Since the early days of this blog, more than 11 years ago, we have reviewed only three trombone and drums duo albums. Indeed, the number of albums are rare with this line-up. And now we have this great duet between two masters of their instrument, Gerry Hemingway on drums and Samuel Blaser on trombone. This is not the first duo recording with a percussionist for Blaser, who released "Vol à Voile" with his compatriot Pierre Favre in 2010.
The performance was recorded live three years ago, in the Kerkje van Oostum, in Groningen in the Netherlands, one venue of the bicycle tour summer jazz festival. The little church originally dates from the 13th Century.
The opening track is surprisingly calm, as if both musicians are measuring the space in which they perform, and barely a whisper leaves their instruments, hesitating and sensitive to explore the environs, a kind of welcoming minimal disruption of what already is. Hemingway starts the second track with more gusto, creating a rhythmic foundation for more voiced and lyrical playing. Yet interestingly, they open things up again on the third track. A bluesy solo by Blaser expands with timbral and multiphonic explorations. Hemingway joins with first implicit, then clearer rhythmic patterns, turning the sad beginning into a more playful and almost funky interaction with the horn.
They keep changing the approach, changing the expectations between lyrical interplay and sonic explorations, between raw free improv and jazzy soloing, including even atmospheric and solemn singing in a dialogue with vulnerable trombone sounds. They change between sad and joyful moods, between calm moments and they end with a great and intense powerful finale.
It is a real joy to hear these two musicians interact. The music is fresh, rich and a little like a crackling fire, vivid and moving, yet at the same time soothing and inviting to dream.
In Max Frisch’s “Homo faber”, a novel about an engineer who is trapped in his technological view of the world, the protagonist and his daughter Sabeth play a game while watching the Aegean Sea. They try to find as many comparisons for natural phenomena as possible. For Walter Faber, whose vocabulary seems to be restricted to the world of logical reasoning, it is hard to keep track with Sabeth, whose comparisons also include mythology, the arts and nature.
Playing their game while listening to Superimpose’s Edinburgh would have been a real challenge for them. Faber might have compared the music of Matthias Müller (tb) and Christian Marien (perc) with the creaking of the floorboards in old buildings, with wind hammering against huge metal boards, with flags fluttering in a tornado or with the sounds of the machines in a huge shipyard, while Sabeth might have heard a lonely horn at midnight on a Swiss alp accompanied by an orchestra of owls, the roar of a dinosaur during mating season or the sound of a winter storm blowing over a North Sea island.
In general Müller and Marien try to find a unique sound for what they do, trombone and percussion merge into one sound, maybe into the voice of a huge, melancholic animal. Since 2006 the two musicians, who are both part of Berlin’s highly creative Echtzeit scene, have been rehearsing and touring intensively and they have been trying to develop their own musical grammar and syntax. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Albert Mangelsdorff and Paul Rutherford, Müller – one of the most interesting European trombonists of his generation (and possibly the most under-estimated one) – has always been pushing the limits of his instrument and he has also been exploring the possibilities its sound, for example in his Going Underground project with Chris Heenan and Nils Ostendorf with which they play in caves in order to “to create a space for a fuller aesthetic involvement with the audience by re-thinking notions of musical space and place using the caves as both a site of artistic experiencae and as an aesthetic source from which it springs”. He tries to establish something like that with Superimpose too, and in Christian Marien he has an ideal partner, who uses his “drum kit” not to create any kind of pulse but to invent unusual and unheard sounds (see the video below). The result is music which is extraordinarily clear, intrepid, focused and deep, because the musicians understand each other intuitively. Those who like sound excursions á la John Butcher should definitely give this album a try.
Edinburgh was recorded live at Reid Concert Hall in Edinburgh on March 2013, the graphic design is by bassist Clayton Thomas.
It is available on limited vinyl and as a download. You can listen to “Part 1” here:
http://wideearrecords.bandcamp.com/album/edinburgh
You can also watch excerpts from a live performance here:
Last year Emanem released new material by the late trombonist Paul Rutherford, an artist who had been instrumental in creating and shaping the European free improv scene. The album consists of four quite distinct performances. It starts with "Elesol", three tracks for solo trombone and electronics, a kind of experiment and not really successful in my opinion. This is followed by two pieces for horn quartet, with George Lewis on trombone, Martin Mayes on French horn, and Melvyn Poore on tuba. The four men make their improvisations vary between solemn lyricism and wild intensity, with the former being the dominant one.
The second CD starts with three lengthy pieces for solo trombone, and to me these are the highlight of the album, showing the trombonist's richness of voice and experimental power. The last three pieces are a trio performance with Paul Rogers on double bass and Nigel Morris on drums. An interesting album for fans of Rutherford. The non-electronic solo performance and the brass quartet alone would have made a great record. Now, it sounds more like a collection, rather than a unified listening experience.
The Astronomical Unit - Relativity (Jazzwerkstatt, 2010) ****
Without a doubt a great fan of Rutherford, German trombonist Matthias Müller, in a cohesive trio format with Clayton Thomas on bass and Christian Marien on drums, takes the learnings of the great Brit into outer space. In four fully improvised pieces, the trio leads us on our interstellar journey, and it is quite an interesting one: it is one in which surprise and wonder reign. The notes are sparse and intense, the interaction telepathic and warm, moving quite well together, forward all the time.The sounds they create are minute, precise, full of new textures and shades of colors, unhurried, calm yet resolute. It does not have the raw energy of the duo albums of Müller and Marien, but the end result is even stronger. You will need open ears for this one, but you will not be disappointed. A truly powerful album.
Gail Brand & Mark Sanders - Instinct & The Body (Regardless, 2009) ***½
Equally adventurous, although much more direct and immediate in its expressivity is this CD by Gail Brand on trombone and Mark Sanders on drums. Both Brand and Sanders are well-known artists of the British free improv scene. Together they create this very intense, raw, violent, sensitive and subtle interplay of bouncing notes and crashing percussion, shifting between velvety and abrasive sounds. As the liner notes say : "ten years or more of laughing, crying, shouting, listening, uprooting, settling, coming and going, and improvising it's all in the music". And that's an adequate description.
The trombone is a tough instrument to put in a leading role, and the small ensembles that feature a trombone are hence limited, but thanks to the relentless creativity of modern music, anything is possible, in any combination, with any kind of intent. Here is a list of interesting new albums in random order.
Daniel Blacksberg Trio - Bit Heads (NoBusiness, 2009)
This adventurous new Lithuanian label presents us with what I think is the debut album of trombonist Daniel Blacksberg as a leader, accompanied by Jon Barrios on bass and Mike Szekely on drums. His approach is cautious, free and precise, in the sense that he does go beyond the beaten path, offering new possibilities for the instrument but without going into the wilder areas that George Lewis is known for. The end result is highly listenable avant jazz, with slow and bluesy inflections, using the instrument's inherent capabilities for sadness. Promising!
Taylor himself plays tenor trombone, and a wide variety of regular or custom-made trombones. Franz Hackl plas trumpets, Adam Holzman surdo, bass drum, piano; Scott Robinson a wild variety of reeds, such as contrabass clarinet, tenor rothopone and many more, and Warren Smith has this gigantic list of rhythm instruments to have fun with : giant Chinese barrel drum, bass marimba, and many more. From the list and the label, you already get the gist that this music is to be played in the lower registers, full of klezmer scales in the best Radical Jewish Series tradition, and indeed, you are right. The album is inspired by "the music of the legendary Cantor Pierre Pinchik, ... evoking the ecstasy of cantorial fervor".
If the music did not open such interesting new musical visions at moments, I would not even mention it. Taylor creates great, reverent and intense soundscapes at times, with the solemnity and Weltschmerz you may expect, although often too pompous and heavy-footed. He throws in every style he has ever played in, from the New York Philharmonic over Blood, Sweat & Tears to the Muppetts, and luckily some creative modern music moments. Great instrumental skills do not necessarily make great composers.
Superimpose - Talk Talk (Leo Records, 2009)
This is German trombonist Matthias Müller's seventh release, and his second with Christian Marien on drums. Together they bring you deep into free improv territory, full of short and very intense interactions, exploring sounds, timbres, shades and colors, perspectives and musical depth, bouncing of notes and rhythms, extracted from context, abstracted from meaning. No doubt the least accessible album on this list, but not necessarily the less rewarding. Müller squeezes more sounds out of his trombone than most trombonists even conceive is possible, but to his credit he uses this skill not as an objective but as a means to create music. New music, taking risks, and in Marien he clearly found a great sparring partner.
French trombonist Yves Robert is without a doubt one of the masters of the instrument, confident, rich, and incredibly versatile. His album "On Touch" on ECM is easy to recommend. Here he teams up with Noah Rosen on piano and Didier Levallet on bass, for a very intense musical dialogue and confrontation, recorded at the wonderful Château Vilain XIIII (sic!) in Belgium. The three musicians explore, respond, push forward, change courses, open new vistas, and often all within one piece, changing from powerful intensity to slow and prudent testing of new common grounds. Rosen's piano sets the tone, the rhythm and the music's overall fluidity, adding complexities to abstractions, and it is without a doubt the most lyrical album of the list, yet also one of the richest, most mature and most playful. A real trio achievement.
