eponymous opening track is charged with his pointed melodic statements from the gentle prod at first to the dense motion that come later. Equally as impressive - or impression making - is pianist Celine Voccia whose playing contains unresolving chord voicings and emphatic melodic lines that intertwine with Schubert's. Joe Hertenstein's drumming, along with Bauer's bass work, provides a cohesiveness to the music, adding additional heft to the already excited atmosphere.

 

The music throughout the generous set of tunes, all carrying a name related to time or a time ... like 'Mahlzeit' (meal time) or 'Freizeit' (free time) or even Steinzeit (Stone-age). Each one offers a diverse set of moods and approaches and the musicians demonstrate an astute level of listening and natural reacting. Just for a quick example, on the aforementioned 'Steinzeit', the track opens with Bauer bowing high harmonics and Schubert pushing air through his mouthpiece, making both making "un-notes" (my term) in echtzeit (real-time). These textures are accompanied by Hertenstein's diverse percussive sounds and occasional interjections from Voccia. As the end of the track nears, the music has changed, evolving in a sense from the origins of sound to a reserved and melodic piece. The following track 'Eiszeit' (Ice age) begins uptempo and active, Schubert again delivering intricate and arresting snippets and Voccia filling space with forceful and flowing tones.

 

A lovely album capturing four excellent improvisers in-tune and fully in-time with each other. 

 

Read More

The Word Itself Interrogated: Two duos

By Stuart Broomer

If free improvisers are the bravest of musicians, then free improvising vocalists may be the bravest of all, confronting both the blank slate and the audience without the comforting intercession of a musical instrument. Most of the best will have some special background or capacity. Sainkho Namchylak has centuries of Tuvan throat-singing/shamanic mysticism in her background. Lauren Neuton, who literally wrote the book on the subject (VOCAL Adventures: Free Improvisation in Sound, Space, Spirit and Song, Wolke Verlag, 2022), has an astonishing range of cross-cultural techniques including opera, jazz and everything else. There are musicians as well who are significant vocalisers and self accompanists, like Joëlle Léandre whose voice often joins her bass in profoundly resonant (vocal/cultural) chant that seems to stretch across the Mediterranean from the Iberian peninsula to the Middle East; the drummer Sunny Murray’s rising and falling hum-wail-moan is a background voice on several great records, his own and others; Milford Graves was a master of chant.

John Russell/ Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg - before the wedding (Empty Birdcage Records, 2025) 

Phil Minton & Ståle Liavik Solberg - TRUE (Nice Things Records, 2025) 

These two recordings, in a rare moment of special affinity, appeared within a couple of weeks of each other. Each duet matches a vocalist with a single partner; each presents a single piece from a live performance in which a senior member of the British free improvising community works with a continental confrere. More than that, though, is that each duo wills a crossing of boundaries, testing the notions of speech, language, utterance and the human animal’s potential for transcendence. Each simultaneously presses the culture of free improvisation toward spell, shamanism and vaudeville. In either performance, genius is never far away, nor is the spectre of Ducks Daffy and Donald.

before the wedding (released on guitarist Daniel Thompson’s remarkable Empty Birdcage label) is initially a reminder of how much we lost when we lost John Russell (another is Thompson’s acoustic solo reflection, entitled John, a digital release recorded on the day of Russell’s passing). Russell was a great duet partner (including, coincidentally, a long-running duo with Ståle Liavik Solberg), among his many gifts, and on before the wedding his chorded passages and subtlest rises and falls in dynamics are never far from the voice of the Belgian Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, a commentator on improvised music of genuine insight as well as a vocalist of special gifts. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe all the things that Van Schouwburg can do with voice from the commonplace whisper to fricative and fortis (a commentator with a richer background in linguistics/phonetics would be better equipped to describe this work).

In a single 26-minute piece recorded on April12, 2018 at Klub Gromka, Ljubljana, Slovenia, parodic opera and grande dame/ grand guignol voices arise. Van Schouwburg and Russell are ideal complements throughout this 26-minute duet. There’s a certain focussed intensity in Russell’s playing, a determination that always expands Van Schouwburg’s mutations and divagations, already rich in meaning and drama, even when dancing with the comic. Transformed cartoon voices that arise here are drawn to something larger, both through their own dynamics and through Russell’s abstract, yet warm, mediations. Sometimes a cartoon-like impression will move toward articulate speech, only to wander backward into voluntary squall and willful chaos. The true complexity of this work gradually asserts itself: it is a guitarist and vocalist, yes, but it is also work moving freely – sometimes at warp speed -- among genres, all comedy, all music, all seriousness… but also no genre at all, some avatar of reality, no mediation between conception and voice. Van Schouwburg is expressing something as close to the vocal range of the human condition that might arise in art, rapid fluctuations from ghostly trill to Warner Bros. cartoons and horror, even nasal snorts, reminiscent of Animal Farm, not entirely neglected.

TRUE, recorded live at Blow Out, Kafe Hærverk in Oslo on November 21st, 2023,begins in the thin, high-pitched rattles of Ståle Liavik Solberg’s minimalist drum kit, followed almost immediately by Phil Minton’s intense and utterly far-fetched song – part senescent ramble, part protest and vision, part rapid-fire triple-talk in an unknown tongue. When Minton breaks briefly, he comes back strangling, combining high-pitched yodelling cries and gagging inhalations, all shadowed by the prospect of language. Solberg’s sounds reduce to the whistle of a light resonant scrape on the surface of something material, gradually expanding to his compounding, shifting tapping, while Minton drives further into an unknown world of whispers and muted cries and sudden bird whistles (eliciting a cymbal tap), word-gagged, shattered, choked, called out in some imaginary station to some unimaginable passengers (us, I assume, by proxy). There’s a gesture toward some gong-like device, then a thin (human) whistle, then more of the gong’s light resonance, a snare-like rattle, a choked chant (added to but not quite interrupted by cough and whistle).

Later there be loud and forceful utterances voiced as if part of a serial opera, and so it goes, every manner of human utterance explored, even a moment that sounds like Minton is channeling two choked voices at once, all subtly underpinned by near-invisible drumming. It’s like a radical, freely improvised oratorio (staged in this rendition by a listener’s imagination). A drum solo will appear, created with a minimal kit that seems to include wood block and cymbals. It’s all technically amazing, but that relatively minor feature is overshadowed by the exploration of life’s vocal extremes of madness, a madhouse production of Lear or Godot (It’s a mere 38 minutes, but it is so compressed that it’s effect is comparable) occasionally joined by Daffy Duck, sometimes searching an imaginary globe for absurd and unknown accents for spotlit shrieks, all accompanied and accented by a Tin Drum drummer who finds some especially sentient metal resonance to accompany a thinly whistled reflection.

Read More

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, 577 RECORDS (2/2)

Dawn After Dawn - Home is Where You Are (577 Records, 2025)

Here we have the Maestro (saxophones, trumpet and piano) along with Aron Namenwirth (guitar, flute, percussion) and Jon Rosenberg (loops, effects), under the banner Dawn After Dawn. Aron and Jon have been friends since 2020 and played as a duo, Hall of Mirrors. How the duo became a trio is clearly explained on Bandcamp notes by Aron Namenwirth: “Find yourself lucky enough to have Daniel and Jon in a recording studio and some incredible guitars and pedals on a grand piano, incredible exchanges will happen. Then the engineer becomes a musician…”. Electronic loops and experimental nuances are interspersed with smooth, beautifully out of time, Dexter Gordon-esque sax lines, soon to be hijacked by noises or crashed by Jimi/Miles-wise telluric wah wah: as in any great record, no way to rest on a comfort spot. About the “cooking”, here is Brooklin-based audio engineer, Jon Rosenberg: “Between my love for dance music, the electric period of Miles Davis and music for films, I began to add samples of tonally and rhythmically centered material to see if, somehow, these two disparate types of music could be made to mesh into something unique in the listener’s mind”. Should we feel, as listeners, that the music depicts a borderless sense of freedom, we got the counter-evidence of this directly by Carter’s words: “Dawn After Dawn inspires me to be more free of being a saxophonist, so to speak, Seems there are certain requirements and expectations that can be suffocating, nerve wracking and confining in trying to be a saxophonist. I have, for a long time, periodically been inspired to play in the inner voices instead of playing what's going on”. 

Sonic Chambers Quartet - Kiss of the Earth (577 Records, 2025)

Let’s grant Maestro Carter a little bit of well deserved relaxation and have a listen to this band co-led by New Orleans-based clarinetist and saxophonist Byron Asher and New York City-based saxophonist and clarinetist Tomas Majcherski. The multi-instrumentalists and composers have known each other and performed together for over 10 years, primarily in the New Orleans music scene, though their collaboration on this project only began in 2023. Studies in philosophy and religion, as well as working in avant garde theater, are part of their common upbringing and cemented their personal and artistic bond. The powerhouse of this debut release provided by Matt Booth from North Carolina on bass and Doug Garrison from New Orleans on drum, is blasting colorful and polyrhythmic patterns, setting the perfect frame for the warm, deep and intriguing textures put in place by the two reedists. Experimentation and avant-garde music find an exciting counterbalance in arrangements and sounds coordinates that moving the listener straight to European chamber music tradition, epitomized by Part One of the mighty Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, grinded and recast as “an improvisatory vehicle”, to borrow their own words. Recorded in rural southwestern Louisiana, Kiss Of the Earth sees at the mixing and production helm Brian Seeger, longtime compadre of the band.

Read Part 1 Here

Read More