Samo Salamon, Kevin Miller & Dan Blake - Burnt Pages (Samo Records, 2025)

By Guido Montegrandi

The line up of this record is: Samo Salamon - acoustic guitar, Kevin Miller - electric guitar, and Dan Blake - tenor & soprano saxophones and when a trio is so tight and the instruments are so close in their range you can end up having a sensation of closure or, on the opposite side, a sensation of a total opening. In this case my impression is that of doors and windows opening to offer a different view each time, Each piece is a room.

Sometimes you enter into a very jazzy atmosphere, comping passages and a rhythmic feel that is taken care by the three of them in turn - then more chamber music passages and high pitch sounds like in Cobalt Charm where Dan Blake goes wild and the others follow at various level of wilderness.

At any level the musical exchange seems to spring from a deep mutual listening and the electric and acoustic guitar always create a sonic spider web that support the whole structure. Each piece develops around the dynamics between composition and improvisation and everything in between and…space. (Read an interesting article by Daniel Blake on this very topic).

On the same topic this is what Samo Salamon wrote to me:

All the music is a nice interplay between composed and improvised parts...for my compositions, I can say that the composed (written out) are quite tricky rhythmically and melodically...and I really wanted to feature this flowing between improv and composition, sometimes it is hard to distinguish what is what.

'Bad dumplings,' the opening piece, almost seems a manual for a trio composition with two guitars and a sax; a unison intro develops into a broken section in which acoustic guitar and sax built their lines together until the electric guitar enters creating a new balance.

The whole record develops along these lines with melodies and counterpoint and intricate rhythmic sections. To mention just a few: Pastrami or Burrito, sounds like late night music with sax, a relaxed atmosphere that slowly thins out and every musician feels free to try different solutions waiting for the others to react - Tattoos and beards takes the rhythmic and motives intersection to the next level in a piece that emphasize the chamber jazz music attitude of the trio - Vision Fest develops around small fragmented sections, a close free rhythmic dialogue among the three musicians.

This project is the second outcome of the collaboration between the two guitarists, this is how Kevin Miller explains it: This trio was essentially Samo's and my idea. We did a duo recording about 2 years ago (Unlocking the Code, Samo Records 2024), and had the idea to do another recording with a 3rd person added. We decided we'd each write 4-5 compositions, and ask Dan (Blake) to be the person who completes the trio's personnel. 

And what Blake does is to add a new layer of explorative paths in the space created by the interplay between Miller and Salamon. The three of them produce a rich and subtle music that asks to be listened to.

As usual you can do that on Bandcamp:

Dan Rosenboom - Coordinates (Orenda Records, 2025)

By Lee Rice Epstein

In the broader Southern California jazz scene, brass player Dan Rosenboom is both a well-established leader and an anchor for a community with far-flung interests and locales. In Long Beach, he leads a regular quartet gig at the Vine and recorded The Left Edge: Live at the Vine last year with pianist and keyboardist Joshua White, bassist Billy Mohler, and drummer Shawn Baltazor, cranking out over an hour of high-octane funk-rock jazz, mixing hard bop and late fusion into a crunchy groove. In the five years since what I’ll call Rosenboom’s dual statement of purpose, Absurd In the Anthropocene, a raucous meditation on this late stage we’re embroiled in, and Points On an Infinite Line, a blazing set with a group of longtime friends and collaborators, saxophonist Gavin Templeton, Mohler again on bass, and drummer Anthony Fung. Where Absurd In the Anthropocene showed Rosenboom pushing himself harder than he had before, opening his sound up to include a who’s who of regional players and bringing in Jeff Babko to produce, Points On an Infinite Line was recorded in a single, three-hour session, shining a light on the profound, sincere connective tissue between the quartet’s members. Both sets were, in their way, perfectly human, playing with a vulnerability that expressed the fear, confusion, and desperate hope of 2020. In the years since there have been plenty more albums recorded with different lineups, but nothing has hit like Coordinates, which—if there’s a shorthand for describing it—plays like a happy marriage of the two.

Rosenboom has never seemed like the kind of artist to stay in one musical space for long; even as his group Dr. MiNT was cranking out some of the most diabolical and seriously fun music on the scene, each album raised the stakes by incorporating more complex compositional/improvisational ideas. And yet, Rosenboom hasn’t merely raised the stakes on Coordinates, he seems to have pushed himself harder and further than ever. Coordinates is a tight 40 minutes, packed with brass canons, gorgeous string arrangements, snarling horns, crackling guitar and keyboards, and some outrageous solos. Again, the band’s stacked to the rafters. The core quartet is Rosenboom with guitarist Jake Vossler, bassist Jerry Watts, Jr., and drummer Caleb Dolister. Joshua White rotates through the piano/keyboard chair with Babko and Gloria Cheng, while Wade Culbreath and Petri Korpela trade off on percussion, Culbreath covering mallets on half the album, Korpela covering hand percussion, gongs, metallics, shakers, and shells on the other half. The winds and brass lineup includes Templeton, flautist Katisse Buckingham, altoist Nicole McCabe, Brian Walsh on contralto clarinet, Jon Stehney on bassoon and contrabasson, horn players Laura Brenes and Katie Faraudo, trombonists Steve Surminski, Ryan Dragon, and Steve Trapani, and Doug Tornquist on tuba. And then there are the strings: harpist Jacqueline Kerrod, violist Lauren Elizabeth Baba, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on 5-string electric violin, and Michael Valerio on contrabass, backed by the Lyris Quartet, violinists Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan, Luke Maurer on viola, and cellist Timothy Loo.

About half the group recorded in Rosenboom’s studio in Long Beach, while the other half recorded their parts themselves or else in studio in studios in Burbank, CA, and at UCLA. The major difference from Absurd In the Anthropocene—and to be clear, this is not a knock on that record—is this one was produced and mixed by Rosenboom himself. Babko did an excellent job producing the previous album, with Justin Stanley mixing, but the difference I think comes in the specific vision Rosenboom has for the music. Of course, he’s been recording, mixing, and mastering for at least 15 years, his own records as well as dozens of others, so it really comes down to performing the intention. The record sounds incredible, without the (quite welcome, actually) details in the liner notes, you wouldn’t know parts were recorded remotely. The whole band sounds rich and deeply in sync—I’d say there’s a generosity in the way so many players give of themselves. After an opening statement of intent, the first two “Coordinates,” “Many Worlds, Many Dances” and “Apophis,” come rushing gloriously out of the speakers. A tonal breath is taken for “Josephine’s Dream,” which features the Lyris Quartet, Kerrod, and Valerio alongside Cheng’s piano and Stehney’s bassoon. An accomplished Hollywood studio musician, Rosenboom has a knack for shaping the arc of an album. The bend through the second half, from “Coordinate 4: Nemesis” to the finale “Coordinate 5: Hyperion,” is a knockout 20 minutes. Arguably, the most remarkable thing about Coordinates is how organic and unforced the whole thing sounds. Listening to the full album is an emotional journey that carries you along and risks vulnerability balanced with virtuoso performances. The result is a brilliantly bridged gap between technique and passion, a place where heart cooks brain while brain fries heart. It’s a space Rosenboom seems most comfortable, baring his soul with dazzling chops. What’s different now compared to then? Ultimately, it’s the group he’s assembled, the places his writing takes them all to, and truly the insane level he’s performing at—if your jaw doesn’t drop multiple times listening to this, I don’t know how to help you.

Hayden Chisholm and Philip Zoubek

Next week, saxophonist Hayden Chisholm and pianist Philip Zoubek will be releasing As If the Stormy Years had Passed – The Music of Gurdjieff Reimagined on the New Zealand label Rattle Music. The music is an exploration of the compositions of the George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, "philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and movements teacher." 

From the materials about the release:

"Over many years, the two musicians have explored Gurdjieff’s melodies to their harmonic and formal limits – and often beyond – until new versions emerged. Zoubek conjures resonances from inside the piano that seem at once mechanical and ghostly, while Chisholm glides through this labyrinth with his unmistakable tone. The result is not an interpretation but a metamorphosis: Gurdjieff’s music appears not as repetition, but as myth in a new language."

Here is a video that presents the gentle, flowing music - one may be tempted to think ECM-ish - seems perfect for a Sunday morning...

Cecil Taylor / Tony Oxley - Flashing Spirits (Burning Ambulance, 2025)

By Martin Schray

The 1980s were initially not Cecil Taylor’s best years, although he did release some wonderful albums in the beginning (e.g., It Is In The Brewing Luminous and Calling It The 8th). But after the death of his long-time collaborator, saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, in 1986, he had to look for new challenges - and found them mainly outside the US. In 1988, he spent a month in Japan, giving concerts and workshops. In late spring and early summer, he was in Berlin at the invitation of Free Music Productions (FMP) for four weeks. There were concerts, workshops, and readings, too. Taylor played with American and European musicians, with black and white ones. In addition, there were several concerts in New York. In late summer, he toured all over Europe; he estimated that at that time 90% of his concerts took place on that continent. It was a real mammoth tour, during which he was also looking for a drummer who suited his playing style. One date took him to the Outside In Festival in Crawley, UK, on September 3, 1988, where he met Tony Oxley again. Seven weeks earlier, the two had played together for the first time as part of the FMP events, which is documented on the album Leaf Palm Hand (FMP, 1989).

In Taylor’s music the grand piano becomes a percussion instrument, as evidenced by the well-known phrase that Taylor regarded the keys as “88 tuned drums”. The touch of his playing repeats an archetypal human experience - perhaps the oldest instrumental experience of all, according to Swiss Taylor expert Meinrad Buholzer. With each stroke, the inner rhythm emerges, the heartbeat is released and passed on. The acoustic effect arises where the stroke encounters resistance, at its limit, where the physical transforms into sound, takes hold, enables communication, Buholzer says. Taylor’s playing is exemplary in this respect. He passes on his rhythm, he always pushes himself to his limits. In his music, despite its density, he always leaves space, empty spaces that allow his fellow musicians and the audience to complement his ideas and think them further. And this is where Tony Oxley comes in: Oxley believed that Taylor would benefit from a lighter, higher-pitched percussionist, and with textures that acoustically surround his group of cymbals, cowbells, wood blocks, and bongo drums (played with sticks), his equipment sounds more like Varèse than a standard trap kit, a sound that permeates Taylor’s staccato piano without drowning it out. Although Oxley contributes accompaniment and embellishments, the two tend to occupy different but complementary spaces, with countercurrents, collisions, and temporary configurations, swirling particles that never quite stabilize.

This becomes clear from the very first second of the 36-minute title track on Flashing Spirits. Taylor’s concise phrases are accompanied by Oxley very poignantly. Above all, it’s his snare drumming that complements Taylor’s notes in the beginning. At first, Oxley doesn’t even try to keep up with Taylor’s energetic playing, but instead adds pointillistic accents here and there. Then, after about six minutes, he picks up the tempo out of nowhere, driving Taylor forward. From that moment on, there’s no stopping them for almost 30 minutes. Oxley’s subtle approach, combined with Taylor’s supersonic technique, is like a musical shower of shooting stars. The pianist’s strict, precise phrasing, which always oscillates between jazz and blues traditions and European classical modernism, is brought out even more strongly by Oxley’s micro-subdivisions.

What is more is the fact that Taylor has always understood his art as bridge building. For him bridges, especially those by Santiago Calatrava, were the perfect combination of statics and aesthetics, of functionality and elegance, the art of the supporting pillar. In almost all of his music there has always been an architecture of sound in which statics and aesthetics must be in harmony. The rhythmic pillars are the supporting elements of the music, the arcs of free improvisation, which can also be recognized in this recording - in the long-winded arcs of the right hand, supported by the clusters and block chords of the left. In the course of the piece Taylor merges with the piano, becoming one with it. The sound seems to come directly from him. Oxley, in turn, picks up on this sound and expands it, almost doubling it. The drum rolls on the kits push the music forward, shift it, make it stumble, or slow down the tempo (after 31 minutes). Taylor’s and Oxley’s musical bridge begins at the starting point, rises above the water, swings boldly upward with magnificent embellishments, veers to the right and left at times, and finally arrives at the other shore. In my mind’s eye, the improvisation resembles the Sultan Abdul Halim Muadzam Shah Bridge.

So, in the end, what is so special about Cecil Taylor’s music? Why is even a recording from 1988 still so extraordinary today? His musical poetry is an attempt to escape the compulsion to the obvious, the predictable, the banal, the conformity, and the comfort of everyday life (to quote Meinrad Buholzer* once again). Over the years, Taylor’s music has not undergone any process of wear and tear; it has never become fashionable and can never be misused as mere background music. It is music that has consistently refused to be commercialized to this day.

* If you read German I recommend Meinrad Buholzer: Always A Pleasure; Begegnungen mit Cecil Taylor (self-released, 2018)

Flashing Spirits is available as a limited CD and as a download. You can listen to the album and buy it here: https://ceciltaylor-bam.bandcamp.com/album/flashing-spirits

El Infierno Musical - II (Klanggalerie, 2025)

By Eyal Hareuveni

El Infierno Musical is Viennese vocalist, electronics player (the ppooll software), and composer Christoph Kurzmann’s tribute project to the late Argentine poetess Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). The project was born almost twenty years ago by an inevitable coincidence. Kurzmann was sitting outside a coffeehouse in Buenos Aires when his attention was drawn to a street vendor selling small books by Hispanic writers, and he chose a collection of poems by Pizarnik.

Kurzmann was drawn into Pizarnik’s idiosyncratic, dark poetic universe, obsessed with music (she was a fan of Janis Joplin) and sounds or the absence of them, appreciating the limitations of language, the nature of intimacy, and silence. Pizarnik took her own life in September 1972 after a period of depression and five months of hospitalization, summarizing her distress in the words: “It's so far to ask. So close to knowing that there is none” (from “Fragments to Master Silence”). 

Kurzmann immersed himself in the writings of Piraznik and released his first homage to her poems in El Infierno Musical. A Tribute To Alejandra Pizarnik (Mikroton, 2011), after he was commissioned by the Music Unlimited Festival in Wels in 2008 to suggest a project. El Infierno Musical (The Musical Hell, 1971) is Piraznik’s last collection of Poems, inspired by a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The album used Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights on its cover.

Kurzmann’s second incarnation of El Infierno Musical was brought to life on the 50th anniversary of Piraznik’s death, with a new lineup. Ken Vandarmark, who played on the project’s first album, plays on the new one on tenor sax and clarinet, alongside other musicians associated with him and from the Chicago free scene - Dave Rempis on alto and baritone saxes and flute, cellists Katinka Kleijn and Lia Kohl, and drummer Lily Finnegan (of Edition Redux). 

II features six experimental songs with Pirzanik’s poems (one of which, “For Janis Joplin”, was performed on the first album and performed on II in an acoustic version), structured as a claustrophobic suite that reaches its emotional, obsessive and almost inevitable climax on the “Last Poem / Último Poema”, where the poetry leads to utter silence and emptiness. Kurzmann sings and recites Piraznik’s poems - in English and Spanish - with great commitment, and often stresses a few lines of the poems as subversive, prophetic thoughts about the current global zeitgeist, trumping naked power over innocence, empathy, and compassion. The chamber ensemble embraces Kurzmann’s dramatic delivery with nuanced, thoughtful, and imaginative improvisations, and each poem receives a distinct, insightful arrangement, which, in its turn, highlights the dark, urgent tension of the poems. 

Kurzmann’s openly vulnerable delivery, as well as his delicate yet unsettling electronics, only intensify Piraznik’s desperate, poetic messages, who writes on herself as one who speaks the night and the dead, and as a poetess whose almost whole poetic work is structured as a fragmented, suicide letter. In “Little Songs / Pequeños Cantos”, Kurzamnn repeats in English and in Spanish: “the center of a poem is another poem / the center of the center is absence”. “For Janis Joplin” contrasts Piraznik’s clear affection for Joplin with her desperate perspective about life: “... to sing sweet and to die later. / no: / to bark. / This is how Rousseau's gypsy sleeps. / This is how you sing, plus lessons in horror. / You have to cry until you break / to create or say a little song, / scream so much to cover the holes of absence…”, and Vandermark and Rempis add a short quote of Gershwin’s iconic “Summertime” in this song’s coda. As the album progresses, the atmosphere becomes more tense, chaotic and dissonant, intensifying Piraznik’s suffocating but sobering feeling of hopelessness as summarized in “Winter Story / Cuento De Invierno”: “... But the night must know the misery / that drinks our blood and our ideas. / She must cast hatred in our gazes / Knowing them to be full of interests, of disagreements. // But it so happens that I hear the night weep in my bones. / Her immense teardrop raves mad / and shouts that something has gone away forever. // Someday we will be again”. On the unsettling “Last Poem / Último Poema”, where Kruzmann shouts: “I am night / And we have lost…”. 

A most touching, insightful masterpiece.

Džukljev, Greiner, Weber - INDUSTRIESALON (Trouble in the East, 2025)

 

By Paul Acquaro

 

INDUSTRIESALON is a true Berlin record. Though of the trio, only drummer Michael Griener calls the city home, everything that led to its creation happened there.

 

The initial connection occurred during the Serbian pianist Marina Džukljev's residency in 2022 at the near mythical Au Topsi Pohl in the city's central Schoenenberg district, while the later recording occurred in the Weissensee and Oberschöneweide neighborhoods, out towards the edges of the city. The latter is home to what lent its name to the album, the Industriesalon, located in a former East German industrial center and now a museum and cafe, which incidentally hosts an always intriguing series of concerts. Wandering through the exhibits is a fascinating trip through a mechanical wonderland of switches, tubes and the stuff of inventors' dreams. 

 

The music, based on the classic piano trio line up, has Džukljev, Griener and Swiss bassist Christian Weber operating with geared precision, interlocking rhythmic inventions and exciting dramatic intentions. The music begins quietly with scattered percussion and pensive notes from the piano, and while it picks up in tempo, it remains pensive through its eight-minute lifespan. 

 

The next track, 'Resistor,' is where the real action happens. Within the opening phrases, the trio is rumbling with pent-up purpose, tones and beats pour out of Džukljev and Griener, while Weber's bowing adds dramatic flair. Then, shifting to the inside of the piano, Džukljev makes a move in a textural direction. Following a musical break down, the piece slowly regains its intensity and 10-minutes in, it is even denser and fiercer than before, Džukljev leading the way with powerful, swirling melodic ideas and strong fragmented chords. The piece lies defiantly between modern classical and free jazz, with some of the most intense moments of the 31-minute piece essentially free from melody or harmony, going deep into atonal rhythmic territory. 

 

The final piece, 'Empty Gloves,' which must be a reference to the album's cover photo, closes the album on a more hopeful note. After a dramatic intro, the piano delivers a sequence of open, brighter chords that are given an extra push from the drums and bass work. Slowly overtaking the melody, the three instruments meld as one, driving the piece with ever growing purpose.

 

INDUSTRIESALON offers an engrossing sonic trip replete with compelling contrasts, dramatic passages and exploratory breakdowns, and while pan-European in its personnel, it is also uniquely imprinted by its city of origin.

Sven-Åke Johansson: Two recent recordings

By Stuart Broomer

When Sven-Åke Johansson died at 81, on June 15^th of this year, he had been an active explorer in multiple art forms for roughly sixty years, including work at the frontiers of music’s possibilities, collaborating across the rich spectrum of improvised music, and working in visual arts and theatre as well. Two recent releases, one recorded in 2022, the other in 2025, place him with similarly radical musicians, all several decades younger, all as original as Johansson himself, their work further enlivened by his inspiring presence. Most remarkably, the musics, though both improvised, are radically different, one wandering loosely, the other immediate and tightly focussed, but both essentially mysterious, elusive. There are virtually no overlaps in instrumentation except Johansson’s drums, while his accordion, brought to bear in the Café OTO performance, might oddly parallel the robot piano that Nicholas Bussmann plays on Tea-Time. It is the genius of these musics to elaborate utterly distinct social and communicative models, a tribute to the openness and engagement of all of the contributors. 

Nicholas Bussmann, Sven-Åke Johansson, Yan Jun – Tea-Time (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu, 2024) *****

This recording from 2022 finds Johansson working with Nicholas Bussmann, a composer and cellist who might be said to work at the edge of everything, including computers, free improvisation and Chinese choral music. Among his projects is the duo of Kapital Band 1 with drummer Martin Brandlmayr in which Bussman “plays” robot piano, the programmable instrument he also plays here. The third member of the trio, Yan Jun, is a Beijing-based singer, musician and poet who has worked with Bussmann on remarkably speculative works like The News Trilogy / Revolution Songs in an AI Environment, easier to listen to than describe.

Yan Jun’s broad range of vocal techniques will link him to both traditional and post-modern musics. Here it can be a strange warbling that suggests Tibetan throat singing and other incantatory practices. Together the three create one of the decade’s most mysterious recordings, a unique sonic work that is also especially engaging, suspended across continents, tethered to its own benign universe.

On the recording’s Bandcamp page, commentator Kristoffer Cornils emphasizes the quality of a dream, pointing out Bussman’s suggestion that “the joint improvisations that you hear on Tea-Time capture a sound that once came to [him] in a dream and that he made a reality with the help of his fellow musicians.” He also cites Bussman describing the work’s “double fakeness of fake jazz meeting fake throat singing”. The work is perfectly comfortable in its strangeness and its assemblage. Bussmann creates at times a kind of fragmentary ragtime, something genuinely random; Yan Jun’s performance ranges from something like moaning and wandering in pitch to gravelly approximations of traditional throat-singing. Always at the ready, Johansson provides shifting rhythmic patterns, precise, dynamic, and, like the other elements, somehow detached, whether from its surroundings or, delightfully, everything else.

There is no self-consciousness here, no more sense of forced creativity than of forced convention. This is genuine playing, that is, play, that sense of difference here displacing any commonplace pattern recognition or sense of interaction; this playful construction and exploration lead somewhere beyond comprehension, its dream logic a positive route to genuine creative growth. Vision is vision and, here and elsewhere, Bussmann’s revolt against the conventions of improvised music may be as effective in his practice as Randy Weston’s transformative experience at a Gnawa healing ceremony, Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics or Anthony Braxton’s overlapping of contradictory formal practices. Its insistences, its occasional rushing a beat, its genuinely polyrhythmic and poly-spatial play, all eventually gather: beyond its essential challenge to almost any sense of convention, the music will lead to spaces that are radically original; further, they are also original in that they belong, in some sense, to a listener’s willing, even willful, acts of acceptance and assemblage.

By the end of Tea-Time (the title suggests, as does the work, repose, serenity, yes, but also the antique, the formal, a hierarchy of staged conventions), the three musicians have developed a highly distinctive zone, a kind of pure music that is liberated from intentionality, a collective improvisation that also suggests a collected music.

Sven-Åke Johansson, Pierre Borel, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip - Two Days at Café OTO (OTOROKU, 2025) *****

Two Days at Café OTO documents an extraordinary quartet with the alto saxophonists Pierre Borel and Seymour Wright and bassist Joel Grip. Each night begins with a trio and ends with the full quartet. The first night’s trio has Wright; the second night has Borel. The first night also has a brief centerpiece, a five-minute quartet with Johansson on accordion, Borel taking his place at the drum kit, with Wright and Grip playing their usual instruments. 

The music possesses a unique sense of the dynamic, with an internal delicacy that one might not expect from a band that’s half of [Ahmed] (Wright and Grip) or half of the bar-drug-dream sequence band (Borel and Grip) of the film The Brutalist. The trio with Wright has a startling delicacy, with the intensity and reiterative phrases distinctive in his work, but somehow softened, resulting in a fresh lyricism. The first extended quartet piece emphasizes both the principle of dialogue practiced by the two saxophonists and their distinctive sounds and lines. Like all the music here, it breathes life, a kind of ideal meeting of four distinguished musicians willing to engage with a minimum of preconceptions and a commitment to spontaneity.

The second LP begins with the set’s longest track, a trio performance by Borel, Grip and Johansson that begins with a kind of Morse Code interplay between alto saxophone and bass. Whether in quartet or trio formation, the musicians are tightly focused, subliminal and shifting structures almost always in view, developing continuously throughout. Moments arise here in which Wright appears to be present, but which ultimately reveal themselves to be Grip’s virtuoso bowing. Borel moves on and off Mic suggesting duet play as well, something else he creates by alternating short melodic phrases with sustained multiphonics. There’s a natural conclusion, a pause, Johansson launches another movement. Grip will pause after a solo interlude. Johansson eventually launches a tom-tom pattern. Grip enters again. Borel will sustain a continuous high harmonic throughout an extended bass passage. A hard-edged and extended bass solo eventually entices Johansson’s accordion to the fore, which inspires Borel to some strange hard-edged funk (there’s a Mingus theme underpinning some of this). Each of these extended forays will eventually become revelatory, sometimes pitched between mayhem and sentiment – unlikely poles that become points of exchange. Multiple whistles arise. 

The final quartet begins in radically different sonic territory, with the two alto saxophonists exploring isolated upper registers in a strangely abstracted, reed ensemble including Johansson, who for a time plays accordion again. When he turns to drums, the prior pointillist dialogue between Borel and Wright continues, short melodic fragments, isolated honks and smears ricocheting between the two in an intertwining duet in which they can fall into honking in unison, shifting the notion of collective improvisation toward simultaneous composition. Uncanny elements arise, like a sustained, ascending high tone that may be hard to assign to either wind; as it develops, it eventually reveals Grip’s arco bass, pitches eventually close enough to merge with one of the altos in one of the year’s most brilliant recordings of collectively improvised music. The piece continues with Borel’s own swirling, ascending phrases poised against Wright’s honks, Grip’s harmonics and Johansson’s almost military snare, a passage of conjoined alto cries and cymbals sufficient to suggest one of Albert Ayler’s more sacred conclusions, just before Johansson turns again to the accordion and Grip contributes a repeated ascending figure to the end.

Isaiah Collier & Tim Regis - Live in the Listening Room (Vinyl Factory, 2025)

By Nick Metzger

Here we have a new vinyl-only EP from saxophonist Isaiah Collier with drummer Tim Regis and producer Sonny Daze in collaboration with the Vinyl Factory. The session was recorded direct to tape in January of this year at Devon Turnbulls’s (OJAS) Hi-Fi Listening Room Dream No. 1 at 180 studios in London. The duo met Turnbull through Daze circa 2021, setting off a series of concerts in Turnbull’s listening rooms in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chelsie, and finally London, where this session was recorded. Collier and Regis first met up in 2020 during practice sessions in NYC during the pandemic and have developed a fantastic rapport in the time since - and it shows on this scorcher. Collier has been releasing some incredible music over the past 5 years both with his quartet the Chosen Few and with a diverse set of players and projects both young and old. In Regis he finds an incredible collaborator who speaks the same language and works with the same energy. You can probably consider this a trio recording with Sonny Daze playing Upsetter on the mixing board - his accents leave a psychedelic stamp, elevating the recording beyond that of a simple sax-drums duo and helping to achieve sounds and textures not available with a more limited palette.

The album is split into 3 pieces across 2 sides and the duo does a great job of keeping things moving along for the entirety. I could listen to Collier solo all day long. He has an effortless musicality and is great at throwing in little hits of melody amongst the skronk - it absolutely spills out of him and is impressive to see live. Tim Regis is a brilliant percussionist who I really look forward to hearing more from, this being my introduction to his work. He lays down a very busy, propulsive sound - heavy on the kick drum which is how I like it - but more than that he has a tremendous sense of swing that maintains a sense of form, during even his most abstract passages. Add to all of this the interspersed sonic manipulations of Daze, provisioning octave effects and swirling Pollock-esque lashings of Echoplex feedback that multiply the sonic density. He applies what sounds like an MXR Blue Box to Collier’s horn on the lead-in of the second track “2nd Genesis” which may be a first, at least outside of Borbetomagus, and it’s pretty effective for building tension. On the final track it sounds like they use live looping in conjunction with the octave effect, making it sound like a big band is playing the riff, that kick drum just absolutely walloping on the last track. For all the swirling psychedelia and experimentalism throughout, the album is relatively concise, wrapping in the span of 26 minutes. An excellent EP of OUT! spiritual jazz.

This album, along with The Ancients bookend Collier’s year - one with two of the old masters, and one with a dynamic newcomer - and that is the music in a nutshell. Always looking for inspiration from the past, yet continually pushing forward into the future. This one is pretty special, not to be missed!

Out September 24th and limited to 500 copies from The Vinyl Factory :

https://www.thevinylfactory.com/product/isaiah-collier-tim-regis-live-in-devon-turnbulls-listening-room

Bertrand Denzler & Frantz Loriot - Musique Improvisée et Questions Politiques (Bruit Edition, 2025)

By Stef Gijssels

In this little book, two avant-garde musicians, French-Swiss saxophonist Betrand Denzler and French-Japanese violinist Frantz Loriot discuss the link between improvised music and politics. Their approach is a long dialogue between two intellectuals. Even if Loriot asks the questions to Denzler, he also comes with a lot of ideas and suggestions to which the other can react and comment. The responses are often long, and clearly the result of a written text, with sources and references. 

Obviously, the key question is whether improvised music is political in nature or addressing political questions. In the history of improvised music many artists have actually addressed political questions, maybe even more than in other genres, yet this is not really the topic here. The question is about whether breaking down musical boundaries, ideological and cultural, whether relinquishing a pre-programmed structure, is a political statement. I'll translate some passages of interest, with the original text below. It gives you an idea of the kind of discussion both men have over the full length of 100 pages. 

"‘When you practise this music, you realise that being concerned solely with the process, tending towards ’without preconception‘, ideally implies that ’the music is produced solely by the relationships that are established, on the spot and throughout the piece, both between the sounds and between those who generate them", to quote what we wrote in the foreword to The Practice of Musical lmprovisation'. Now, despite the gap between music and politics, these relationships do raise questions about equality and freedom, which you say are ‘important ideas’ in anarchism. In fact, it seems to me that improvisers, because they have the possibility of doing so, establish from the outset something that evokes a ‘situation of anarchy’, by implicitly positing the freedom and equality of everyone as principles and by asserting without saying so that there are neither rulers nor ruled, neither representatives nor represented, neither God nor State and so on. So it would seem that improvising musicians are actually prepared to play the game of equality and freedom to see what happens. Rather than trying to understand the link between improvised music and anarchism [a claimed anarchism], I therefore feel that it is more effective to examine the practice of improvised music by seeing it as an attempt to establish a (musical) ‘situation of anarchy’ each time, even when the musicians present don't talk about it or think about it in these terms" (p. 35-36).

Luckily, and interestingly they also integrate the importance of listening, at least for the musicians to perform in public.  

"We're self-proclaimed musicians [without any further details about our status and without worrying about whether we're going to make any money], which doesn't seem to me to be completely indefensible. We just want to make music and we want to make it ‘in public’. Because even if we are aware of the issues mentioned above, we know that the presence of flesh-and-blood listeners and the codified ritual of the concert and the utopia it evokes change the music, and that, for good and bad reasons - some of which remain mysterious - these listeners make the music more intense. The concert is open to criticism, and it would be easy to shoot it down. But thanks to this institution, we have experienced some powerful moments, both as listeners and as musicians. The concert allows us not to isolate ourselves, to shut ourselves in, to barricade ourselves, to self-segregate, to separate ourselves completely, to circulate ideas and sounds, to have experiences, and it changes our music". (p. 94)

Interestingly, and that is my personal opinion, what they fail to see in all this is the actual experience of the listener, who is forced by this music to drop his or her guard, to have an open mind and open ears, to welcome the unexpected, the undefined, and welcome novelty, even if some aspects and sounds may appear harsh or strange. It is the listener too, who has to drop pre-conceived notions and the act of open listening also changes something in the mind and hopefully also the heart of the audience. 

It's interesting to have this kind of questions about the music we like, and I applaud both authors for the nature and depth of their questions, their proposals for answers, while at the same time being humble enough to not to proclaim anything with certainty or in absolute terms. This short review and excerpts do not do full credit to the conversation, so I can only recommend readers who speak French to give it a try. 

The book can be ordered here. 

Original excerpts:  

"Lorsque l'on pratique cette musique, on s'aperçoit que le fait de se préoccuper uniquement du processus en tendant vers le «sans préconception » implique dans l'idéal que « la musique est produite par les seules re­lations qui s'établissent, sur-le-champ et tout au long de la pièce, aussi bien entre les sons qu'entre ceux qui les génèrent », pour reprendre ce que nous ecri­vions dans l'avant-propos de The Practice of Musical lmprovisation'. Or, malgré l'écart entre la musique et la politique, ces relations posent éffectivement des questions concernant l'égalité et la liberté, dont tu dis que ce sont des« idées importantes » de l'anarchisme. En fait, il me semble que les improvisateurs, car ils en ont la possibilité, établissent d'emblée quelque chose qui évoque une « situation d'anarchie », en posant implicitement la liberté et l'égalité de toutes, de tous, de chacune et de chacun, comme des principes et en affirmant sans le dire qu'il n'y a ni gouvernants ni gouvernés, ni représentants ni représentés, ni dieu ni Etat et ainsi de suite. II semblerait donc que les mu­siciens improvisateurs soient effectivement prets a jouer le jeu de l'égalité et de la liberté pour voir ce qu'il advient. Plutôt que d'éssayer de comprendre le lien entre musique improvisee et anarchisme [un anarchisme revendiqué}, j'ai donc le sentiment qu'il est plus éfficace d'examiner la pratique de la musique improvisée en la considérant comme une tentative pour établir à chaque fois une "situation d'anarchie" (musicale), même lorsque les musiciens présents n'en parlent pas ou n'y pensent pas en ces termes" (p. 35-36)

"Nous nous autopro­clamons musiciens [sans plus de précisions sur notre statut et sans nous préoccuper de savoir si nous allons gagner de l'argent], ce qui ne me semble pas com­plètement indéfendable. Nous voulons done faire de la musique et nous voulons la faire « en public ». Car même si nous sommes conscients des enjeux évoques ci-dessus, nous savons que la présence d'au­diteurs en chair et en os ainsi que le rituel codifié du concert et l'utopie qu'il évoque changent la musique, et que, pour de bonnes et de mauvaises raisons. dont certaines restent mystérieuses, ces auditeurs rendent la musique plus intense. Le concert est critiquable, il serait facile de le descendre en flammes. Mais grâce a cette institution. nous avons vécu des moments forts, en tant qu'auditeurs et en tant que musiciens. Le concert nous permet de ne pas nous isoler, nous enfermer, nous barricader, nous auto-ségréguer, nous séparer complètement, de faire circuler des idées et des sons, de vivre des expériences, et il change notre musique". (p. 94)

Josh Cole Trio + Strings

Featuring Josh Cole with John Oswald, Aline Homzy, Nick Storring, & Blake Howard

Enjoy!

More on Bandcamp

Peter Ehwald - Public Radio (Jazzwerkstatt, 2025) *****

By Don Phipps

An exquisite collection of hazy atmospheres awaits the listener of Peter Ehwald’s Public Radio, an album of improvisations that features Ehwald on tenor saxophone, Tom Rainey on drums, and Stefan Schultze on piano. Each of the musicians contributes to the foggy happenings – mysterious and beautiful – emphasizing lines that seem to wander in a dark forest of sound.

One need look no further than the second cut, “Palladio,” for evidence of this blurred landscape. There is Ehwald’s muted blowing coupled with Schultze’s delicate tinkering – abstractions that are both cool and lyrical. But it is Rainey’s wonderful cymbal work that is the highlight here. Listen to his masterful touch and the way he interacts with Ehwald’s searching lines and Schultze’s light strokes.

Then there’s the labyrinthian navigation presented in “Slip Song,” where the piece seems to slowly wind forward, propelled by a combination of bell sounds, inside the piano tinkering, light sprinkles on the keys, and Ehwald’s diffused sliding explorations. And in “Promise,” Schultze’s subdued but seductive use of piano overtones slip perfectly underneath Ehwald’s dreamy phrasing.

“Limestone and Seabed” is another improv that demonstrates the contemplative misty nature of the tunes. Ehwald’s extended notes have a slow motion effect. Listen to how he dwells on them – lingering – milking the essence from the sound he creates. Rainey wisely keeps his energetic yet musical contribution low key, permitting Ehwald and Schultze to weave their cloudy moods together like a fine-spun tapestry.

The music veers towards darkness in “Fortune Teller.” Rainey’s subtle but precise use of the tom and bass pedal add girth, while Ehwald’s sax lines wander about, like an explorer in some strange new land. His phrases run high and low – with a grace and sparse beauty. Then there’s the sad veneer of “Focus,” where Rainey’s exquisite brushwork and Schultze’s repeated motif undergird Ehwald’s sax contemplations; each sax note is packed with emotion. And on “Night Out,” Ehwald’s solo seems to float in the air before the number becomes more active under the pulsating drive of Rainey’s drumming and Schultze’s repeating motif.

The music of Public Radio is the music of three improvisers who choose to sift through the ethereal landscape of perception. The works presented remind one of Dali’s surreal mind probes or Escher’s challenging blends of shapes and forms. It is music of consciousness. Music of the underneath. Swimming under the waves. Highly recommended!

Matt Mitchell - Sacrosanctity (Obliquity Records, 2025)

By Lee Rice Epstein

Revisiting some of the East vs. West Coast jazz criticism of the 1950s, I was reminded of several toss-offs I’ve read in the past 20 years about players in what Vijay Iyer termed New Brooklyn Complexity, players like Iyer himself, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Lehman, Matt Mitchell, Kate Gentile, Anna Webber, Miles Okazaki—for shorthand, maybe, the Pi Recordings crew, the post-Threadgill, post-Berne, post-Steve Coleman artists who really pushed the boat out in terms of composing dense, complex melodies and counterpoint, who sometimes even dared to appear at clubs and bars with sheet music.

In both cases, West Coast (specifically LA circa late 1950s to early 1960s) and Brooklyn (of all-time, probably), what you have are players who lean heavily into composing and arranging duties, who delight in new sounds and rhythms, but who nevertheless bring to bear all the bluesy, swinging heart of any group playing the same ol’ heads and changes. The NBC scene was often baptized on the bandstand, occasionally trial-running high-wire ideas live in person, much to the consternation and finger-wagging of more than a few earthbound critics. And so, last year, when pianist Matt Mitchell dropped a double-album of solo piano, Illimitable, many of us were rightfully knocked out. Over nearly two hours of improvised piano that effectively shut down any lingering criticism or doubt that Mitchell can swing like the all-time best. As a follow-up, Mitchell’s comparatively brief (only 55 minutes!) Sacrosanctity furthers what he has accomplished on piano, as he again delivers a moving, impressive improvised suite.

If anything, I find Sacrosanctity sounds like a true follow-up rather than some kind of Janus-faced twin—this despite the fact that the two albums were recorded on the same day, at the same studio. In truth, I have no idea what order the two sets occurred in, but opener “gnomic” plays like an interregnum, holding the listener in suspension before the gently roaming “hibernaculum.” Displaying his gift for patiently building drama, Mitchell unravels idea after idea, like a series of brief anecdotes linking each section. This was the genius on display on last year’s “unwonted,” and in its slightly contained state here, the strengths are amplified. The mid-album stretch of “glyph scrying,” “skein tracing,” and “thither” go to some intriguing lengths, Mitchell’s two-handed playing evoking at times Jarrett and Taborn (piano and electronics duet when?), while at other times bringing to mind the exceptional forward-thinking piano of Hildegard Kleeb, the great interpreter of Braxton, Lucier, Feldman, and Wolff. As an intentional and sensitive player, Mitchell is subtly giving audiences and critics an opportunity hear him outside the confines of NBC. And isn’t that the real complexity all artists strive for, to go beyond the artificial bounds we place on them?

Gjerstad / Schlippenbach / Narvesen - Seven Tracks (Relative Pitch, 2025)

By Martin Schray

It’s hard not to compare this band with Alexander von Schlippenbach’s trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens, a formation that has existed since 1970 (initially with Michel Pilz on clarinet). However, there was a break after 2018, when Paul Lovens was no longer able to tour (on their famous winter journey), even though Paul Lytton was a more than worthy successor. Recently, Schlippenbach continued go on a winter tour again, with Rudi Mahall on clarinet and Norwegian drummer Dag Navesen. Navesen is also featured on this recording, plus saxophone legend Frode Gjerstad (also from Norway) replacing Evan Parker, so to speak. That being said, expectations were high for Seven Tracks, a recording that came out of the blue for most of the fans of the old trio.

“1“ begins like a typical Schlippenbach Trio piece, with the band immediately hitting its stride. You’re confronted with seemingly isolated, short phrases that nevertheless come together and belong together. After two minutes, there is a first break, set by a piano chord. It becomes clear that Schlippenbach plays more romantically than in the wild years, but he still makes radical statements and creates structure with block chords. Nagesen shows that he’s very much in the tradition of Lovens and Lytton, but of Tony Oxley as well, which proves continuity and a sense of tradition. At the same time, he’s also a very energetic drummer, who has developed a style of his own. The biggest difference to the Schlippenbach Trio, however, is Frode Gjerstad. He hovers above the improvisation as if he was the group’s sound poet, who comments on the action calligraphically. His sound and his playing are rougher and more squeezed compared to Evan Parker, but they are also very varied, as he proves in the second piece. At first, there’s even a short passage that swings, but then the tempo picks up significantly. Gjerstad communicates intensively with the man at the piano, setting clever counterpoints between Nagesen’s elegant figures. In general, between these two warhorses of European improvised music the drummer is an absolutely equal explorer of sound worlds, underlining and initiating areas of discourse with nervous reflexes and a wide range of percussion sounds, most clearly in a short solo in “4”.

The music presented on Seven Tracks is remarkably unsentimental; Schlippenbach avoids the interior of the piano, instead offering dense, dissonant lines at breakneck tempos (the man is 88 years old), but he also likes to invent ballad arrangements without abandoning free tonality. What is more, his sense of form is as incorruptible as ever, and at the end of his career, his love for Thelonious Monk and the influence his music has had on him is becoming increasingly apparent. This can be heard in “5“ for example, where the sublime rhythmic shifts give way to expressive force (as they often did in the old trio), but they determine the improvisations even more obviously, and the control that the musicians have over their interplay seems more light-footed.

Yes, this music is complex, but that’s undoubtedly part of its strength and a reason to hope that this album will not be the last from this band.

Seven Tracks is available as a limited CD and as a download. You can listen to it and buy it here: 

Keefe Jackson, Jakob Heinemann, and Adam Shead - Stinger (Irritable Mystic, 2025)

By Gary Chapin

Keefe Jackson is someone on my “notice” list. Whenever the Chicagoan puts anything out or broadcasts a live performance I make sure to hear it. His sax and compositional voice put him squarely in my sweet spot for listening: the sort of “loft aesthetic” exemplified by the amazing Studio Rivbea and the Wildflowers record series that documented it. Jackson—and his compatriots on this record, bassist Jakob Heinemann and percussionist Adam Shead—would have been right at home in that scene. Stinger, the trio’s new recording on Irritable Mystic Records, is glorious stuff.

To focus on some specifics: the track “12345” is propulsive, riding on a syncopated bass/drum riff, with bass clarinet playing the role of storyteller. The whole piece comes to a short pause, a stuttering interlude, some right angle melody options, then off to the races again. “Gun Shy” begins with a slow crawl evocative of Eric Dolphy, deep and languorous with suspiciously wide intervals. It’s like an instrumental noir, action and chaos bracketed by sleepy reflection about how the whole situation may be fakakta, but at least it’s my situation. A few tracks later we get “God of the Fickle,” a swinging thing with bass and drums stringing their ebullience under the tenor’s knowingly good natured solo. It may be that I'm reacting to these too cinematically, but that’s my idea of a good time. In a way this trio brings to mind the fabled Thomas Chapin Trio, which swung hard and skronched hard. 

The compositions are split evenly between Jackson and Heinemann each contributing four, with one additional by Bobby Bradford and another by John Tchicai. The opening piece, by Heinemann, “Regent,” starts with an intriguing minimal, chromatic melody with a blowout bridge that sets the pace for the improv that follows, tenor goodness with a shimmering excess of fast percussion and bass surrounding it all. One thing I love about a trio in “this kind of music” is how they have an equality of place, each has autonomy within the mix to shape the beast. The coda of this relatively short piece (!) goes into a kaiju-stomping moment that is *chef’s kiss.” Like I said, glorious stuff.

Carol Liebowitz/Nick Lyons - The Inner Senses (Steeplechase, 2025)

By Hrayr Attarian

Pianist Carol Liebowitz and alto saxophonist Nick Lyons are kindred spirits not only because they studied with erudite pianist Connie Crothers, but also because they are thoughtful and sensitive improvisers. Liebowitz excels in duet settings with like-minded saxophonists and her sublime The Inner Senses is her second collaboration with Lyons, a dozen years after the brilliant First Set (Line Art Records, 2017). In the intervening time between the two dates the pair’s synergy has crystallized and matured.

Liebowitz and Lyons improvise freely without sacrificing lyricism. For instance, Lyons opens “Phantasm” with a bluesy solo. Liebowitz enters with a series of resonant chords. The contemplative exchanges create an otherworldly atmosphere with an undercurrent of meditative spirituality. Liebowitz’s reverberating notes echo against silent pauses building a loose rhythmic framework within which Lyons weaves sparse, introspective lines. The expressive conversation is thought-provoking and accessible, pushing the boundaries of the music but never giving in to full-on dissonance.

Nine of the 10 pieces on the album are spontaneously created and the tenth is a Crothers composition “Ontology”. The pair plays the soulful theme in unison before diverging into independent and complementary performances. The shimmering melody flows within an expectant ambience as each musician embellishes it with angular and expressive phrases. Despite the overlap of simultaneous yet individual monologues the result is moving and quite harmonious further underscoring the sublime camaraderie within the duo.

The title track, meanwhile, also has a pensive mood with a haunting cascade of piano notes within which Lyons weaves sinewy refrains. The dialogue has a reserved passion that boils to the surface frequently while the duo flirts frequently with atonality. As the tune evolves, the musical discourse becomes more fiery yet naturally concludes on a solemn note.

This intimate meeting of inventive minds is a multilayered work that makes for a rewarding listening experience. It is a superb example of synergistic creativity, and both provocative and delightful. Hopefully Liebowitz and Lyons will continue to collaborate in the future.

Christian Pouget: Maëlstrom for Improvisers

After directing films about violin player Théo Ceccaldi (Corps à Cordes, 2018) and Joëlle Léandre
(Affamée, 2019, and Duende, 2023), director Christian Pouget embarked on a two and half year project, involving 22 multi-generational musicians from Europe, America and Japan, displaying their art in solo situations and musing on life, music, creation, inspiration, the ghosts of Ayler, Cage, Coltrane, Scelsi, ancestral chant, Noh theater, racism, resistance, rebellion, subversion, and the search for freedom in improvisation.

The sequences were shot in France, Spain and Italy, in unusual locations. There is no concert footage;
everything was specifically staged for the film.

 Releases in October.  

Zoh Amba - Sun (Smalltown Supersound, 2025)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

There’s no point in denying that the 2024 forum’s final playlist was suffering for the lack of one of the year’s aces, There is a garden, by Beings, the group that saw Zoh Amba (saxophone, vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonium, piano) along with Steve Gunn (electric guitar), Shahzad Ismaily (bass, synth) and Jim White (drums). The blog’s rules of the game are crystal clear: no database/no review, no review/no playlist: fair and simple, “dura lex sed lex.”* 

Beside such small, negligible personal regrets, the reason to remember and to quote the above mentioned record is because the affinities with Sun, the one reviewed here, are pretty consistent, even though the musicians involved are totally different and Zoh’s pastoral Sandy Denny-esque voice is set beside. This time, the sublime Tennessee-born New York-based musician is teaming up with Caroline Morton on bass, Lex Korton on piano and Miguel Russel on percussion and decided to release the album on Smalltown Supersound, as a connection to the late titan Peter Brotzmann, who was both a spiritual mentor to Amba and issued several records on the label. For Amba the human cotè of the music is the architrave of her artistic outcome, so building up personal bonds among the band members before the recording process was a cornerstone of the whole project: “We spent days just playing together and I was trying to mentally take notes of what naturally wanted to exist in this band, before giving instructions or handing out sheet music, I wanted to see where we were all standing in life, right at that moment. From there, I started carving out the process with them”, she says. The final result shows a collection of nine compositions, three of them solo, and is absolutely quintessential of her music and of her peculiarity on the jazz scene: free, taking-no-prisoners outbursts (“Interbeing”, “Forevermore”, “Like the Sun”), interspersed with suffused, nightly atmosphere (“Ma”, “At noon”) and poignant textures (“Seaside”, “Champa Flower”). 

Here is another adventurous chapter in the astonishing biography of an artist who, at the age of 25, already crossed the blades with the likes of Sorey, Corsano, Orcutt, Zorn, Parker, Mela, Haino, Iyer, Drummond, Edwards, Shipp, Perelman and got covers and profiles, not only by every jazz magazines all over the globe but by The New York Times or The Guardian as well. It would be a huge mistake considering Amba flirting with the mainstream: we, keen on “lateral” (euphemism…) kind of music, often are fundamentalist in our judgments and pretty suspicious to see shadows of sell out or betrayal beyond every corner, but here there is really no reason at all. While listening to her music, it’s really difficult to wipe out the imagine of this young musician playing in the middle of nowhere woods of Kingsport, Tenn. before heading northeast, ending her path in New York with David Murray. As the British writer Geoff Dyer wrote: “One can envisage seeing Amba half a century from now, playing a selection of ballads at Carnegie Hall or the Village Vanguard. But who knows where she will end up, what twist and turns her career might take? Tradition in jazz has to be a springboard into the future though one can rarely tell what this future will sound like”. We let to Amba the final words that touched us from the very deep: “Heart takes its course. That feeling merges to silent sweetness. That is this journey. Reflecting and feeling my heart overpour. 

Knowing this is only the beginning of the journey and what was captured on this recording will never exist again and the next song will be closer and closer to the center of the heart. My heart sits in the deep light dear Peter Brotzmann shared to this universe. I hear his spirit each morning. This music is only a reflection of a soul that is ever changing and trying to reach beyond the sun”.

Foot note: Zoh, Mette, Ava, gabby, Kris, Anna, Tomeka, Moor, Savannah, Angelica, Sylvie, Mary, Sofia, Valentina, Matana…it seems that nowadays the most challenging projects belong to a pack of fearless she-daredevils that through an unashamed, brave, loose, untamed approach shattered the crystal ceiling and have begun to demolish the floor. Keep on going, ladies: Jamie left but, with you, the building is in super safe and reliable hands.

*editors note: these are almost the rules, the album does need to be reviewed on the Freejazzblog or by the lister somewhere in order to be eligible for listing in the end of year lists

Jazzfestival Saalfelden 2025 (4/4)

2025-08-24 Saalfelden Day 4- Sunday

By Sarah Grosser  

 

Anna Tsombanis & Yvonne Moriel. Photo by Michael Geißler

As is now tradition, Saalfelden woke up early to line the impossibly picturesque mountain lake for the annual concert in a rowboat. This year an all female cast took to the water including a female captain joining Anna Tsombanis and Yvonne Moriel, both on saxophone. In contrast to last year’s chaotic, loud duck calls from Mats Gustafsson (sax) and Nate Wooley (trumpet), this year’s concert was a much more peaceful affair; the duo played a number of composed, slow pieces in harmony, as the little rowboat gently floated around the perimeter of the sea. The music was pretty quiet, so it was sometimes difficult to fully appreciate the grandiosity of the reverb effect created by blowing saxophones over the water, reflecting the sounds up into the mountains. The music itself was pleasant, but I couldn’t help feeling that the naturally echoey auditorium didn’t reach its maximum potential. Nevertheless, the spectacle of enjoying the cute boat and the atmosphere of hearing a concert outside in the gorgeous scenery was still very much worth the early rise. Some freaks were swimming. I don’t know what was wrong with them. 

Walking back to the hotel for breakfast we took a narrow, trodden path that led us over vast fields, surrounded by 360 degree panoramas of the Alps. No trip to Saalfelden Jazz Festival is truly complete without spending just a little time outside in nature; the silence of the giant hills perfectly recalibrates the head and heart, balancing out the busyness and the noise of avant-garde with a little exercise, and some fresh air in the lungs. For those who chose to camp for the fest, this is also a pathway from the well-populated campsite back into town. 

Camila Nebbia invites John Edwards
Brücklwirtshaus

Camila Nebbia – saxophone
John Edwards – bass

Camila Nebbia & JohnEdwards. Photo by Michael Geißler

Crammed into the second floor of a traditional restaurant, Camila on sax and John on bass are improv battling it out. John aggressively thumps his instrument, leaning right into it, producing exceptionally twangy hits. Camila scrunches her face for squonkier emphasis. Both are very emotive with their bodies as they play. Outside the sun is blazing through the back window. In here, all the lights are on, including a magenta uplight, illuminating the walls. Every seat is full in this low capacity venue. Some folks even line the stairwell.

Camila produces super high pitched harmonics, while John emulates a similarly high frequency with a bow. Some long tones remind of the single-note frequencies of a television test pattern. Having seen Camila performing shows of mostly loud dynamics this weekend, it's impressive to be able to also enjoy some of her more quiet bag of tricks.

John gets a sound out of the bass reminiscent of a sitar with a great "boing" to it. During some of the more intense moments, it sounds as if a third human voice is accompanying the session- it's John himself vocalizing along with the jam. There's something beautiful about getting to a place musically where one feels they must physically submit, almost like an ego death. John can make his double bass sound like a string quartet. A drop of sweat drips from his forehead onto his busy hands.

It's a really great pairing and I can't decide who I enjoy watching more. They just sound fantastic together. It's only a short show but the crowd are hungry for more and a small encore is coaxed out of the duo.

McDonald's Flashmob

McDonald Flashmob. Photo by Julian Gruber

It must be really annoying to go into McDonald's and have a flashmob appear out of nowhere to perform avant-garde. A group of around fifty festival-goers descend on the stinky restaurant. Most of the people eating don't seem to mind too much that a wild, crazy woman in a leotard is dancing and screaming with cow horns in her hair like a Flintstone character. Flashmob coordinator/drummer Valentin Schuster leads Siegmar Brecher on bass clarinet and Magdalena Hahnkamper doing vocals and performance, including rubber chicken, for the impromptu jam. Sometimes the comically dramatic Magdalena plays a small organ for even more drama. At one point, she selects a random customer to bump hips with her, from which the rubber chicken is dangling. With each hip-bump the chicken squeaks. Wildly entertaining. It is hot in here and smells of grease but the juxtaposition of the absurd with the corporate is a lot of fun. Many people are filming it on their phones, smiling and laughing – I am one of them. 

Nothing Causes Anything
Otto Gruber Halle

Yvonne Moriel – saxophone
Alex Kranabetter – trumpet, electronics
Vincent Pongracz – bass clarinet, electronics
Christian Lillinger – drums

Nothing Causes Anything. Photo by Julian Gruber

This quartet has a kind of moody overall vibe- I don't know if it's the additional effects on Alex's trumpet, the sub bass rumbling the shed walls, or the all black alternative attire of the two up front. Or maybe it's the reverberating breakdowns paired with dark bass clarinet and Lillinger's supersoft brushes that skitter around like dragonflies. In combination with a little fog machine and some deep, almost sad melodies, these pieces crescendo into pretty ethereal spaces. The streaky spotlights gently lower adding to the dreamlike effect. Maybe it's all the magical air blowing around from reed instruments and trumpet. It's hard not to watch Lillinger the whole time- his creative and expressive drumming is always a spectacle to behold, even as a sideman. To him, it seems there is no such thing as a straight swing: every hit is an event. Alex uses his effects appropriately on the trumpet, beat-repeating final bursts, delays, and echoes for extra detail. It's a cool embellishment and he is smart about not overusing these effects, allowing his ability on the instrument to shine through. It's all about atmosphere, and mood and this band surely achieves that.

Sun-Mi Hong Bida Orchestra
Congress Saalfelden

Jozef Dumoulin - piano, fender rhodes
John Edwards - bass 
Mette Rasmussen - alto saxophone
John Dikeman - bass & tenor saxophone
Alistair Payne - trumpet
Sun Mi Hong - drums

Sun Mi Hong. Photo by Michael Geißler

There is an unfeasibly large bass saxophone on the stage- the size of a small person. Once you get past this massive distraction, you can focus on the groovy, intergenerational ensemble beside it. Delicate is the name of the game during a supersoft ballad- with malleted drums, and a gentle trumpet solo. Sun-Mi’s song titles are abstract and based on her dreams: “Temple of 1000 Neon Leggings,” “Running Horse Candle,” “Invisible Rose.” John Edwards's bass solo is foreboding, accented with further unrest from Jozef's Fender Rhodes. When Mette joins in on the sax, the atmosphere could just about summon a weather god. The drums accompany the rising wave bringing the lightning into the rainstorm. After a huge crescendo, there is a pause in which nobody claps in anticipation, wondering if the piece is over. Some guy yells out “...aber Hallo??" (German: “...but hello?!”) to wake up the entranced crowd. Obviously, everyone cheers. A couple of standing ovations, well earned. 

It's hard to articulate just how creative John Edwards is. It's so much more than just speed and hitting the right notes. It's using the body of the bass as percussion, flicking the strings up top for harmonics, jamming the bow into the neck where it sticks, plucking or bowing, bending,... it's nuts. It's hard for a single individual to really stand out at a festival like this, no less a double bass player, but John leaves a lasting impression. 

Kalle Kalima’s Detour with Leo Genovese and Christian Lillinger
Congress Saalfelden

Kalle Kalima - guitar
Leo Genovese - keyboards
Christian Lillinger - drums

Kalle Kalima. Photo by Michael Geißler

"We rehearsed for seven hours the other day- FUSION!" says Lillinger about Detour. Expectations are high going in for some complicated shit. Bring it on…

Kalle describes his way to Saalfelden via planes from Helsinki to France, then Munich, and finally the shuttle to Saalfelden. He says that he needs a pilot (Leo) and a navigator (Christian), and that he "made a big map, but it was way too big- so I translated it into musical language." That "musical language" was evident in the form of around thirty pages of strategically organised sheet music per person. 

There is so much energy in this trio. Leo is bouncing around. From keys to Rhodes to synth, as if he has springs in the heels of his hi-tops. The freakouts between these three are totally contagious. Kalle asks if we are having fun, adding that "sometimes the musicians are allowed to have fun." It's novel to watch them play a ballad titled "Ghost." The piano glissandos while Christian lightly flits around the kit like a trapped moth. With each new chapter a musician will toss another fistful of sheets onto the floor. Someone in the audience's phone goes off in the break between songs. Leo motions in the direction of the caller and says, "We're busy!"

Kalle whips out a slide and he and Leo get a thing goin' with vibrant organ- long chords with a bunch of tremolo. A really fun surprise banger eventuates, complete with soaring solo from Kalle that carries it's way up into the Alps. It's raw, electric, and fun- it's so hard to tell what is going on and in which direction it's going, but this is apt for a performance about "detours."

Ancient To The Future
Congress Saalfelden

Ava Mendoza - guitar
Majid Bekkas - gimbri, oud, vocals
Xhosa Cole - saxophone, flute
Hamid Drake - drums

Ancient To The Future. Photo by Julian Gruber

A fitting contrast to Detour, Ancient To The Future is a groove driven project with drums, guitar, sax, and flute, but also gimbri, oud, and vocals. The mesmerizing loops allow great space for pretty guitar solos.

Hamid is the engine behind the beat, controlling the speed of the train. The "Flat 2, Sharp 4" Arabian scale on flute and gimbri in combination with traditional singing taps into the "ancient" element, married with contemporary instruments where the ancient “meets” the future. Songs gradually speed up, as Hanmid dictates and the guitars rock out over the uncomplicated riffs. Well, comparatively uncomplicated, compared to a lot of the programming at this festival. This feels like a kind of alternative rock show.

Hamid has a natural fluidity which seems to flow through him onto his drumkit. The whole band appears to be very comfortable and relaxed on stage, and I don't detect a huge aura of ego about them. When the faultist puts his instrument down and starts brushing his hands rapidly together, his fingers blur with motion as he claps. Some solos from this band earn their polite Austrian golf claps- that's no mean feat- you have to be impressive to get those around these parts.

The Bad Plus, Chris Potter & Craig Taborn
Congress Saalfelden

Chris Potter - saxophone
Craig Taborn - piano
Reid Anderson - bass
Dave King - drums

The Bad Plus. Photo by Julian Gruber

The final act of the night, preceded by a short speech from artistic director Mario Steidl and production manager Daniela Neumayer giving a shoutout to the wonderful attentive public and the staff who worked tirelessly for the last four days on site.

Host Götz Bühler introduces the band by saying they "saved the baddest for the last." It's two of the original members plus two worthy stand-ins: Craig Taborn and Chris Potter. And why not close the weekend with a raucous fast jam! The Bad Plus attacks the work of Keith Jarrett - one of the most iconaclastic figures in free jazz. Dave is as animated as ever- his neon beanie bounces around as sticks go flying every which way. Chris's solo earns a roused response from the audience- so similarly does Dave's, jumping up out of his drum stool. For the next track he whips out a set of red brushes- which are cool and easy to see from afar. Craig and Chris don't use any sheet music for reference. I'm astounded at the amount of memory space these guys are storing upstairs- the capacity for which they are able to remember so many projects and songs, riffs, themes, melodies, notes,... etc. Sure, a lot of this set is improvised, but with the two stand-in's basically leading the charge on the main melody, this still never fails to blow me away. During a more mellow moment, Craig is playing a very slow chordal progression with such tenderness, a hush falls over the auditorium. Each chord is more original and beautifully articulated than the last. The delicacy and intention with which he plays each note is so vulnerable. It catches me off guard, consuming me wholly, and I can feel the tears beginning to well up. No shade to anyone else on the stage that night, but if you have not seen Craig Taborn play the piano, I can absolutely recommend adding that item to your bucket list. 

Finishing the festival on this salty free jazz is a classic move. It’s time to go home and the visitors leave the Congress out the main entrance they have frequented for the last few days. This time a gauntlet of cheering staff, including the event organisers themselves, are arranged to applaud the festival attendees as they exit. It’s difficult not to feel the warm fuzzies as you get one last look at the faces of all the people involved in putting the weekend together for you. Here’s hoping we will see every one of them again in 2026.

See Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4