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Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Dan Blacksberg - The Psychic Body/Sound System (Relative Pitch, 2024)

By Nick Metzger

I remember a long while back reading a review for a blistering solo free jazz album on Keith Fullerton Whitman’s now defunct Mimaroglu Web Store (thanks for everything Keith!) and he noted that solo albums like that really hit him between the eyes during the freezing winter months and I’ve thought of that every winter since. I also tend to listen to a lot of solo music during the post-holiday cold as I’m generally not as distracted with outdoor life and am able to listen a little more closely. That said, this year I've been loving this new solo trombone release from Philadelphia's Dan Blacksberg who’s trio has been covered a couple of times here on the blog. He was in the Hasidic doom metal band Deveykus with fellow Philadelphian, guitarist Nick Millevoi , releasing their only album Pillar Without Mercy on Tzadik back in 2013. Blacksberg is described on his website as “a living master of klezmer trombone” and in addition to being a dedicated proponent, teacher, and organizer of the music he also released the first album of klezmer to feature the trombone as the lead instrument on Radiant Others, also with Millevoi. The album currently under consideration here is not a klezmer album in the slightest. The Psychic Body/Sound System is a powerful improvised statement that blends wild soundscapes and drone with gnarled extended technique and commanding free trombone flights. The poetic fictionalizations of the titles are the perfect signage along the path, one that is craggy and steep but also imbued with some remarkable vistas.

The album starts off with “We Walk Through the Petrified Gates” - a brief, low drone that feels like an initiation - setting the tone. Next is “Tale of a Survival” a heady dialogue of solo free trombone where the staccato phrasing starts to slur and is interrupted by mumbled exclamations across the track, occasionally breaking down into violent and wet blasts of sound. On “Crags of Resounding Whispers” the thwacking churn of the horn is reminiscent of the chug of a huge pumping machine. The album's arguable centerpiece (for me) is “Observing the endless screamer” , this time on a prepared trombone. No idea what the preparations are but it would seem that Blacksberg opened some sort of portal. Endearing in much the same way that Merzbow is, it might require a bit of effort for some. Blacksberg does a considerable job of bending and directing these noises to make the track a standout on the album, it’s not just pure intensity but also arrangement, variety, and nuance. “Feeding the great babbler” is a brief segue in low frequencies - a lot lower than the previous track - it’s fast-paced and bulbous and pretty easy on the ears (mindful sequencing) with a lot to offer the careful listener. “Softgrid Lament” is built of growling, multiphonic passages recorded really dryly, so much so that the gurgling inner world of his trombone is central to the piece. It seats gnarly, aggressive exclamations at the same table with slow glissandos that sound like cartoon airplanes falling out of the sky.

The direct effect of being submerged is discernible on “Liquified tides of thought”, which conversely has the reverb cranked to 11. The stuttering passages ripple like water over rocks, closing in breathy resolution. On “Infinitely shattering crystal wishes” Blacksberg plays his horn into a prepared piano. Heavy tongue thwacks and high pitched whistles disturb the pressure field, causing the strings to answer, the track becoming more intense and violent as it progresses. “Gliding over the dimensional glacier” is another brief but continuous drone piece that puts the gauze back in our ears, again the sequencing is right on as this lull resolves into the brightness of the next track “Tale of refusing futility”. On this one Blacksberg plays with a raspy, cutting tone that blasts through in a haze of atomized spittle. Then Blacksberg puts down the magic wand momentarily and delivers a passage that’s aggressive and direct. The album closes with the “We exhale the gate closed”, another brief and murky drone that works as a bookend with the opening track. This is a good one, there’s a lot of variety in both technique and style and it’s a lot of fun to listen to. It's got a quality of its own and doesn’t sound like a solo trombone album in the sense you might expect. The detail and density keep the listening active and as a result it’s 40 minutes pass all too quickly.

https://www.danblacksberg.com

Monday, February 10, 2025

Kahil El’Zabar and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble @ Space Gallery

Kahil El’Zabar @Ueberjazz 2024
Photo by
Wanja Wiese_Art

By Gary Chapin

Question: Why would it be that an artist or art that has been widely recognized as wonderful, groove-tastic, ecstatic, and cool for fifty years “suddenly” becomes transcendent, “suddenly” becomes preternaturally compelling, “suddenly” becomes the best music you’ve heard live in years?

Is it the persistence of the vision that transports you? Has the music been gaining gravity over the past 50 years? Is it improvement? Has the artist upped their game year after year and now, in the present moment, they transcend? Or is it the quality of the audience? Has the time, space, context, trauma, and treasure of “us today” rendered the present moment into the right time? Or is it a mystical alignment of the river and the foot stepping into it? Never the same twice, but perfect for this exact moment?

These were my thoughts in the days after attending Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble performance at the Space Gallery in Portland, ME, on February 4, 2025.

The trio came into a sold out room and began with the “little instruments” percussion wash that the AACM has turned into a sacred ritual. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble has celebrated its 50th year as one of the only extant ensembles from the collective’s early days (possibly one can say the Art Ensemble is still around). The audience—packed in—was ready to be embraced.

Corey Wilkes, trumpet, and Kevin Nabors, tenor, traveled the spectrum. The head of the first tune was quirky, post-boppish, and soulful with space and tricky syncopations, but the solos were barnburners, the sorts of things where outlandish blowing is occasionally accomplished by pistoning the keys/plungers using your forearm and the elbow as a fulcrum. This first tune, apparently a mission statement for the evening, ended with Zabar’s own solo which had enough kinetic energy to raise a house. Rarely has destructive energy (hitting) been used to create so extravagantly.

That said, Zabar did not spending that much time behind the kit, often coming out front to sit on the most thoroughly, skillfully, and soulfully whacked cajon I’ve ever heard, or playing a “thumb piano” (of all things) in a way that defied all expectations of what most people think of as a gift shop tchotchke. Through it all, Zabar threaded his songs and vocalizations, bringing together the blues and the choir, uniting Saturday night and Sunday morning. This was spiritual, trance-making music, joined with noise, play, and ecstasy. His wordless singing has a dreamlike quality to it, evoking joy without being required to articulate it.

The evening had half a dozen pieces. Zabar’s own “A Time for Healing” was the center of the set. The trio’s rendition of “All Blues” was the most sublime moment, with Wilkes’ harmon mute (of course) bending the room to his will. McCoy Tyner’s “Passion Dance” came through like a cyclone. Zabar’s tribute to Ornette Coleman mesmerized us, with Nabors provoking a standing O in the middle of the tune. The evening ended with a solo vocal performance from Zabar, a love standard—”my mother’s favorite”—rendered in Zabar’s unique scatted/sung/dreamscaped/onomatopoetic way. It was funny, adventurous, exciting, and remarkably touching.

Was this the best performance I’ve seen in the last few years? Maybe. At the very least, when we discovered, after the concert, that the keys had been locked in our car on an evening when the temperature began at 8 degrees and only went down—my sense of joy was in no way dampened. I after-glowed the drive home, lightly buzzing as I made my way back into the dark, snow-blanketed Maine Woods.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

Howard Riley (1943 - 2025)

 

(Photo by Dmitrij Matvejev, NoBusiness Records)

By Martin Schray

I fell in love with the music of Howard Riley rather late, actually it was with Solo in Vilnius (NoBusiness, 2010). But then I really did. In the following years, I discovered his whole body of work, his early trio and most of all his solo albums, especially Constant Change 1976 - 2016 (NoBusiness, 2016), a 5-CD box set, which is one of my favourites of the decade. Howard Riley has become my favourite pianist (except Cecil Taylor, who is a league of his own), and because I had listened to his music intensively, I was really shocked when it became known that he was seriously ill. However, Riley managed to defy the illness for a long time and even managed to adapt his playing technique. But in the end, the great British pianist lost the fight and died yesterday, February 8th, shortly before his 82nd birthday.

Howard Riley studied at the University of Wales (1961–66), where he gained a BA and MA. He then he went to Indiana University (1966–67), before he enrolled at York University (1967–70) for his PhD. Alongside his studies and teaching he always played jazz professionally, with Evan Parker in 1966 and then with his aforementioned trio (1967–76), with Barry Guy on bass and Alan Jackson, Jon Hiseman and Tony Oxley alternating on drums. They released three albums for three different labels, each showing a remarkable stylistic evolution, opening up standardized structures into the worlds of an unknown, free improvisational language, while still clearly rooted in jazz. Riley played with a number of the key musicians of the British improv scene, but his idea of freedom was different. He needed a melody or rhythmic fragment to provide a center of gravity.

Apart from that, the feature which characterizes Riley’s music best is a tendency to reduction. His first solo album, Singleness, “demonstrated his mastery of historical techniques, attuned, through Monk, to the language of bebop as well as to the contemporary forms of Xenakis and Penderecki“, as Trevor Barre puts it in Beyond Jazz - Plink, Plonk & Scratch; The Golden Age of Free Music in London 1966 -1972. Especially Xenakis has been a constant influence to his music which Riley has always seen as an evolutionary process. In the liner notes to Facets (Impetus, 1981) he mentioned that he had always tried to bring both sides together: the useful ideas and intellectual aspects of the European musical environment and the intensity and spontaneity which is displayed by the American jazz tradition. Riley’s work ricocheted between drama, space, rumbling trills, rhythmic surprises and a sparing lyricism. Hardly anyone was able to develop a theme through constant modulations, harmony shifts and subtle dynamics like him, his idiosyncrasies always remaining accessible.

During a recording session, he realized that he couldn't play anymore and went to see a doctor, who diagnosed Parkinson’s disease. Riley had to stop playing for some time, and luckily he recovered with the help of medication. However, he had to revise his technique. At that age this was a tremendous and hard effort and it was surprising how well it worked, for example on the late recordings for Constant Change 1976 - 2016. As another result Riley approached his later solo performances “with or without repertoire“, playing the great standards, mainly Monk and Ellington. He was back where he started from.

Howard Riley has always been something like an unsung hero in the improvised music scene, but he released very recommendable albums. Flight (Turtle Records, 1971) and Synopsis (Incus, 1974), both with the above-mentioned trio, are landmarks of British free jazz. Duality (View Records, 1982) and For Four On Two Two (Affinity, 1984) are early masterpieces of his solo excursions. His piano duo with Keith Tippett must also be mentioned here, for example The Bern Concert (FMR, 1994). A personal favourite of mine is Improvisation Is Forever Now (Emanem, 1978/2002) with Barry Guy and Phil Wachsmann. From his late period all albums on the NoBusiness label are great, Solo in Vilnius and Constant Change 1976 - 2016 are essential. By releasing Riley’s late works regularly, the Lithuanians have helped this wonderful music to see the light of day.

It was also NoBusiness’s Danas Mikailionis who informed us that Howard Riley passed away at his care home in Beckenham, South London. Unfortunately, Parkinson’s Disease had really taken its toll severely with him over the last few years. The musical universe has lost a bright star, a kind man and a great personality. It is not only me who will miss Howard Riley a lot.

Watch Howard Riley play solo here:

 

FIRE! Work Song For a Scattered Past

Appearing on Friday this past week, a video by Samot Nosslin/Underhypnos was released for the song "Work Song For a Scattered Past" by FIRE! Watch as the trio of Mats Gustafsson (sax), Johan Berthling (bass) and Andreas Werlin (drums) apply their lugubrious magic to devastating effect.

FIRE! and it's bigger sibling FIRE! Orchestra and their influences have graced the pages of the Free Jazz Blog quite a few times over the years:

- Paul Acquaro

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Butterfly Mushrooms and a Hungry Ghost

By Ken Blanchard 

Peter Brötzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love- Butterfly Mushroom (Trost Records 2024)  

Somehow I missed the earlier review of Butterfly Mushroom by Eyal Hareuveni at this venue. Having written it, I went ahead and sent it in. Apologies to Eyal.

There are no surprises here for anyone who has listened to more than the first few minutes of almost any Brötzmann recording. Well, maybe one, especially if you enjoy his trios and duets as much as I do. I find the synergetic pacing of those recordings to be woven together as seamlessly as if a four or six handed demigod were playing it all at once. Butterfly Mushroom gives me the feeling that the two musicians are playing independently, isolated in space and time; and yet somehow the result is perfect, dynamic, joinery, something like body and soul in Cartesian theory. As I hear most free jazz, it is the role of percussion to create the aural space within which the other instruments flicker in and out of being. On this recording I often seemed to hear this reversed. The horns make a space within which a range of collisions occur.

That out of my system, most of the pieces present the signature Brötzmann high-frequency fields of sound. On the first cut, “Boot licking, Boots kickin,” Brötzmann’s guttural buzz is produced as he drills into one vein of ore after another. I was reminded near the end of this cut of two cruise ships passing out of port and playing signature tunes with their Godzilla-sized horns. On “Ride the Bar,” the horn lines get smeary, as a pen pressed too hard into parchment, and then gives way to streams of humming punctuated on both ends by high squeals. Nilssen-Love squeezes out a wide and dense ribbon with sparkle and humor. “Frozen nose, Melting Toes” opens with jungle drums at an imaginary distance. The horn sings a sad, breathy lament and the drums, for once, go quiet. When they come back in, the percussive vibe has shifted to East Asia. The romance does survive the next two cuts. However, as the horn goes feral, we still get traces of Zen temple strikers.

Butterfly Mushroom was recorded in Wuppertal, Germany, in 2015. Around that same time, I missed a chance to hear Brötzmann live in Chicago. What a mistake. If you want to hear two extraordinary artists who can evoke pretty much any human experience out of ear and memory, check this one out. 


Hungry Ghosts - Segaki (Nakama Records, 2024)

Hungry Ghosts is described on the Bandcamp page as “Norwegian-Malaysian trio.” Try finding that restaurant in Boise. The trio consists of Yong Yandsen on tenor sax, Christian Meaas Svendsen on double bass, voice, and shakuhachi, and, tying these two recordings together, Paal Nilssen-Love on percussion. You can find a review of their first album by our own Taylor McDowell here.

The term hungry ghost comes directly from Buddhist mythology. The idea is that the ravenous, unsatiated appetites of human beings live on after death. It is less clear whether the ghost is the person herself or just a particularly toxic fragment from that bundle of passions we call a person. I believe this idea appears also in Navaho mythology. A large bit of funerary ritual is designed to detoxify these spirits. The album title refers to such rituals. The title and cover (I learn from the Bandcamp page) are from The Scroll of Hungry Ghosts.

The titles of the four cuts suggest that hungry ghosts have bizarre cravings. “In search of filth like vomit and feces to eat” begins with a thunderous, chaotic dialogue between the saxophone and drums. If Svendsen is there, it was hard for me to tell. A little over three minutes in this intense volume of sound collapses into a moment of silence, into which Yandsen pours his solo. He replicates the dialogue by alternating between higher and lower whimpering, descending to a barely audible crackle. About a third of the way through we get a more explicitly Buddhist vibe. Bells ring and echo. The drums come in and weave a marvelously textured carpet of clicks and plunging knocks. The last section of the piece brings back the jungle drum/soundtrack passion similar to that noted on the previous recording. All the energy rushes back in and we return to the intensity of the opening.

If your ghost is hungry for a marriage of bowed base and sax, you get it on the second cut “Small bits of pus and blood.” The small bits make enough room for one another here that we can appreciate all three virtuosos, but it is the bass that steals the show. Svendsen maintains the dominate role at the beginning of the longest and best cut on the album. “Mountain valley bowls full of grime” reminds me of a sputtering engine more than mountains or bowls. There is more narrative here, but it never leaves the passion for texture that marks free jazz. This one was so good that I had to carry my JBL speaker into my stairwell, which has the best acoustics in my home.

Both of these recordings are brilliant. If you had to choose one, go for Segaki. It’s only Jan 24 as I write this, but if this isn’t the best thing I hear all year… it’s going to be a wonderful 12 months for free jazz.

Friday, February 7, 2025

Nate Wooley - Henry House (Ideologic Organ, 2024)

 

For those who fear that the concept behind Nate Wooley’s 80 minute five-piece epic might be a little hard to get your head around, let me start by breaking it down into simple terms for you:

Firstly – and most notably – for this record, Wooley has abandoned his trumpet. He does not perform at all. Instead, Henry House is composed of five pieces, all based around poetry that he spliced together based on four core texts:
  • The words are collaged together with additional subtle changes.
  • There are two main literary themes: These are tracks one and two.
  • The last three tracks are interpolations of those two.
  • The first piece features vibraphone overtones, the third is horns, and the final is piano.
  • The second and fourth are both voice layerings, with some water and frog sounds.
  • So it has an odd, even, odd, even, odd pattern going.
  • It’s meditative, avant-garde and absurd.
Listening to it through in one go makes for a more impactful ending, as you follow the story both musically and lyrically, developing in long stretches and finally reaching its heavy, satisfying conclusion on piano and quarter tone piano, played by Laura Barger and Cory Smythe.

It’s obvious that Wooley has put a huge amount of thought into this massive work. What’s really appealing is the way that tracks one, three, and five fit together instrumentally. The vibraphones, played by Russell Greenberg and Matt Moran, sound like pure sine waves – very long, with consistent sustain, and almost zero attack, making it practically impossible to distinguish how the sound has been produced. The overtones here are divine, as they are throughout the record; spine-tingling, magical, and beautifully subtle. Some of the stranger chords achieved in the second and fourth vocal-layering pieces remind of the more dissonant moments of John Zorn’s acapella group, but this is all overdubs by the one singer, Megan Schubert. The long, soft horns of the quartet in track three create a phasing effect that sweeps around in circles. Peter Evans (trumpet), Dan Peck (tuba) Mattie Barbier and Weston Olencki (trombones) and are to thank for this. Even the deep, low hum of the sub bass frequencies at the beginning of the piece resonate under the skin, and down to the bone.

There are, believe it or not, ten artists performing on this album, which is quite a coordinated effort. Given its introverted mood, and the gentle silences among the music and text, a sense of intimacy is created in each track, and the space between only adds to the illusion that you are alone in a room with just two or three artists at one moment. The spoken word parts are performed only a few lines at a time, in small bursts, and are responded to by the musicians. This is another common theme throughout the record, and the listener falls into the rhythm of spoken text and music, one after the other.

Interesting layerings of chords throughout each chapter continue to engage, and although the readings become almost trancelike in their absurdity, Mat Mineri's deep, articulate voice especially lulls the listener into a kind of relaxing meditation. The lyrics weave together Wooley’s collage of ideas of what Henry’s character represents: “a guilty purchase meant to be used and discarded,” “a forgotten fad”, “a soft unattended, and absurd moment,” “a failed event.” It’s sombre and contemplative, and with each tessellating burst of spoken word and song, the opportunity to reflect on both is presented. The poetic weirdness sometimes causes the imagination to drift, but this allows for new discoveries and focal points with each relisten.

I have not been able to stop thinking about, or listening to Henry House by Nate Wooley for the last week: so subtle, delicate, and patient. Incredibly layered, and meticulously conceptualized. Introspective and private…

But enough about Henry.
Let’s put it this way:
He gets blessings from me.
That is true. 
 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Ivo Perelman & Nate Wooley – Polarity 3 (Burning Ambulance Records, 2024)

By Don Phipps

No matter how free or abstract the playing, Ivo Perelman (on tenor sax) and Nate Wooley (on trumpet) are always in control. Polarity 3, their latest collaboration, is a clever and at times striking conversation of musical thought, not unlike professors at a university working out complex problems of ethics, logic, and math, in a probing, delicate, and introspective manner.

What is notable about Perelman’s duets with a wide range of collaborators [over the last year, Perelman has recorded duets with Ingrid Laubrock,Tom Rainey, Matthew Shipp, Fay Victor, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, and even Nate Wooley, on the magnificent Polarity 2], is the wonderful way he converses with his guest artists – the dedicated form of listening while improvising, the careful construction of free form playing, the call and response technique honed to perfection.

There are many intriguing highlights in the ten improvs that grace this outing. Wooley’s pianissimo playing on “One” - the gray blue haze of “Two” – the jazzy dance of “Three” – the cave-like experience of the opening of “Four” and how it transitions and transforms to a bluesy ending – the coiling apart and winding back together of the musical phrases of “Five” – the grasshopper leaps and rapid hummingbird wingbeats found on “Six” – and the climb to the stratosphere of “Ten.”

But one would be negligent without calling attention to the special sequence of improvs “Seven,” “Eight,” and “Nine.” “Seven” starts out wild, wooly, and ferocious with lines that zig and zag like a ping pong ball on fire. The pair work closely together, as evidenced by Perelman’s daredevil runs that terminate with Wooley’s blurting trumpet note. And the rhythm, its evolution over the course of the piece, rotating slow and fast like a struck cue ball. “Eight” is the musical inverse - Wooley starts off muted, a kind of cool loneliness. And the piece feels like isolation in a beautiful Sedona desert landscape. “Nine” follows, with a heated exchange. The maestros banter back and forth in soulful gestures. And it is on “Nine,” where one can hear Jim Clouse’s recording technique capture not only the intensity of the music, but the musician’s actual breathing through their instruments.

Beautifully rendered, challenging and sonically robust, the music of Polarity 3 once again drives home the remarkable approaches and articulation of two of free music’s top improvisers, Perelman and Wooley, in their prime. Enjoy!

 

Polarity 3 can be purchased here.

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Schick, Håker Flaten, Steidle - The Cliffhanger Session (Zarek, 2024)

By Paul Acquaro

Berlin's Ignaz Schick's work with electronics and turntables seems to get a bit more attention than his saxophone playing. This is understandable, finding a good electronics player is a bit trickier than finding good saxophonist, but fortunately The Cliffhanger Session with Schick exclusively on his first instrument, the alto & baritone saxophones, helps to re-balance this possibly misperceived injustice.

The musicians fleshing out the trio on The Cliffhanger Session are none other than bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Oliver Steidle. Both have working relationships with Schick on electronics, most notably, Steidle and Schick with ILOG, reviewed here, here, here and here. For the Cliffhanger Sessions, as the liner notes explain "it was decided to leave the two power duos intact ... " and become a "...wonderful acoustic trio with a back to the roots approach: Free Jazz and Free Improvisation! Pure, melodic, rhythmic, energetic, surprising and rooted in tradition."

The trio accomplishes this with verve. From the initial warming up moments of "Cliffhanger #1", the spirit is apparent. Schick quickly ramps up with a energetic, spiraling melody that is supported confidently by Steidle and Haker-Flaten. It's a free jazz power trio in the best sense - strong, fluid saxophone work that incorporates moments of over-blowing and extended technique without obscuring the melodic and rhythmic ideas. After seven minutes, Schick and Steidle drop out leaving Håker Flaten to fill the sonic space with his zestful plucking. The intensity is scaled back as the other return after a few minutes and Steidles' textured percussion makes a splash. He takes a more pronounced solo at around 20 minutes after which the group regains its initial intensity. In the final moments of the first track, Håker Flaten's strong groove, Steidle's colorful percussion and Schick's flowing lines provide the perfect summation to this musical journey. Track two, 'The Cliffhanger #2', begins with a plaintive tune from Schick on baritone and the groups takes it time to built to a collective peak, using all the levers - density, intensity and volume - to make the trip exciting.

In other words, Schick, Håker Flaten, Steidle know how to craft a set of music that leaves one wanting more.

(A quick note, Cliffhanger Session has been available for a while and apparently a follow up, Vol. 2 came out in the time it took me to finally get my notes together.)

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Bittolo Bon / Grillini – Spell/Hunger (Hora Records, 2025)

By Guido Montegrandi

Spell/Hunger is a new chapter in Bittolo Bon's (augmented sax, feedback and electronics) search for a sound that develops and thrives at the intersection between acoustic and electronic sources. This time, he plays in duo with Andrea Grillini on drums, percussion and electronics; a musician with whom he shares a long history of collaborations (Bread&Fox, Youruba, Rex Kramer Trio, Tower Jazz Composer Orchestra).

On the album, the sound of the acoustic instruments is often augmented with electronic effects but most of all the electronics provide a grounding, a sort of basso continuo that allows the two musicians to move freely. The final result possesses a hypnotic quality that sets the listener into a pervasive fascinating sonic environment.

The first track 'Spell/Hunger #1 - pangolin summoner' unrolls on a repeated reed pattern with the percussion that develops around it with a sparse quality. The global sound never escalates with the two musicians defining a sonic horizon based on subtle nuances and evolving rhythmic patterns.

This is a feature that characterizes almost every track and even when the sound gets thicker as in 'Sports' or 'Ongok Sunside', Bittolo Bon and Grillini create dense and obsessive forms that never give to a liberating yelling and thumping.

The thing that the augmented sounds seem to add to the mix is a sense of inescapable anxiety, a kind of restless hungry feeling (to quote Mr Dylan). 'Bite the Beaver' for example displays a heavy drum pattern augmented with electronics that is then topped by a distant dissonant reed; in about three minutes everything dissolves into a crackling whistle.

All of this work carries the listener on the verge of something, every sound could develop in every direction but then every sound is left somehow suspended…an unsettling but thought provoking sensation. Absolutely worth listening.

Spell/Hunger is released by Hora Records.


Monday, February 3, 2025

Spaces Unfolding + Pierre Alexandre Tremblay – Shadow Figures (Bead Records, 2024)

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

The trio of Spaces Unfolding (Emil Karlsen on drums, Neil Metcalfe on flute, Philipp Wachsmann on violin) has been reviewed here on this site before and was, still is, a main feature on the resurrection of the great Bead Records. This trio channels the very essence of the experimental ethos in music, using improvisational techniques and practices as a means to a collective feeling about music. It’s not an easy task and they make it even more difficult for themselves by adding the complex electronics of Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. To clarify things, by more difficult I mean that, always, adding another person takes time and energy to continue in the same vein. Improvisation is demanding, that’s why its fruits are so juicy.

The presence of Tremblay marks a shift in the jazz based free improv stance of the trio. He helps create atmospheres where the respected instruments of the trio move freely without any hesitation. I’m, as a listener but also as someone who feels that the less amplification the better nowadays, quite skeptical about the use of electronics in any kind of freely improvised musics. Apart from my latter comment, electronics can easily saturate the music, leaving the acoustic nature of it behind, making it many times barely inaudible.

But on Shadow Figures this isn’t the case, quite the opposite. It seems that Tremblay’s use of the ambience of the recording space opened up new possibilities for them. Both the violin and the drums seem to be ever-expanding in every audio way is possible. The duo of Wachsmann and Karlsen offer the listener an alternative way to hear. The percussive nature of the violin (sounds from its body and strings) is at the forefront, while Karlsen’s playing is full of ideas, gestures and small scale energetic playing. Metcalfe’s flute is a part of the electronic dialect between him and Tremblay’s humble use of electronics.  In some tracks, like the two part Refractions, Tremblay takes the upper hand, transforming Shadow Figures into almost an ambient record. But that’s one of the facets of the quartet’s music. Quite thrillingly there are many of them, and in terms of listening and exploring this CD is one of the most demanding I’ve listened to the whole year. One of the best and most rewarding too.

Listen here: https://beadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/shadow-figures

@koultouranafigo

 

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Columbia Icefield with Susan Alcorn

The news of pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn's passing came as quite a shock yesterday. Today's video features Susan in Nate Wooley's Columbia Icefield project. Susan was also in the trumpeter's thunderous Seven Storey Mountain VI. In 2021, Alcorn appeared at Jazzfest Berlin performing Columbia Icefield. Of it, I wrote:

...The mournful, charged, amplified breath blew a cold breeze across the stage. It was musical dawn, and guitarist Ava Mendoza provided the first rays of light breaking through the tonal darkness. Deep, thick droning tones hovered in the background, emanating from Susan Alcorn's pedal steel guitar. As the music awoke, the textures came into sharp relief: Wooley changing from a metallic rush of sound to a mournful melody, drummer Ryan Sawyer adding additional texture, and Mendoza delivering aggressive arpeggios and discordant tones. 

It seems a video of that performance is not readily available, but I did stumble upon this version from Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, with Alcorn, of course, and Mary Halvorson replacing Mendoza: 

 

- Paul Acquaro

Saturday, February 1, 2025

kelly bray + caleb duval - BRAY/DUVAL (F.I.M. Records, 2024)

By Jury Kobayashi

Bray/Duval is an incredible duo album by Kelly Bray (trumpet) and Caleb Duval (double bass). It was released by the relatively new record label F.I.M. Records, out of New Haven Connecticut, which also hosts a concert series by the same name. This record is easily one of my favourite releases of 2024. The album is quite short (roughly 35 minutes in length), and I find I often listen to it twice in a row because of the sheer amount of amazing playing packed into a beautifully succinct album.

In Perpetual Frontier: Properties of Free Music, Joe Morris outlines that there are 5 methods of interaction (solo, unison, compliment, juxtaposition, silence) that free music musicians can choose to engage in when they play. This duo uses all 5 forms of interaction, weaving them in and out and bouncing between the different types of interaction, often changing the mode of interaction on a dime. This album is a lesson in interaction, and it makes for an amazing listening experience. Bray has one of the widest pallets of articulation on the trumpet that I have ever heard. She can go from a beautiful rich tone, to spluttering attacks, to percussive punchy notes. Duval plays the bass beautifully, and he is clearly engaged in a deep study of the possibilities of preparing the double bass. The effect of the wide range of articulations and careful attention to modes of interaction has produced an album that demands repeated listening.

The album art (painted by Bray) is layered and striking, much like the album itself. The recording is also beautifully done--I love that I can hear Duval preparing the instrument, or removing preparations from under the strings etc. This album is great, I highly recommend listening to it and checking out other F.I.M. records and concerts if you are in the Connecticut region.

Susan Alcorn (1953 - 2025)

Photo by Peter Gannushkin

By Martin Schray

Some news simply comes out of nowhere, it catches us unprepared and on the wrong foot. The news of Susan Alcorn’s sudden death is such news. Nobody expected it; she had recently played concerts in Europe- in front of euphoric audiences. There was no one like her who managed to combine country and western elements with free improvisation so elegantly. Anyone who spoke to her found an incredibly friendly person who could talk about her instrument with a unique enthusiasm. The musical (and human) loss is just immense.

Susan Alcorn was born in Cleveland/Ohio in 1953. She grew up in a musical family and said that her earliest musical experience was a situation in which she sat under the piano as a small child while her mother played - and she played the pedal, her first musical instrument, as she put it. As a child, she was surrounded by the music her parents listened to - Igor Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, but also pop music from the radio. She herself began playing the guitar at the age of twelve, inspired by her interest in folk, blues and the pop music of the sixties. She loved Muddy Waters which was why she wanted to play the slide guitar. One evening, when she was about 16 years old, she heard excerpts of John Coltrane’s OM on the radio. The next day she went out and bought His Greatest Years.

In 1975, she saw someone playing pedal steel guitar in a nightclub. She was immediately drawn to the magical, metallic sound and marveled at how the shiny bottleneck seemed to float above the instrument. As with the Coltrane record, she went out and bought the instrument the very next day. It was the start of a lifelong journey of musical discovery and a love affair, which - however - didn’t start easily. First, Alcorn took the obvious way and played in country & western bands. Technically, of course, she had to learn the instrument, but the critique was often direct and brutal. Her first “compliment“ as a pedal steel player came from a musician who came up to her and said he liked the songs she played, but not the way she played. Other musicians also had no sympathy and grimaced when she played. However, she later said that she was grateful for this criticism. It was the only way she was able to acquire the armor she later needed to push the boundaries of her instrument with free jazz influences, classical avant-garde music, Indian ragas and various styles of worldwide roots music.

To improve her technique, she copied the music of her steel guitar and blues heroes: Buddy Emmons, Lloyd Green, Jimmy Day, Curly Chalker, Maurice Anderson, Robert Johnson, Bukka White and many more. She also took lessons from anyone who would teach her, especially Maurice Anderson, who was very supportive. In 1981, she moved to Houston/ Texas, where she played with local and regional country and western swing groups. Alcorn described her time there as her real musical education. In addition to regular country swing jams, she weekly drove to the Third Ward to study jazz improvisation with Dr. Conrad Johnson, whose pentatonic approach to improvisation opened the door to improvised music and the vast possibilities of dissonances.

Alcorn then met the composer and philosopher Pauline Oliveros in 1990 and ended up working with her. Possibly, this was the decisive turning point in her musical life. Oliveros introduced her to her deep listening approach to music (and life). A second turning point was a moment in 1997 when she was asked by trombonist David Dove to play a 12-minute solo set live. Alcorn decided to do this without any guidelines, nothing was planned, it was free improvisation par excellence. She had never played a solo set before and was quite afraid of it. But when the moment came, she looked the audience in the eye and began to play. She described this experience as absolutely liberating - it was just her, the pedal steel, the audience and the room.

Since that moment, Susan Alcorn has played with everyone who is anyone in the free improv scene, e.g. Joe McPhee, Nate Wooley, Ken Vandermark, Ellery Eskelin, Mary Halvorson and many more. She particularly emphasized her work with Eugene Chadbourne (with whom she was able to perfectly combine country and free improvisation) and her work with Peter Kowald. She knew no boundaries, as her work with Olivier Messiaen, Astor Piazzolla and Roberta Flack proves. She recently played Messiaen compositions to a sold-out audience in Zurich in Switzerland.  

Susan Alcorn recorded lots of exceptional albums. Possibly our favorite is Pedernal (Relative Pitch, 2020) with her quintet with Michael Formanek on bass, Ryan Sawyer on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Mark Feldman on violin. Another beauty is Mirage (Clean Feed, 2013), a trio with Ellery Eskelin on tenor sax and Michael Formanek on bass. Her solo album Soledad (Relative Pitch, 2015), on which she plays compositions by Astor Piazzolla, is outstandingly beautiful. Also very much recommended are her trio Birds Meets Wire (Relative Pitch, 2021) with cellist Leila Bordreuil and sax player Ingrid Laubrock, as well as Filament (Relative Pitch, 2024), a duo with tenor saxophonist Catherine Sikora. A personal favorite of mine is Columbia Icefield (Northern Spy, 2019), a record by Nate Wooley (trumpet, effects), with her, Mary Halvorson (electric guitar), and Ryan Sawyer (drums, voice).

Susan Alcorn still had many plans. She was in the process of recording a trio album with Lori Freedman and Mat Maneri, scheduled for release this year. In July, Relative Pitch wanted to record a sequel to the trio with her, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bordreuil and she also worked on a Messiaen project. In addition, she was scheduled to play at Big Ears Festival with Mary Halvorson and Ryan Sawyer, among others. Finally, a tour with Catherine Sikora was planned for April. All of this is no longer possible. The news of her death shocked us all and many have lost a true friend. The music world has lost a queen.

Watch Susan Alcorn play in Gdansk in 2020: 


Friday, January 31, 2025

Acqua Pesante - Shaping the Time (Phonogram Unit, 2024)

By Aloysius Ventham

The stated aim of the album is to incorporate music, broadly understood as jazz music, within the Spatialist and Nuclear Movement project(s). It is, therefore, perhaps a solid exegetical strategy, and possible point of entry, to spend some time looking at their project.

Both Spatialism and the Nuclear Movement (still active projects today) emerged from the avant-garde scene in post-war Italy. While various manifestos of intention were released, themes tended to centre around destruction, creation and technology. There is a stated and tangible antipathy to The Old Ways that merely aimed to entertain and please (in the perjorative senses of the word) ‘consumers’ of art. Spatialism and the Nuclear movement aimed to throw of this mediocritizing ‘crowd pleasing’ bent via various disruptive provocations – creation not for consumption, but for a sort of anti-consumption. Creation not for a mundane, borderline-anhedonic pleasure, but for discomfort. To this end, new methods of artistic expression, new mechanisms of artistic creation , were adopted (those that utilised state-of-the-art technologies were to be preferred), thus creating ever-new textures, colours, spaces and arrangements.

What would a musical equivalent to this be, and do Acqua Pesante succeed? From their album blurb, we are told that they wish to take Spatialism and Nuclear as a springboard in the following sense:

“The “Acqua pesante” project calls for the need for a new art, which “goes beyond traditional painting, sculpture, poetry and music”, without imposing formal solutions, but encouraging a new creative attitude: art that must update in accordance with the scientific-technological-anthropological evolution of the times.”

One would thus reasonably expect to hear something unified and familiar becoming stressed and deformalized, or perhaps something that begins in a completely ‘free’ fashion become pushed to its structureless limit, developing perhaps geometrically, evolving almost deterministically like a nuclear reaction. Is this what we find? To be honest, I can’t be sure…

The album starts off, to my ear, in a complete state of disunity. The appropriately labelled ‘Blind Instant Composition’ process works very well – the musicians at the beginning of the work sound like they’re playing masterfully, but at random, completely independently from each other. Were the progression of the project to move towards obtaining its stated goal, one would expect this effect to accelerate with each track. What one experiences, however, is a seemingly anastrophic process. The musicians by the end sound more coherent.

The opening track of the album initially sounds like someone cleaning the windows of a particularly untidy and chaotically arranged house. The texture of the sound is uncomfortable and restrictive; the music is incoherent, disordered, disorientating and, borderline stressful. This is, of course, no bad thing and it would be an enormous mistake to stop listening here. While the first track is saturating (Carlo Mascolo’s trombone is overwhelming in the intensity of its strangeness), track two is far more sedate, but no-less interesting. Giacomo Mongelli is able to express his virtuosity as a percussionist and Hernâni Faustino’s accompanying double-bass meeting Mascolo’s croaking trombone is truly an outstanding performance. The second track is probably my highlight of the album acting, if not as a palate cleanser, as a sort of bridge away from referentless noise and towards something more concrete and tangible, albeit complicatedly structured. By track three I was absolutely hooked and was able to make sense of what was going on.

While all the musicians are clearly superlative at their craft, it is probably Mascolo’s trombone playing that will stay with me and keep me returning to the album; the sounds were unusual and chaotic, enrapturing and confusing – I truly couldn’t wish for more.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

the klingt.collective - variable densities (Interstellar Records, 2025)

By Eyal Hareuveni

klingt.org (a wordplay in German that means sounds weird) is the website and the collective of Viennese experimental musicians that celebrated its 25th anniversary in January 2025 with a one-day festival, and with, among other acts, the rarely-heard “nine-musician improvisation hydra” klingt.collective”, on its only third performance. This electro-acoustic ensemble represents musicians-improvisers from a wide spectrum of musical activities - sound art, noise, free jazz, free improvisation, contemporary music, reductionist music, and art-rock. The ensemble was put together by turntables wizard dieb13 (aka Dieter Kovačič) and its first performance was during the 2022 edition of the Wien Modern festival.

The king.collective features drummer Martin Brandlmayr (of Radian, Christof Kurzmann’s El Infierno Musical, and Mats Gustafsson’s Fake The Fact), recorders and tapes player Angélica Castelló (of Disturbio duo with Revox tape wizard Jérôme Noetinger, and the duo Chesterfield with guitarist Burkhard Stangl), dieb13 (of Fake The Facts and Gustafsson’s NU Ensembles, and TWIXT duo), ppooll software player Klaus Filip (of sonic luz and Kurzmann’s Orchester 33 ⅓), bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer (of Vegetable Orchestra, GBK and So Sner), cellist Noid (aka Arnold Haberl, of sonic luz), electronics player and bassist Billy Roisz (of The Elks and RWIXT), guitarist and electronics player Martin Siewert of (Radian, Georg Graewe’s Sonic Fiction Orchestra, Also and Fake The Facts and in-demand sound engineer) and guitarist and electronics player Oliver Stotz. These musicians collaborated on countless other projects, bands, performances, and albums.

variable densities is the first album of klingt.collective, “composed ex ante and in real-time” and recorded live during its second performance of the ensemble at Festival Denistés in Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France, in October 2023. True to DIY spirit of the collective, the album was mixed by Siewert and Kovačič, mastered by Siewert, and its ironic cover artwork was made by Kovačič with advice by Roisz and Gartmayer.

The music moves between pre-defined structures and free improvised parts and between the resolute opening of massive waves of disorienting, noisy sounds that demand total surrender to highly nuanced and conversational improvisations that its enigmatic, suggestive sounds have a strong, hallucinatory quality, mirroring the diverse stylistic influences and the various backgrounds of the musicians. Obviously, the dynamics of the ensemble stress the many years of common musical work and profound aesthetic history. The album is divided into two extended pieces, fitting the vinyl release. Side A with the title piece is more sparse with a mysterious, dream-like cinematic quality while Side B, “dense variations” deepens this mysterious, psychedelic vibe but slowly gravitates towards an explosive, cathartic maelstrom. As with all the works of klingt.org ’s musicians, variable densities promise that its attentive listeners would be equipped with a much better, recalibrated sensory consciousness of their environments - real, imagined, and dreamt of.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald Cleaver - the blacksmiths, the flowers (Reading Group, 2024)

 

This record is many things: it's a live album (the best kind of album), it's a critique and exploration of art while being a piece of art itself, it's a musical and political statement, it's dense and cerebral while retaining simplicity and viscerality, it's an iteration on cultural symbols and signifiers, it's an exploration of the human experience through a personal and new lenses which is, put simply, what poetry is. And it's Fred Moten's improvised poetry that this album revolves around.

Sometimes I struggle to convey through words how certain music impacts me and why I think it's great but, funnily enough, I'm finding that conveying how Moten's words make me feel is way harder than describing the music on this record; he effortlessly weaves a thick webbing of his lived experiences, his radical politics and references to current and past events like the murder of Rodney King into a free associative tapestry of feelings and moods that I can't quite untangle neatly or dissect but that simply, as the kids say, hit. The mastery Moten has over the english language is evident, with his vocabulary smoothly jumping from exalted to ordinary just as quickly as he jumps from musings on climate change and the growing hold oligarchy has on our societies to vignettes of interpersonal relationships, creating a miniature replica of the pathways of his brain, intrusive and throwaway thoughts included, a fully fledged universe of his own. 

His wordplay also holds infinite replay value, with new quotes and thoughts jumping out at every listen and sticking in your head like 'we cut each other off to make each other up' when discussing the connections to our fellow humans or the oxymoronic and borderline Lynchian 'having become fleshly with amputation'. Hip-hop fans call them quotables and this album is a treasure trove of wonderful, at times funny and poetic thoughts to sift through and hoard in the back of your mind. Moten's not just great with words, he chooses the best words every time (another definition of poetry).

While the poetry alone is worth the price of admission I'd be remiss not to mention the incredible musicianship from bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver. Their synergy is out of this world and their creativity defies all expectations. López explores his bass in all possible ways: grinding bowed notes, koto-like harmonics, hypnotic ostinatos, fast and spidery runs, everything delivered with fiery intensity and blaring volume. Despite the nature of improvised music and no matter how some of the playing might be physically demanding the bass is never out of sync with the drums, López and Cleaver are focused on and locked in with one another, constantly adding to each other's ideas and leading to exhilarating moments like the blood-pumping, Swans-like crescendo on '1A' or the irresistible rhythms on 'B1' and 'A2'. The pair are the gold standard of what we might reductively call a 'rhythm section', as comfortable with free-tempo caveman bashing as they are with Hip-hop inspired wonky beats, not in the Spotify-approved and sanitized kind of way but in a way that feels honest and true to the artists' vision. All of this while perfectly complementing Moten's contributions to the music and creating a wonderful listening experience. For all the fantastic interplay among these musicians nothing is as emblematic of their great chemistry as the times Cleaver punctuates Moten's lyrics with his own voice. A microcosm of what improvisation is, a nod of approval and enjoyment that's delightful in its simplicity.

Both deeply personal and, in a way, universal, a fantastic album to be played over and over, recorded on two separate nights but cohesive both sonically and lyrically. Available digitally and on double LP from Reading Group with gorgeous, abstract artwork, perfectly suited for the music and words on this record. I can't recommend this enough.