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The Outskirts - Dave Rempis (ts, as), Ingebrigt HÃ¥ker Flaten (b), Frank Rosaly (dr)

Schorndorf, Manufaktur, March 2025

Jörg Hochapfel (p), John Hughes (b), Björn Lücker (d) - Play MONK

Faktor! Hamburg. January, 2025

Sifter: Jeremy Viner (s), Kate Gentile (d), Marc Ducret (g)

KM28. Berlin. January, 2025

Monday, May 19, 2025

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, 577 RECORDS (1/2)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Founded in 2001 by the italian musician Federico Ughi along with the legendary Daniel Carter, 577 Records (named after Ughi’s apartment at 577 Fifth Ave. Brooklyn, where he was living at the time) is one of the most interesting independent labels around, including in its roster the likes of Amba, Amado, Cleaver, Dunmall, Genovese, Greene, Holmes, Ishito, Jones, Mela, Moore, Musson, Parker, Putman, Sanders, Shipp and both the founders, among many others. Key figure in the picture is the graphic designer Sergio Vezzali. Two sub-labels covering and enriching the artistic scope: Positive Elevation, dedicated to experimental electronic music and avant soul; Orbit577, the digital branch. 577 Records started the Forward Festival in 2015 and the residency program Sounds of Freedom, in which active musicians are awarded the opportunity to develop their own sound, skills and improvisation concept. If it’s ontologically impossible to define the sound of New York, 577 Records is for sure part of its sonic DNA. Some fresh Gourmandises de la Maison, as follows.

Roberto Cassani/Graeme Stephen - Pictish Spaghetti (577 Records, 2025)

Free music where moods and feelings move your mind and soul to a Spaghetti Western set? It sounds pretty unlike but it’s what happens with this record. Just, instead of the dusty Almeria desert, the landscape shows the green hills of Scotland, where Italian double bassist Roberto Cassani and guitarist Graeme Stephen put in place a recording studio in a battered rural school, deep in the Ochill Hills remote countryside. Here, in the summer of 2024, the duo recorded their first album together with the aim, says Cassano, “to capture a true, imperfect, honest beauty of a moment in music” and what came out “sounds like a Sergio Leone’s western set in Pictish territory, the soundtrack of which is left to a couple of Druids who trained for a lifetime to produce spontaneous moments, where every noise, every stumble, every dissonance is essential”. The Picts were an early Middle Ages tribe living on the hills of Perthshire, the remnants of their magic and culture can be seen today as spiraling art carved into rocks and boulders called Pictish Stones. Taking for granted, as said in the liner notes, that the mysterious and enchanting vibes influenced the duo’s recording, what we can add is that this recipe made of free textures, psychedelic nuances, rural and western atmospheres, is fully palatable, never out of focus or confused. A brave and intriguing work that could easily be a Julian Cope’s favourite.



Ayumi Ishito (Feat. Kevin Shea and George Draguns) - Roboquarians Vol.2 (577 Records, 2025)

Born and raised in Ishikawa, Japan, Ayumi Ishito spent a 3 years scholarship studying performance and composition at Berkee College of Music in Boston, then, after graduating, moved to New York in 2010 where she put in place several projects, Open Question, The Spacemen and her own quintet, among others. On this record, labelled as “the ultimate avant-punk experience”, Ayumi is teaming up with George Draguns on guitar and Kevin Shea on drums, for a Vol.2 by this unity that is actually the real debut. Bizarre, you're right. Draguns and Shea began playing together in the mid 90’s as Storm & Stress, an experimental rock band from Pittsburgh, then, relocated in Chicago, released a couple of records for the legendary Touch and Go label. Through collaborations with the jazz ensemble Mostly Other People Do the Killing and the trio Entropic Hop, the guys crossed the path with Ishito, starting a fruitful partnership that delivered our Vol.2, along with a fine-tuning of previous material written by Draguns and Shea with other musicians (Vol.1). Do we have, as it has been claimed, the “jazz Black Flack”? No, for the simple reason that you could have such a band once in a million years and we already got it, but this doesn’t affect the sheer beauty of this record: frantic free saxes, hardcore guitars, frenzy of mental pattern, combined with even tropical-tinged sounds, edgy dystopian and feral assault. All with heart and soul.



Daniel Carter/Ayumi Ishito - Endless Season  (577 Records, 2025)

This time Ms. Ishito shares the duties with none other than the Maestro himself, Daniel Carter, the legendary musician, defined by The Wire as “one of the purest spirits of the New York free jazz community”, co-founder of the label, whose monster roster of collaborations measures the caliber of his art: Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Sonic Youth, Sam Rivers, Yoko Ono, Jaco Pastorius, Yo La Tengo, William Parker among others. (Authors' note: let’s hope that such an extraordinary spirit could soon be known and recognized by a wider audience, beyond our Free Jazz Conspirators Enclave, as, for instance, finally happened to Joe McPhee). To the usual Carter’s tools, trumpet, saxophones, clarinet, flute and piano, Ishito adds tenor sax, effects, synthesizer, arrangements. Different ages, cultures, upbringing and approach: how statistically high is the probability of a shapeless pastiche? Extremely high, but this record keeps far off such a risk. The deep, philosophic multi-instrumentalist talent of Daniel, combined with the young, freshly dynamic and creative blood of Ayumi, are always pushing the game in a full sense of togetherness, never shadowing each other. Originally recorded as an acoustic set, soon the project moved forward as Carter strongly encouraged Ishito to take care of the audio productions and she did it, shaping beats and sounds, delivering amazing electro-analogic textures, as well as quiet and melodic, even cosmic, vibes.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Essential Listening : Harris Eisenstadt’s Desert Island Picks

Photo by Petra Cvelbar
By David Cristol

With a discography beginning in the year 2000 and a couple dozen album reviews on this blog, Toronto-born and Brooklyn-based drummer Harris Eisenstadt, who turns 50 this year, is a discreet yet essential character on the creative jazz scene, whether as leader of his own projects (Canada Day, Golden State, Old Growth Forest, September Trio) or as a band member. Accomplices include Nate Wooley, Pascal Niggenkemper, François Houle, Larry Ochs, Alexander Hawkins, Adam Rudolph, Tony Malaby, Angelica Sanchez, Ellery Eskelin... Eisenstadt has also shown an interest in African music as exemplified on Jalolu (CIMP, 2004) and Guewel (Clean Feed, 2008) which reflect his time studying in Gambia and Senegal and suggest a connection with the works of the A.A.C.M., while his current direction is influenced by afro-cuban traditions. In the last week of June he’ll be performing at The Stone in duets and trios with former teachers and forever inspirations of his: Wadada Leo Smith, Barry Altschul, Henry Threadgill, as well as artists of a younger generation such as bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, sax player James Brandon Lewis and pianist/singer/composer Melvis Santa from Cuba. 

Henry Threadgill - Song out of my Trees  (Black Saint, 1993) 

It's hard to pick my favorite record by Henry, which I'm sure is a common refrain amongst his fans because we love his music. It's visionary, it's expansive. Out of many remarkable recordings from his long and distinguished career, I chose « Song out of my Trees » because it’s one of those that I actually go back and listen to often. I return to a lot of the Sextett recordings and this one. Carry the Day and Too much Sugar for a Dime could also have made the cut, records from his 1980s and 90s period. I love the album’s opening tune, 'Gateway,' with Gene Lake rumbling, Brandon Ross and Jerome Harris laying it down, and Threadgill’s instantly recognizable alto sound and compositional voice. I love 'Over the River Club' which has a guitar quartet juxtaposed with Myra Melford's gospel piano. 'Grief' combines Amina Claudine Myers’ harpsichord with Tony Cedras’ accordion and Diedre Murray and Michelle Kinney's double cellos. Threadgill comes in soaring plaintively, and then Mossa Bildner's voice restates the melody and they do this loose, beautiful double cry. Talk about instrumental music that accurately captures the mood of the title of the piece ! 'Crea' is my favorite tune on the album, with the guitar quartet again and the majestic hunting horns of Ted Daniel. They hit this rhythmic section and juxtapose it with this abrupt, romantic lyricism, and then the rhythmic stuff comes back. It's sublime. The record ends with the title track : blues-drenched organ, Reggie Nicholson's loose swing, Threadgill's unmistakable alto, Ed Cherry doubling Henry with his bluesy guitar. It's a varied record and emblematic of the vastness of Henry's imagination. Everybody who's written for unusual instrumentation ever since, is doing so in the shadow and awe of Henry Threadgill. There's Henry, Braxton, Leo, Roscoe Mitchell and other composers and improvisers who stressed, either by example or by saying so explicitly, as Wadada said to me : « Write for unusual instrumentation, explore unusual combinations of instruments » . This is all ultimately in the tradition of Ellington, but with a postmodern, kitchen sink aesthetic.

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet (Tzadik, 2000)


Next record is the eponymous recording by Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet, the first of the Golden Quartet albums. I love the opening scramble of Jack DeJohnette and Anthony Davis; it was a revelation to hear Jack play free like that. Eventually, Jack sets up the time. Anthony has Wadada's Ankrasmation language velocity units to work with, these short and then long combinations of rhythms and pitches set against each other. And finally, Leo enters with a beautiful melody, one of my favorites of his, in little groups of five notes and then this long, trilling texture that you just hear and know it's him right away. The second track is a beautiful ballad called 'Harumi'. It's a perfectly distilled lesson of when I studied composition with him. He always spoke about finding the musical moment, about only including the notes that matter the most and finding in your own composition what those notes are or what that section is or what that passage is or what that gesture is, drilling into the heart of what you're writing. I love the free march texture of 'A celestial sky…,' the depth and tree-like, rootedness of Malachi's pedal tones, Jack's free swinging funk, Leo's declamatory playing on top of it. I love the other ballad on the record, The 'Healer's Voyage,' with this beautiful lyricism and an expansive approach to ballad playing, especially in Anthony Davis's voicings, using the entirety of the piano, independently, polyrhythmically, and yet lush and beautiful. And then the last track, which prefigures a lot of Leo's titles of the last several decades. Leo's titles have always been poetic. They also often have a political relevance to them. The title of the last track is 'America's Third Century Spiritual Awakening'. Talk about a prescient title, from the vantage point of 2025... My goodness. I wish more people, beyond the people who know, would listen a little closer. I love, again, the urgency of Jack's free bop, Anthony's stabbing interjections, Malachi's rumble, Wadada's restating of some of the stuff Anthony was playing at the beginning. Leo had invited me to the recording session of this album at Avatar Studios in Manhattan, in the middle of my time at Cal Arts. I remember the thrill of watching, the interactions in the studio, the collegiality and reacquainting of old friends working together who hadn't worked together much in those recent years, but these are people that Leo, especially in terms of Jack and Malachi, had gone back with to the mid-sixties in Chicago and, of course, his long association with Anthony from New Haven. It was a revelation to see these heroes of mine catching up and getting to it and creating this profound music. I feel so lucky to have been there.

David Holland Quartet - Conference of the Birds (ECM, 1976) 


Another recording that I love is the hardly secret album Conference of the Birds by the David Holland Quartet, as it says on my CD cover. I'm looking at the autograph of Barry Altschul which says « Thanks ! Barry » . The album features Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton and Barry : what a band ! I love the exuberance of 'Four Winds', the first track, and the both melodic and textural pointillism of 'Q and A', the exquisite lyrical beauty of the title track 'Conference of the Birds,' the incantatory nature of 'Interception,' the capacious open space of 'Now here (nowhere)' , and the colossal and insistent free bop of 'See-saw'. Each track is a perfect sonic picture of 1970s creative music. For those of us too young to have attended concerts in the various loft scene venues, Rivbea or wherever, this has to be one of the great statements from that period. I actually read about this record before I heard it. I was getting into jazz via mostly Coltrane and Miles in the late nineties. I'd borrowed a copy of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on LP or even cassette, I think it was. It might have been the second or third edition, around '96. And I was letting my fingers do the walking type of research and looking for recordings to check out. I was already interested in the Coltrane Quartet and 60’s Miles, and then in fusion of the early seventies, Mahavishnu, Tony Williams Lifetime, the earliest Weather Report and Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band. I started reading about European free improvisation and 70s free music, Jarrett's European and American quartets, Dave Holland's ECM recordings. I heard this and it was the the ultimate inspiration, especially what Barry was up to. It was such a wide open concept of what being a creative music drummer and percussionist could be. I remember studying with Gerry Hemingway later in the 90’s. Barry's a decade older than Gerry and Mark Helias and Ray Anderson and Anthony Davis and George Lewis, other creative musicians coming up in the seventies. He said they called Barry « the cash register » because he had this incredible ability to not just create staccato, non-pitched sounds on his expanded drum kit, but he had this constant imagination, scampering around, searching for different sounds. I remember Barry talking about the expression that he credited to Beaver Harris « from ragtime to no time » , that was really his concept as a teacher. When I lived in New York in the late nineties, I was reading The Village Voice looking for gigs to go to one night, and there it said « Barry Altschul solo ». I'd known Conference of the Birds already. Oh my god, my hero is playing in town. He had been living in Europe for most of the eighties and early nineties and was back in New York. I went to hear him play and asked if I could study with him. He gave me his card. The image on his business card was this seventies-looking beautiful painting of him that someone had done. Lessons took place at his apartment on 105th and Central Park West, in his two-story apartment with a spiral staircase, a block or two up from the building that Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Paul Motian lived in. He gave me a facsimile printout of 12 steps to follow, a range of skills that he insisted on his students mastering or practicing anyways, from the freest, most abstract spiritual pursuits, long meditative upstrokes and downstrokes as a standing meditation for minutes at a time, to Charlie Wilcox on and swing solos, old school jazz pedagogy, books like Syncopation and Stick Control , the bibles of rudimentary drumming, the whole gamut. Make a sound, make another sound was one of the exercises that he had his students work on weekly. There I was getting to all this formative, aesthetic and practical information. It's not every time that your heroes as artists are also great teachers, but he was. At that time, I was undecided. I knew I wanted to be a musician. I was in my early twenties and a drummer, but I also was writing. We’d record interviews after our lessons. I would turn on a tape or dictaphone, and remember asking him about playing with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and all this amazing history. And this record, it's not just because of Barry that I love it so much, it's the perfect alchemy of the musicians involved. But Barry's playing really pointed me forward for the entirety of my career. I saw him play at Big Ears a couple months ago, still swinging like crazy, stopping on a dime and exploring the nooks and crannies of his kit, all pointillistic. He's over 80, playing his butt off. What an inspiration.

Miguelito León - Mina Mina  (Ocha Records, 2024) 1-song digital streaming 


So now to three that are influential to me in my current research focuses. The first is a track called 'Mina Mina' by an artist named Miguelito León. It's released as a single, rather than as an entire album. A single and a video, on streaming platforms only. Maybe a departure from the purview of this column, but I've been listening to it nonstop, since a friend of mine hipped me to it a couple months ago. Musically it's, not unrelated, but in a different lane, so to speak, than Wadada and Henry and Barry and my own work in creative music, likewise in terms of its dissemination strategy. This is not an old school recording in any sense of the word. The production aesthetic, of course, is much more meticulously polished, overdubbed and all that stuff. Still it has a nice organic feel to it, in a very different aesthetic than creative music in the ways that creative music is generally recorded. What he's doing, and it's something that I'm interested for my own work, is taking traditional materials used in afro-cuban ceremonies, particularly the song 'Mina Mina,' and reimagining it. He also intersperses, in the background, verité recordings of a venerated elder singer named Dayan. I mean an elder in in terms of his legitimacy and experience growing up in Cuba in a folkloric family. You hear Dayan teaching his young son some traditional praise poetry, and teaching it in the traditional call-and-response way. Teaching a language, teaching linguistics in a way that is preserving the tradition. Miguelito is including this verité example of traditional pedagogy as a way of connecting what is a forward-looking produced track to the traditions that it comes from. It's a salient example of how to reconstitute traditional liturgical materials in new and unexpected ways, which is a a central preoccupation for me these days. Not so much in the creative music sense as we are talking about it, understanding it to be coming out of jazz and improvised music, but creatively nonetheless. My research in batá and afro-cuban music has taken me deeper and deeper and deeper into it, but I still am sorting out for myself how to reimagine these things in creative music.

Ilú Keké - Transmisión en la Eritá Meta (Music Works-Sendero, 2018) 


This recording bears the name Ilú Keké, which is a set of sacred batá drums from Matanzas, Cuba. The artists involved on the recording are numerous. There are essentially three people who play a set of batá drums. There are usually three drums in a set. This recording has a series of tracks by elders from Matanzas, which is a small city near Havana where I have done a lot of research and visited and studied there and been involved in religious, ceremonial stuff for a little more than a decade. It's a sleepy workers' town, about 90 kilometers, an hour and a half drive East of the capital. Not much going on there, at first glance, and yet it is also known as this rich repository center that preserves afro-cuban traditions, that date to centuries but particularly to the nineteenth century. The afro-cuban population who lived in the city of Matanzas and in the province of Matanzas were slaves on the sugar plantations there. The city has preserved traditions that don't exist in the more global city of Havana or anywhere else on the island. These traditions are in various degrees of decline, being forgotten or not being preserved, or elders are dying with the secrets and not passing them on to the next generations. The recording is this ethnomusicological document from 2017. Ritual drummers heard of a set of sacred drums that were from the 1950s and had been in disrepair, and hanging on a wall. Sacred drums are hung, they're not supposed to be on the ground ever, so they're hung on walls in the homes of the people who own them. They were hanging on a wall, at the home of the owner who they had been passed down to, by earlier generations. They weren't being played and had been forgotten. It's as though, in terms of creative music and jazz, someone had found a secret drum set of Baby Dodds in New Orleans that no one had known, that its existence was not even known for many decades. So the recording documents the rediscovery of those drums, and on half of the tracks, those drums are being played by elders who were already in their late seventies, early eighties. In fact, one of them died within weeks of the completion of the recording. Another died some months after. The third died a year or two later. This is like recording dinosaurs barely while they’re still walking the earth. And then the other recordings are live tracks of actual ceremonies, multitrack recordings with great microphones, excellent recording technology. Capturing not only the oldest set of drums, but also a younger set of consecrated drums being played at ceremonies throughout Matanzas. I've included this because it’s this vital document of elder musicians in their final moments and not just a museum piece that you put in a museum and say, wow, look how cool that looks, but, emblematic of living vessels as sacred batá drums are believed to be, able to continue to transmit their messages through the rhythms that are played on them, through the songs that are sang, that the drums accompany the participants in these ceremonies with. I have a particular connection to this recording based on studying and having religious affiliations with the people playing on it. Matanzas is like if there was some small city just outside of New Orleans, not the Ninth Ward, not the Treme, not a neighborhood in the city, but some quiet community that was almost forgotten and that was a repository of New Orleans African-American traditionss. I joke that Matanzas is like the Hartford or the Cleveland or the Binghamton of Cuba. I hope that including this recording on this list will point some ears in the direction of this exquisite tradition, not the globalized better-known versions of it, but the super O.G., the real Mecca. Mike Spiro, a great American practitioner of this music and religion, has referred to Matanzas as Mecca for afro-cuban folkloric practices. This recording is like a holy grail of almost forgotten ancient knowledge.

Bembesito - Yemayá Guiro (Bembesito, 2018) 1-song digital streaming 


This is another example of a song rather than a complete album, more in keeping with the way things are, perhaps not in creative music, but certainly in most genres or fields of music. This is a digital-only streaming release by a singer named Bembesito. Bembe essentially means party in Caribbean Spanish. Bembe sito is a diminutive and affectionate ending to the name. Bembesito is someone who is bringing the party with them. It's an appropriate name. Bembesito is a a singer that I have been working with in New York, playing afro-cuban ceremonies often with for the last seven years. It's an example of afro-cuban folkloric music. In this case, the form is known as guiro , and is made up of gourd rattles called chekere, also known as agwe. So even though the form is called guiro, no one is actually playing a güiro like a scraper. They play these two, sometimes three shakers. And there's a metal bell which is actually the blade of a hoe, the tool you use to break up the earth before you plant stuff in it. It's called guataca. And then there's a single conga drum that improvises quite spaciously, as the singer and chorus sing in this call-and-response way, antiphonally : a singer sings the first verse and then the chorus responds. They might repeat it a couple times, move on to the next one. The singer goes through a series of cantos, which are praise songs. In this case, it's for Yemayá, which is the orisha or the deity, the mother of the world, who lives in the oceans. Lucumi is the name of this afro-cuban religion. It’s the most well known, but there are afro-cuban traditions practiced commonly, including Palo, Abakua , and to a lesser extent, Arara. I've worked with Bembesito a lot, and continue to learn so much from him. He's another young master, in his forties and actually Dominican, and has grown up in the very active afro-cuban religious community in New York, singing guiros andtambores, which are the names for the ceremonies that involve batá drums, for twenty five years. There's a Latin, Spanish speaking community in New York made up of Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, also English-speaking black Americans and afro-caribbeans who are part of this larger afro-cuban community, and he is one of the most in-demand singers of that scene. He has a soaring voice and is in command of a song repertoire of more than one thousand songs. The improvisation in this music is like in any traditional music, very much contextual. The singer chooses the order of the song spontaneously, in the moment, and modifies the songs that he or she is choosing based on both expectations and expected sequences. When you're singing this, there's an expectation that this is coming next and then that, and then that. But it also allows for the spontaneity of the moment to decide which direction a series of songs will take, not just based on musical distinctions or choices but also on what's happening in the context of the ceremony, extramusical circumstances dictating what musical choices are made improvisationally, which I've always been fascinated by. It's an example of someone that I work with often, in this case, making a recording. And that's him not only singing the lead and singing all the tracks in response to his lead vocals, he's also playing all the instruments. A virtuosic demonstration of the way a guiro ceremony would sound. 

 

Harris Eisenstadt, The Stone Residency June 25–28, New York

  • 6/25 Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) Harris Eisenstadt (drums)
  • 6/26 Melvis Santa (piano, voice) Harris Eisenstadt (drums)
  • 6/27 Barry Altschul (drums) James Brandon Lewis (sax) Harris Eisenstadt (drums)
  • 6/28 Henry Threadgill (woodwinds) Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon) Harris Eisenstadt (drums) 


Harris Eisenstadt on the Free Jazz Blog: 

  • Fictive Five – Anything Is Possible (Clean Feed, 2019) ****
  • François Houle / Alexander Hawkins / Harris Eisenstadt - You Have Options (Songlines, 2018) ****
  • Harris Eisenstadt – Recent Developments (Songlines, 2017) ****½
  • Harris Eisenstadt - Canada Day IV (Songlines, 2015) ****
  • The Convergence Quartet - Owl Jacket (No Business, 2015) ****½
  • Harris Eisenstadt - Golden State II (Songlines, 2015) ***½
  • Harris Eisenstadt September Trio - The Destructive Element (Clean Feed, 2013) ****½
  • The Convergence Quartet - Slow And Steady (No Business, 2013) *****
  • Harris Eisenstadt, Ombudsman
  • Harris Eisenstadt - Canada Day 2 (Songlines 2011) ****½
  • Harris Eisenstadt - September Trio (Clean Feed, 2011) ****
  • Harris Eisenstadt - Woodblock Prints (No Business, 2010) *****
  • Harris Eisenstadt - Canada Day (Clean Feed, 2009) ****½
  • Achim Kaufmann, Mark Dresser, Harris Eisenstadt - Starmelodics (NuScope, 2008) ****
  • Harris Eisenstadt - Guewel (Clean Feed, 2008) *****
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    Saturday, May 17, 2025

    Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons - Live in Philadelphia (Otherly Love/Ars Nova Records, 2025)

    By Martin Schray

    When Marshall Allen’s first solo album was released in February (Allen was actually 100 years old at the time), the reviews were almost effusive. And New Dawn is a very fine album, no question about it. For Allen, who crossed several musical boundaries with the Sun Ra Arkestra in the course of his life, it’s a very accessible record that offers a nice overview of his work. It’s highly recommended for Allen-beginners in particular. Shortly before this, however, the man was on stage with several musicians in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia - and the music played there is more likely to be that preferred by readers of this website. Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, which is the name of the project featuring an ever-changing lineup, teaming Allen and longtime Arkestra guitarist DM Hotep with a smorgasbord of outstanding musicians from various genres like saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins, James Brandon Lewis and Elliott Levin; keyboardist Brian Marsella; bassists William Parker, Eric Revis (from the Branford Marsalis Quartet and Tarbaby), Luke Stewart (of Irreversible Entanglements fame) and James McNew (Yo La Tengo’s bassist and guitarist). Also on board are drummers Chad Taylor, Tcheser Holmes (Irreversible Entanglements), Mikel Patrick Avery (Natural Information Society), and Charlie Hall (The War on Drugs). Finally, there are vocalist Tara Middleton, trumpeter Michael Ray and trombonist Dave Davis of the Arkestra; the Ade Ilu Lukumi Batá Ensemble; and experimental noise duo Wolf Eyes.

    “I didn’t want it to turn into a cookie cutter series where every iteration is the same style with different faces. I tried to incorporate musicians with different improvisational mindsets. I’m very familiar with the things that really inspire Marshall, so I kept an eye and an ear towards that while occasionally throwing him a curveball,” DM Hotep says in the liner notes about the idea of disparate lineups.

    And some of the results are outstanding. For example, “Square the Circle” with James McNew and The War on Drugs drummer Charlie Hall, which is a wild mixture of driving rhythms from the New York CBGBs scene (e.g. The Feelies‘ debut album) and Miles Davis’s jazz rock phase at the beginning of the 1970s. Other highlights are “Back to You“, which sounds like a strange Pink Floyd song with Wolf Eyes’s encrypted lyrics plus free jazz sprinkles; “Stay Lifted,” a panting tour de force on the basis of an endlessly repeating rolling bass and Allen on EVI, Elliott Levin on saxophone and Michael Ray on wah-wah trumpet fighting on top of it; “The Hills“, a polyphony of disparate particles of different origins, buzzing around independently, clumping together for moments, intertwining and then drifting apart again, flicking on and off again; and eventually “Slip Stream“ with saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and keyboardist Brian Marsella, which is knee-deep in space jazz rock again.

    Live in Philadelphia shows Marshall Allen’s interest in contemporary music of all kinds. In this project, the musicians are turned on, sometimes making fascinating contributions. Solos in the conventional sense are rather rare, it seems more as if an instrument pushes itself to the fore for a while and then sinks back into the stream of sound. Allen and DM Hotep are more like sorcerers who want to usher in a new age of jazz using a wide variety of ingredients. You have to imagine it: Marshall Allen is 100 years old and he’s still avant-garde. Isn’t that outstanding?

    Live in Philadelphia is available on vinyl (in a limited version, too) and as a download.

    You can listen to the album and pre-order/order it here: 

     

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    Friday, May 16, 2025

    AngelicA 35: CIAOING and GETTING CIAOED

    By Andrew Choate

    For anyone tuned into jazz, contemporary composition, outernational, improvised and experimental music over the last several decades, the AngelicA Festival in Bologna has stood as a beacon for legendary performances and landmark recordings. Its legacy is as expansive as it is enduring: from the personally foundational—Cecil Taylor’s At AngelicA 2000 Bologna , a double-CD documenting his Dance of All Seasons for piano and voice, including a bonus disc interweaving an insightful interview with performance excerpts—to the carnivalesque and theatrical—Tristan Honsinger’s This That And The Other performing Sketches of Probability , where swing and storytelling finally embody the transcendental aspect of absurdity. Then there’s the controversial—MIMEO’s The Hands of Caravaggio , a decisive and accidentally divisive live recording by the experimental electronic ensemble coordinated by Keith Rowe and featuring pianist John Tilbury; the monumentally historic—Eyvind Kang’s Athlantis, blending Renaissance texts with contemporary awe-meets-woe sonic grandeur; and the ecstatically fantastical—Ilaiyaraaja’s Music Journey, a wild ride through Carnatic rhythms paired with polyphonic counterpoint that shimmers like stained glass in an earthquake. Even for the profoundly illustrious Ilaiyaraaja, this was a career-altering moment: his first-ever live performance of his own work, opening up an entirely new realm of his practice. AngelicA is thick with a tradition of supporting contemporary developments at the forefront of musical thinking, where virtuosity and vision viscerally intersect in lived emotion.

    Most of the concerts take place in Bologna at the festival’s headquarters: an old theater on a busy street in the university district. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from where I’m staying, and I pass more than a hundred bars and restaurants along the way—everything from intimate Italian fine dining to al fresco pizzerias, casual ramen and phở joints, and multiple takeout spots specializing in Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Chinese and, what else, Bolognese tagliatelle and tortellini. Walking back after the first concert, I thought I’d never seen so many college students drinking in the street. But that was a Wednesday; I hadn’t yet seen a Friday night.

    The Teatro San Leonardo has a rich and winding history. Originally built in the 14th century and functioning as a church for centuries, it was damaged during World War II and reemerged in the 1960s as a hub for political theater. It remained a theater through several changes of ownership before becoming, in 2011, the home of the Centro di Ricerca Musicale—the headquarters of the AngelicA Festival. The stage inside is high, nearly a meter, with a few crumbling statues tucked into wall alcoves. Assigned seating and modern lighting coexist swimmingly within the lingering historic atmosphere. On nice days, drinks are served in an adjacent garden—though no beverages are allowed in the hall during performances.

    The audience tends to be unusually devoted. A Greek man told me he’s attended every festival since its inception. Another, from Florence, said that even if the same ensemble plays in his hometown, he still prefers to hear them here, because something about this space elicits their best. I’ve noticed a healthy mix in the crowd: older women attending in small, chatty friend groups; scatterings of loner students; black heavy metal t-shirt-wearing aficionados; and the occasional intrepid tourist on a pilgrimage (not just me!). It’s the kind of crowd that listens closely, and the music earns that attention.

    April 30, 2025
    Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

    Charlemagne Palestine & Rhys Chatham
    TWO forrrrr AngelicA

    In proper there-is-no-beginning-and-there-is-no-end fashion, Charlemagne Palestine initiated a light, drifting drone from some small electric organs that leaked into the atmosphere of the theatre before the concert had “officially” begun, and before I was even consciously aware of sound beyond ambience. It was as if it had always been there, and only the turning on of awareness made its presence felt. When Massimo Simonini came out to introduce the festival, Palestine turned down his sound slightly, then raised it back up—suggesting we were always already within the concert experience, the boundaries deliberately blurred between formal presentation and atmospheric presence. The first section of the duo featured his small organs prominently, generating a continual misty, spritzy drone-wash that rose like the essence of ethereal aethers. 

    Charlemagne Palestine & Rhys Chatham. Photo © Massimo Golfieri

     The visual dynamic between the performers proved immediately striking. Rhys Chatham focused on movements that made no discernible sonic impact, the opposite of watching a '90s laptopist: where electronic performers once made few gestures while producing torrents of sound, Chatham made elaborate gestures yielding little audible result. Had I not seen him on stage engaged in obscure manipulations, I might have thought this was Palestine's solo performance. After lengthy fuzz, Palestine moved to the piano (dolce contra forte) and played two clear notes, squared. Following a pause, more discrete sounds emerged—variations on the two-note sequence that collided like smoke rings in slow motion. In my mind I had thought of Palestine as a spiritually playful minimalist, but I heard him talking after the concert and he disparaged any association with minimalism. He said he wanted to assassinate the term and called it a malady, rightly identifying the term's primary purpose as commercial rather than artistic. Focused would be more accurate: his intense oscillations of overtones permeated the space.

    Chatham, however, I couldn’t figure out. His fingers were hitting the strings of his electric guitar, but what sounds were they producing? I have to assume he was contributing to the ambient hum that hovered within the music. Then came some palpable puffs on an alto flute, soon looped and muffled to the point of disappearance. The resulting soundscape resembled a thick shake that refused to stir—not because the music was too dense, but because it moved too slowly to swirl properly. Palestine’s repetitions and micro-modifications were aurally fascinating, though he seemed to want more from his collaborator. Chatham’s flute eventually blew some bubbles into the coagulating smoothie. 

    The interpersonal dynamic between them was compelling. Chatham looked at Palestine the way Cecil Taylor studied Anthony Braxton during their first duo in London in 2007 – but unlike that encounter, these two have performed together before, though not in a decade. At one moment, Palestine concluded an incredible stream of clustered overtones with a flourish and looked to Chatham for a response; nothing coming, Palestine started anew, eventually singing a clipped Tuvan phoneme ping-pong swarm. I heard a gentle ferocity in his relentless restlessness on the piano, which seems to be cleansed by the use of his voice. There’s a rhizomatic resplendence to the colors he draws out of rhythmic nuance, varying his attacks across a narrow pitch range while Chatham added atmosphere, eventually producing appreciable guitar twiddles. 

    After the concert I attempted to photograph Palestine's animal totems—the stuffed creature he had placed on his piano and the three on Chatham’s table. While I was snapping the one on the piano, Chatham was clearing his equipment. When I turned back to record these others, I found them face-down on the floor of the stage. It made me feel strangely sad to see them in this downfallen state and I regret not capturing them in this posture, but I wasn’t quick enough to adapt to the new reality’s quiet dismantling of my imagined plan: I had to recover from the emotion. I also didn’t see the gesture that caused their displacement; one hopes it was just casual and accidental. Still, there they were: toppled. It was a poignantly unresolved coda to an evening of musical ambiguity shimmering with charged fragility.

    May 4, 2025
    Teatro Comunale Pavarotti-Freni - Modena

    Rhys Chatham
    Concerto for 33 electric guitars, electric bass and drums

    My ambivalence to this concert had me questioning whether I actually like guitar music. Alas, I do. I love Hans Reichel, Hot Rats, Wendy Eisenberg, Keith Rowe and Helmut Lachenmann’s Salut für Caudwell. I just don’t think I have a taste for Rhys Chatham’s take on oversized guitar ensembles. Known for 100-guitar “orchestras,” he settled for 33 in Modena plus the electric bass of Myriam Stamoulis and the drums of Jonathan Kane, rounding out the ensemble to 35 in a nod to the 35 years of the AngelicA festival. Compared to, say, The League of Crafty Guitarists (whom I also enjoy) this music seemed to have very little compositional intent: twas all a thrumblin’ and a jiggling. The first movement was loosey-goosey ambient frogmouth foam, then came a field of glimmering strums over a pedestrian rock beat and dry-funk bass. With such a uniform soundscape, I found myself craving more prominence from Stamoulis’ bass (she was worth paying attention to throughout.) But I was probably missing the point: It’s all about the guitars, dude.

    Rhys Chatham with 33 Electric Guitarists. Photo © Massimo Golfieri

    But the guitar gestures themselves were so rudimentary, it felt like space was being filled rather than shaped – and time was simply a bystander. There was nowhere near enough counterpoint––in the land of Morricone no less––to make this feel like a composition. Baby steps toward composing contrasted with the giant leap of organizing such a spectacle. Individual guitarists weren’t featured, which is an artistic choice, but even the power of the collective was underused. The only time dynamics came into play—quieting one section and then building it back up—was stunningly effective. Where was more of that? The overall aesthetic seemed to equate scale with substance. But blowing up a bland image and slapping it on a billboard doesn’t make it more compelling. The music felt childish without being playful, sugary without nuance, like Coke. This is going to sound extreme, but I had a chilling sensation that this overproduction was a desecration of the blues, scaled up for easy commodification and comprehension.

    Movement 5, newly composed for the occasion, began with a promisingly wild swirl of oblong sound—like a doppler blur stirred by helicopter blades. But that richness soon gave way to a single, unrelenting vamp. Imagine the riff from Wire’s “Pink Flag” repeated until it becomes an antiseptic narcotic. (Ironically, Wire recorded a blisteringly intense 10-minute live version of that track in 2011 in Chatham’s adopted home of Paris.) The audience gave the performance a standing ovation, so clearly my experience was not the standard. Chatham and the ensemble were also clearly having a great time––which, honestly, gave me pleasure by proxy. If nothing else, it confirmed my belief that guitars are not inherently good or evil—just very, very numerous.

    May 7, 2025
    Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

    Naïny Diabaté & Eve Risser
    ANW BE YONBOLO «We Are Together»

    It’s rare to find music that is both careful and frolicsome, but this duo excels at exactly that. Their songs are accessibly proportioned and might be passed overdismissively as a kind of multi-culti folk-pop. Except they sound awesome—and are crafted from improvisation and infused with meaningful themes, including female empowerment, dignity and survival. Since 2018, when Naïny Diabaté and Eve Risser brought together their respective Kaladjula and Red Desert orchestras to form Kogoba Basigui, this intergenerational Malian-French collaboration has developed a music that is as meaningful as it is welcoming. Their performance radiated a buoyant spirit of camaraderie, calling to mind the alchemical heights of Barney Wilen’s “Gardenia Devil” from his 1968 album Moshi

    Naïny Diabaté. Photo © Massimo Golfieri

    Risser’s piano was prepared at both ends, with the middle left seemingly clean—allowing her to weave meticulous melodic patterns from the center and add dramatic percussive punctuation from the edges. Though often considered a modern, ultra-Western instrument, the prepared piano here evoked traditional African percussion: buzzing timbres, complex distortions and idiosyncratic tunings. Risser takes full advantage of these resonances, infusing short-form tunes with flares of colorful density. Diabaté’s voice was a warm proclamation: part jubilee, part incantation. She spun short phrases into fine embroidery, or held long notes just long enough to reveal their bodily vibration. One song asked, “Where are the women with instruments?”—an invitation for more female musicians and a call for greater recognition. Yes please. Another declared, “We are the lionesses” (Nous sommes les lionnes), a welcome moment of positive self-identification, expanded by audience call-and-response. In the persistently dark times of global politics, this music broadcasts affirmations—and, maybe more importantly, invitations to affirmation. The duo’s interplay embodied the very themes they sang: Risser joined Diabaté on vocals occasionally, doubling and reaffirming, like a hand on the shoulder saying, “I’ve got your back.” 

    Eve Risser. Photo © Massimo Golfieri

    The tone was lighthearted, but that levity floated on emotional depth and technical intricacy. On a song calling to the ancestors—“the good ones!”—Diabaté’s voice, lightly soaked in reverb, seemed to reach back through time. She modulated her phrasing in subtle play with the echo, bending it just enough to stir something ancient but undormant. Throughout, Risser bounded across the keyboard and inside the piano (sometimes striking it with a mallet), animating the music with a prance-and-pounce energy. It was this attitude—committed to being engaging without simplification—that brought the music fully to life: joyful, clear-eyed, and undiminished even when facing complex and deeply human concerns.

    * Postscript on Eve Risser—because it needs to be said somewhere. I think of her as one of the most vital voices of my generation. The breadth of her work is crucial: a formidable solo piano practice; multiple working duos and small bands with musicians from an array of backgrounds; unflinching openness to first-time collaborations; and leadership or co-leadership of four––4!––different orchestras. But it’s not just the scope—it’s the depth with which she commits to each project, whether it leans toward punk, toy instruments, free improvisation or something altogether uncategorizable.

    It should feel ordinary—this kind of attentive, enthusiastic engagement with the wildly diverse musical landscape we inhabit—but after three decades of listening and participating in music, I can say without exaggeration: her combination of commitment and breadth is anything but standard. It’s rare. And of course, none of it would matter if her piano playing weren’t so sublime: powerful and whimsical, deeply textural and corporeal, always dexterous—and above all, fun.

    All of this comes before even mentioning her dedication to creating opportunities for underrepresented people. Arts organizations and professional administrators make gestures toward equity all the time, but Risser actually does the work. Not because it’s a grant requirement, not for optics, but for the real reason why it matters: it gives all of us access to deeper music. One that emerges not from the dominant narratives of taste, but from what should be the most basic recognition: that everyone has something to offer—and that sometimes the truest sounds are the ones we help each other discover.

    I’ve seen her live in four very different settings and listened to countless recordings, and I keep coming back to this feeling: I want her to stand for what music can mean—for me, and for the people of my time. Apologies for the proselytizing––Eve and I are friends, so I hope I’m not making her blush––but sometimes praise just needs to be sung.

    May 8, 2025
    Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

    Simone Beneventi
    Nine Bells (1979, Tom Johnson) 

    Simone Beneventi. Photo © Massimo Golfieri

    The performance of this landmark piece, devoted to the ringing of bells, auspiciously took place shortly after the announcement of the new pope and the massive bell of the Basilica di San Petronio rang out over Bologna. Though only marginally familiar with Tom Johnson’s music, I was instantly mesmerized by this performance. Nine Bellsrequires the performer to move through a 3x3 grid of bells, their path dictated by a series of geometric patterns. Each of the nine movements centers on one bell, though others are always involved.

    What struck me first—more than the sound—was the choreography. The physical movement through space, the navigation of proximity and avoidance, created a new kind of listening. The performer often passes bells without striking them, leading to a beautiful tension of anticipation and deferral. As the audience sees the performer approach a bell, we expect the strike—but are often denied. This produces the illusion of a sound that never arrives, even as the reverberations of earlier notes still hang in the air. You begin to feel sounds that aren’t there as vividly as those that are. Hallucination can be good for you.

    Simone Beneventi’s choice of bells––many elements are left to the performer’s discretion––was a set of golden rectangular sheets in various sizes: they resembled oversized book covers. Depending on the lighting (also meticulously designed by Beneventi in collaboration with the superb AngelicA technical team), they swung in the air alternating between color and darkness, bending the air like the opening and closing of a book. His movements were both central and critical: deliberate footsteps punctuated by everything from moderate walking to dervish-like spinning, swift jogging to Byzantine threading. Each movement of the composition––“movement” being literal here, in true Johnsonian spirit––also introduced a new mallet, further varying the timbral and textural palette. Despite the simplicity of the setup, the sonic range was surprisingly broad, thanks to the interaction of overtones and the piece’s focused largesse.

    The final movement, focused on softness, was especially powerful. Most mallets struck near the bells’ edges, producing delicate, hovering tones. Often, Beneventi would approach a bell with unmistakable intent—only to withdraw and head in another direction. These non-strikes carried as much weight as any sound. I found myself reflecting on decision-making itself: all the near-misses, the paths not taken, the false starts—and then: thwack! There it is, the boom that was inevitable all along.

    May 9, 2025
    Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna 

    MILESDAVISQUINTETORCHESTRA!
    Sylvain Darrifourcq, drums
    Valentin Ceccaldi, cello
    Xavier Camarasa, piano, prepared piano
    Pierre Borel, alto sax
    Emilie Å krijelj, accordion
    Michael Thieke, clarinet
    Stretchin’

    I’ll admit it: this performance left me delightfully unmoored. It operates simultaneously as a scientific research project and a musical ensemble—both committed to exploring asynchronization: the art of not playing in sync with those around you. It started innocently, each musician looping small rhythmic fragments. To the ear, it felt inviting—simple, even. But soon, it revealed itself as a dense, swirling field of competing tempi, each musician improvising within tight, shifting constraints. There’s no score. No conductor. Just structure, instinct, and timing. (I suspect there are some composed cues built in, but I couldn’t tell for sure. There’s a documentary that provides the background for the project, but honestly, I’m glad I didn’t watch it beforehand.) 

    MILESDAVISQUINTETORCHESTRA!  Photo © Massimo Golfieri

    The band’s name invokes Miles Davis, which the press release dismisses as a play on on how marketing works: symbolic material meant to distract us from what really matters. Maybe so. Still, I couldn’t help but recall Davis’ Second Great Quintet—with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams—and their deep dives into temporal elasticity within an explicitly jazz context on tracks like “Nefertiti,” “Agitation” and “Stuff.” Coincidence? Influence? Just my brain chasing ghosts? Noticeably, there is no trumpet in this group. Though in one moment Thieke’s mouthpiece-free clarinet spumed moisture-tinctured breathiness, conjuring the shadow of a trumpeter clearing a spit valve.

    Trying to isolate “moments” in this performance doesn’t quite work—though I have to mention Å krijelj’s fingernails rapping on her accordion’s casing, instantly evoking the crackle of Black Cat fireworks snapping on the summer pavement of my youth. But unlike a lot of improvisation, this performance wasn’t about moments: it was about entering a sonic time-space unlike anything else. Conversely, perhaps we’re always living inside some desynchronized time-space, and this music simply magnifies it. 

    Sylvain Darrifourcq. Photo © Massimo Golfieri

    I’d like to put it more poetically, but this performance was a mindfuck. In the best possible way. Sixty minutes of astonishing untogetherness, seemingly from A Swirl Beyond. It was hard to know where or how to listen, like being inside a cracked kaleidoscope of rhythm and intent. (I did think of Milford Graves and Sunny Morgan’s Percussion Ensemble, where polyrhythms overlap and erupt with interlocking energy. But this felt more like temporal freefall, each player spiraling on their own axis. The cohesion wasn’t in shared propulsion, but in the sheer tension of divergence.)

    The collective sound tempted me like I was on the edge of a black hole, attracting me to get further and further within. Seductive yet impenetrable, no matter how deeply I plunged I couldn’t access the root. What a beautifully forbidding siren. The essence of incomprehensibility that seemed like the center of what my experience was orbiting also felt like a shoutout to the integrity of the inexplicable, as if the unknowable deserves not just attention, but reverence. The black hole beckons us all: uniquely, commonly.

    They stopped on a dime after an hour and I was happily wobbly.

    ~~

    With a third of the festival now underfoot, I feel justified in my years of ogling the program from afar. Even factoring in my ambivalence regarding Chatham, the bulk of the performances have attained supreme heights of specificity and transcendence. The one thing I didn’t grasp from afar, simply perusing the lists of events, was how much focus each show is given: only one event per night. What this sacrifices in terms of a carnivalesque atmosphere of abundance within a short time-span, it makes up for in the space it allows each performance to breathe and retain a level of autonomy from the fray that intrudes on all our lives. Here’s to one third of thirty-five: eleven and two thirds, a number that refuses to resolve neatly into wholeness, a resistance to integer form that mirrors how truth often eludes complete capture – there is always a remainder, something that exceeds our understandings, our categories, our definitions.

    Thursday, May 15, 2025

    Tyshawn Sorey Trio - The Susceptible Now (Pi Recordings, 2024)

    By João Esteves da Silva

    In order to fully appreciate the significance of composer-drummer Tyshawn Sorey’s recent output with his jazz piano trio, one should consider it within the context of his overall, wide-ranging body of work. Namely, I believe it should be seen as yet another step in his thoroughgoing dismantling of the jazz/classical music dichotomy, following up on the efforts of the great AACM masters - creative musicians often barred from the status of serious composers by the assumption of that very dichotomy, embodying prejudices of all sorts, including racial ones. Sorey has conducted such an endeavour on several levels, among which his explorations of the classic piano trio format have been particularly noteworthy. As I take it, they constitute a twofold attack on the aforementioned dichotomy. (Crucially, and unlike crossover projects, Sorey’s goal is not to fuse two worlds that are assumed to be fundamentally different. It is, rather, to expose the boundaries often posited between them as idle or arbitrary.)

    Throughout the past decade, Sorey lead a groundbreaking trio with pianist Cory Smythe, a musician equally at home in classical and creative contexts, and bassist Chris Tordini, releasing a couple of albums that made us radically rethink the place of the piano trio in the whole music spectrum. Sure, such instrumental configuration comes from the jazz tradition, but the music Sorey composed for it drew heavily upon the classical one (and beyond). So, in a way, he turned a jazz trio into a chamber group performing music falling, broadly, under the contemporary classical category. This was particularly evident in their first outing, Alloy (2014), which featured thoroughly notated material, such as the post-Feldmanesque piece “A Love Song”. Its sophomore, the seemingly freer and timbrally more varied Verisimilitude (2017) strengthened Sorey’s case further, calling the related improvisation/composition dichotomy even more clearly into question: there, the boundary between notation (or predetermined composition) and improvisation (or spontaneous composition) becomes virtually indiscernible, for the spontaneously composed passages display as much formal cogency and craft as the predetermined ones.

    For the present decade, Sorey assembled a new trio, with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer. The main focus is now on the jazz idiom, but Sorey’s engagement with the classical tradition is still felt, even if in the subtlest of ways. Take, for instance, the spellbinding slow motion version of “Angel Eyes” featured in their previous album, Continuing (2023): surely, such extreme choices of tempo, with the aim of yielding revelatory results, are a more common practice within classical music performance. (In a way, Sorey’s approach stands to certain standards somewhat as Celibidache’s stands to Bruckner symphonies. But: somehow, the music never drags.)

    Released a year later, the trio’s latest album, The Susceptible Now, this time with Harish Raghavan on bass, follows up on Continuing ’s distinctive sprawling approach. Some of its tracks are now even longer (up to over 26 minutes) and, while the tempi are not always as slow, the general mood is still an unhurried, immersive one. Diehl is as key to this group as Smythe was to the former, displaying both tremendous swing and something of a classical refinement - his gorgeous introduction to “A Chair in the Sky” (from Joni Mitchell’s Mingus) being a case in point. As solid a jazz bassist as any these days, Raghavan attends to Sorey’s conception to the nth degree, grooving effortlessly throughout extended periods. And Sorey’s drumming is itself a marvel, taking on genuine orchestration and conducting functions, constantly propelling the music forward, no matter the given tempo or dynamics, and with as deep a pocket as one can think of. Overall, the trio operates at a remarkable level of finesse, making this (nearly 80-minute long) album a delight to listen to from start to finish.

    Anyway, the crux of the matter, to me, lies in Sorey’s distinctive handling of form, which struck me as partly indepted to a classical compositional sense. Namely, he arranges the selected tunes (drawn from jazz and other kinds of groove-oriented music, such as R&B) into a four-movement suite of monumental proportions, with each track smoothly transitioning into the next, without breaks. And, for instance, when taken in the context of the album as a whole, the more fast-paced, celebratory closer (Brad Mehldau’s “Bealtine”, from House on the Hill) acquires something of a symphonic finale feel.

    In sum, while his chamber trio brought classical content to what had originally been a jazz configuration, his jazz trio gives a broadly classical form to groove-oriented content, the two trios thus amounting to two (complementary) sides of a single, unified artistic practice.

    Wednesday, May 14, 2025

    Zoe Pia & Mats Gustafsson - Rite (Parco Della Musica, 2025)

    By Sammy Stein

    Zoe Pia is a clarinettist and composer from Sardinia. She graduated from the Music Conservatory of Cagliari, where she specialised in clarinet. Later, she studied at the Conservatory of Rovigo in classical contemporary music, live electronics, and jazz.

    Pia has played with Franco Donatoni’s Hot, together with Marco Tamburini, Mauro Negri, Nico Gori, and Fabio Petretti. She gained experience at the Accademia del Teatro Alla Scala in Milan, international seminars, and has been influenced by Spanish culture and the diverse music she has listened to and played. She has performed with ensembles, as a soloist, and as part of several musical projects. Sardinian music is close to Pia’s heart, and she explores the mixture of styles and soundscapes her homeland provides. The Shardana project, which Pia heads, is part of this exploration of the heritage and culture of Sardinia.

    As well as projects, Pia has performed and collaborated with New Art Symphonic, Filarmonica Italiana, Filarmonia Veneta, Sinfonica di Pescara, Alvin Curran, Steven Bernstein, Bruno Biriaco, Reuben Rogers, Paolo Fresu, Mauro Ottolini, Nico Gori, Marco Tamburini, Bebo Ferra, Stefano Senni and Massimo Morganti to name a few. The list of venues Pia has played at is extensive. On Rite, she plays launeddas (a traditional three-piped clarinet-like instrument), Bb clarinet, Sardinian percussion, light synth, and lumanoise.

    Mats Gustafsson is a Swedish saxophone player, specialising in the explorative side of free jazz and a stalwart of the improvised music scene. He has played with many of jazz’s luminaries, including Joe McPhee, Peter Brotzmann, Pat Thomas, Evan Parker, Misha Mellenberg, Hamid Drake, Ken Vandermark, and many more. Projects and groups he has been involved with include Gush, and Fire! He collaborates with dancers, artists, and orchestras and has written pieces for full orchestra and ensembles and curated festivals, He remains a self-diagnosed discaholic, enraptured by rare and hard-to-find recordings. On Rite, Gustafsson plays flute, slide flute, baritone sax, Ab clarinet, flutophone, and harmonica.

    Pia and Gustafsson met thanks to a collaboration with Fire! Orchestra and Fire! In 2022, they decided to explore the possibilities offered as a duo, and in May 2023, they toured Italy and recorded in the studio, at concerts, and festivals. Initially, it is difficult to conceive how the combination of free blowing, improvising saxophone, and elements of Sardinian folk music, Sami Joik (Sami singing music), and electronic music is going to sound, but Rite does something sublime thanks to the understanding between the musicians. They manage to maintain the purity of their sound yet incorporate elements from each other’s soundscape too. They listen, engage, imbibe from each other, and give their interpretation in ways that create another direction, forging a different pathway into improvisation.

    Rite comprises three tracks. Two are just shy of ten minutes long, and the final track lasts almost twenty-two minutes. ‘I shut My Eyes Like A Rock’ is a heady, explorative piece with different effects and rhythms. At times, there is a sense of the two musicians feeling their way, finding connection, and at others, there is a glorious carefree exchange of patterns and ideas as first Zia, then Gustafsson set an idea in motion, and the other responds. Pia’s playing of the clarinet has, at times, beautifully worked phrasing, while Gustafsson interjects with contrasting sounds. The rock upon which this track hinges is the freely played clarinet, against which Gustafsson huffs and blows his improvising mind. ‘A Thousand Bird Calls’ is beautiful in places, guttural, and jerky in others, with strong folk lines, soft against third, fast against slow melodic phrasing – it works because of the timing of the players. No phrase is too long, no interval too short, but the blend and merging of the different rhythmic patterns and stylistic weaving that happens is pure intuition. ‘Minima.Memory.Mirage.’ is a long, deep dive into improvisation and explorative soundscapes. Both players seek out the furthest range of their instruments, with peaceful interludes fractured by fierce disharmonious episodes and blasts of electronics. Around the ten-minute mark, there begins an irksome electronic noise, which is effective because when it stops, it feels like utter silence and relief as the delicate melodies that were present behind it are suddenly left uncovered and can be heard clearly, their sweetness contrasting with the grating, growly noise of before.

    Rite presents improvised music in new forms, structures, and directions. Two different paths unite to forge a new way through the noise that surrounds improvised music at times. Moving in soundscapes never explored before, the sound combines the richness of traditional culture and free playing into new creative languages of experimental music. The depth and intensity of some of the guttural phrasing contrasts with the delicacy of the flute and solo phrases, creating a sense of freedoms powered against complete containment. Gustafsson is continuing to stretch music and what it means; he combines it with influences from many sources, while Pia brings a freshness and sublime tonality at times, in contrast with the atonal, free driving of Gustafsson.

    This is a sonic encounter. An experience the two musicians shared that is now recorded, and while for both it might feel a different direction, it is one they may continue to develop and explore. So many elements are here, in just under fifty minutes of music. From deep, sensuous, flowing lines, pattering, light, crazy phrases, to forceful blasts of sound and occasional annoying interjections that seem like they have no place – until they reach a point of silence, where the purpose is revealed – they peel away to leave the melodies playing and now they are heard even clearer in the absence of the electronica.

    The lines of folk, classical, free improvisation, and exploratory music are blurred, but the elements are all here, and the intertwined, contrasting, parallel sounds create a celebratory feeling – that there is more to music than simply playing the notes – it is about expressing the culture and persona of the players. In this, Rite succeeds.

    Tuesday, May 13, 2025

    Razor Sharp & Bone Deep


    The trombone, simple to say, has played a crucial role in jazz history, from supporting instrument to prominent leading role and solo voice. Already in early jazz, the instrument's unique slides, growls and scoops added a raw, expressive quality to the music. Later, it showed off its more lyrical and smooth side, and in Bebop, it was as agile and expressive as any of the other horns. Of course, it can also be funky, alliterative and, best of all, abstract. In avant garde and improvised jazz, resourceful trombonists have hooked the music in the curves of the horn, pulling in all sort of different direction.

    Cox, Ajtai, Gyárfás - URGENT (PMG Jazz, 2025) 

    One example where you can hear just about every expressive tone that the trombone can make is on Hungary based, American trombonist Christopher Cox's trio recording URGENT out on the North Macedonian PMG Jazz label. Cox, as gleaned from his website, has a resume that includes working with "Marco Eneidi, Glenn Spearman, Jason Robinson, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, political hip-hop/jazz group Junkyard Empire, and famed poet Amiri Baraka." This trio is filled out by drummer Attila Gyárfás and bassist Péter Ajtai. Likely new names to many of our readers and both with growing discographies. URGENT is the second recording in this formation. 
     
    The trio's approach is quite diverse. There are moments of unbridled free jazz but that is more the exception, as the music does proceed with intensity, but of a more reflective and textured kind. The recording begins with 'Instructions,' and right away the interaction of the players and their sensitivity to each other is apparent. These interactions add up, cascading to a first, reserved peak. Then, time stretches out. Gyárfás's percussion becomes sparse, interjecting only when the time seems right (and it does seem to pick them well), while Ajtai shadows Cox and lays down some long droning bass tones. The notes morph into sliding, atonal sounds and the drums and trombone add agitated energy to the mix. Quite an introduction! 
     
    The follow up tracks are just as gripping. For example, the next one, 'Hunting for the Winners,' takes a different tact: Cox plays a dark-hued melody over a thrumming bass line, as rhythmic figures add motion. They gain even more momentum as Cox plays quicker and quicker figures, the melody developing into a throbbing, and dangerous seeming, thing. The expressiveness of each track captures the listener, whether it is notes that do not even form, like the intro to 'Dragonflies from a Dead Sky' or the intense give-and-take in 'And there Came what Always Was,' the trio seems to revel in the process of making something together, and the end product is captivating. 



    Matthias Müller Andreas Willers - self titled (Trouble In The East, 2025)


    Both trombonist Matthias Müller and guitarist Andreas Willers are established musicians in the Berlin experimental music scene. Müller's list of collaborators is long and varied sporting an international roster of who's who. Willers too, who counts Paul Bley, John Abercombie, as well as Enrico Rava and E.L. Petrowski among his connections. So, while this review is ostensibly glued together through the trombone, with all of its possible slides and honks, this is just as much a guitar album, I mean what instrument can plink and plonk and squeek and skronk like an electric guitar? So, what is certain is that they two bring together their wide breath of experience and tonal discoveries to bear on this excellent duo recording out on the Berlin based Trouble In The East records.
     
    From the opening moments of 'geel dropen,' the listener is confronted with an otherworldly soundscape. There is a structure, a syntax, but in an alien tongue. As the track progresses, the swaths of sound become more coherent and instead of a series of atomic reactions, there is a blending partial chord from Willers' guitar and continuous tones from Müller. The following, 'as sik dat höört,' builds on a different set of tones. The aliens are arguing now. Effects add a metallic tinge to the guitar and the trombone is agitated, tightly filling the space with a demanding melody. The argument settles later, and they seem to have agreed on a common enemy now, as the guitar begins to seethe and the trombone growls. By the time we reach the end of the album, the duo has seemed to exploit every valves and fret available to their illogical ends, but that they end leaving a musically fantastic impression is quite logical.
     


    Conny Bauer - Das Bassposaunen (Jazzwerstatt, 2023)


    Put the word 'bass' in front of an instrument and color me intrigued. The bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet (I associate Anthony Braxton with this one!), bass saxophone, and let's add Conny Bauer to this list for bass trombone. Bauer, a master of the instrument from his formative years in East Germany with groups like Synopsis (later Zentralquartett) and Fez to current day collaborations with say William Parker and Hamid Drake, is always a pleasure to hear. On this solo recording from 2023, Bauer performs three songs with names referencing locations in Berlin. 
     
    First, 'Dreieck Funkturn,' which clocks in at 29-minutes, is a trip through the trombonist's oeuvre . Using multi-tracking, Bauer, at first, explores a stately harmonized melody embellished through improvised excursions. As the track continues, the mood darkens and elements of electronics become audible. Ringing, echoing and droning tones surround his swarthy timbre, and as the track continues it decomposes into more experimental realms. A follow-up dip in the 'Rummelsburger Bucht' drips with melody. Bauer multi-tracks counter melodies accented with a valve-made percussion, and then half-way through the 14-minute track, he contrasts the preceding lightheartedness with an expansive solo excursion that eventually leads back to a folksy feel-good multi-bone ending. Bauer eventually leaves us in 'Tempelhofer Feld,' which uses the multi-tracking to build a proper regal brass choir. 
     
    Add a Helge Leiberg sketch as a cover and you've got a consummate piece of art in your hands (and ears).