Kris Tiner & Tatsuya Nakatani - The Magic Room (Epigraph Records, 2023)

By Stef Gijssels

In 2012 trumpeter Kris Tiner and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani released "Ritual Inscription", with Jeremy Drake on guitar. That's a long time ago. We find Tiner and Nakatani back on this excellent album "The Magic Room", literally the 'vacant top floor of a historic Woolworth's building in downtown Bakersfield', and more figuratively, the space where this magical duet is taking place. Tiner is a brilliant trumpet player, known for his collaborations with Jeff Kaiser and Vinny Golia, but also with his Empty Cage Quartet and the Tin/Bag duo. Like Tiner, Tatsuya Nakatani can also be described as a creative master of his instrument, someone who not only refined the art of percussion to a different level, but who also created his own instruments to generate the sounds he likes to hear. 

Both artists use the size of the room to get the full resonance and space their music requires. Nakatani uses an astonishing array of small percussion next to his drum kit to create a relentless and intense foundation and even lyrical support and guidance for Tiner's melancholy tones. The album is one of intense calm and precision, using the power of their instruments and musical vision focused on the perfection of the delivery, the clarity of the sound, the emotional depth, the quality of the listening. When you hear the beauty of their intimate co-creation, it's the result of the long experience of both musicians to perform in duo settings over the past years, as if their musical voice can only come properly to the fore when starting from a very direct human interaction. 

Tiner's tone is unusually warm, welcoming and deeply felt. Remarkably, also Nakatani's percussion skills allows for heart-piercing moments of emotional distress, by using his kobo-bow, a bow specifically designed by him to give a different level of power than when using a bow produced for strings. The great third performer on this album is the space of the room, and both musicians use it not only for purposes of resonance, but also as its presence of silence, the space between the sounds, the emptyness that provides depth and perspective. 

Last year, they also released another duo album, called "Dagny", in Japan, but I could not get a copy to compare it, but you can listen to it on Youtube. The sound on this one is of a totally different nature. 

This one is absolutely excellent. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Anteloper - Kudu (International Anthem, 2018) ***½

By Stef Gijssels

Chicagoan trumpeter Jaimie Branch's "Fly Or Die" figured on many people's albums-of-the-year list in 2017, including mine. She did not appear totally out of nowhere, but the end result, the great music, and the quality of the album still came as a surprise. She continues to be in the spotlight, and deservedly so, albeit in a totally different context: in a duo setting with drummer Jason Nazary.

The duo performance was recorded live at the Carefree Studios in Brooklyn a year ago. This is not your traditional trumpet-percussion duo, as Branch plays keyboard and electronics too and Nazary adds electronics to the fun. The end result sounds like 'techno free jazz' if that word exists, with pumping rhythms, mad drumming, underpinned by looped phrases over which Branch's trumpet soars full of joy and pleasure, as on "Oryx", the opening track, or nervous as on "Fossil Record", or dark and ominous as on "Ohoneotree". Even if the musicianship is good, the focus of the improvisers is on the overall sound they generate, and it must be said that it works, it works well.

It's not at the same high level as "Fly Or Die", nor does it have the same ambition, but fans of electronic explorations in jazz will not be disappointed.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

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Sirius - Acoustic Main Suite Plus the Inner One (Clean Feed, 2017) ****½

By Stef

Here is one more album for which to applaud the Clean Feed label. I think Pedro Costa is one of the best scouts of good music around, and at the same time willing to give unheard voices a chance. 

The band is called Sirius, but it's actually just two guys, Yaw Tembe on trumpet and Mister Trinité (Franciso Trindade) on percussion. 

Yaw Tembe is a 28-year old from Swaziland, but living in Portugal, and amonst others member of the IKB Ensemble, one of minimalist improviser Ernesto Rodrigues' bands, or the Variable Geometry Orchestra. or even Zarabatana, all bands reviewed earlier on this blog. He is also a sculptor, video artist, and does projects with theater.

Mister Trinité is 70 years old, who lived in France for many years and returned to Portugal with a good deal of new insights to share with other musicians in Portugal.

Their duo album is exceptional. It brings sparse sounds, with lots of reverb and resonance for the trumpet, high-pitched and volatile, supported by the percussion that does not provide rhythm as much as accents. Rob Mazurek comes to mind at times, but also Bill Dixon, both in their more limited line-ups. There is no sense of urgency. Just a calm decisiveness to enjoy the beauty of sounds. It is the sound of dawn. The song to welcome the day. An ode to beauty and life. The sound of unencumbered freedom. Pure being. Pure postivism. An almost wise innocence. A conscious striving for simple and profound aesthetics. A spontaneous outburst of inner depth. That's how it sounds.

The last track is a 10-minute solo trumpet piece that even lifts the album a notch higher. It expresses a kind of longing, of deep melancholy.

We have quite a list of "trumpet drums duets" in our reviews, but few are as light, open-textured, joyful, melancholy and spiritual as this one.

And all that is not bad for a first album as a leader (for both men, actually).

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Axel Dörner and Mark Sanders – Stonecipher (Fataka, 2013) ***½

By Dan Sorrells

Trying to unpack Stonecipher feels as arcane as scrutinizing the lines in marble, or reading the fine constellation of flecks in a slab of granite. It’s an album that makes its transcendence and beauty obvious enough, but without revealing anything of why this should be so; faced with only the sounds, we have incomplete information about how it came to be, and therefore, like some mysteriously-veined marble obelisk, must accept it for what it is, towering before us.

We know that Stonecipher is the duo of Axel Dörner and Mark Sanders, working with trumpet, electronics, and percussion. Dörner has by now completely obscured his methodology, and it’s probably no longer accurate to call him a trumpet player. His concern over the years has steadily narrowed to the very being of sound itself, while his tools for exploring this have at the same time expanded. He deftly weds trumpet technique with live electronics, leaving the listener feeling sure of neither, aware only that they’ve entered a realm where causality and sound no longer have the comfortable relationship they’re used to.

An impressive variety of “distances” are conjured in Stonecipher, as though everything is arranged toward fostering the perception of certain depths of field. The long “Stonecipher I” is very unsettling, a shifting tangle of noise that wields its power by being unpredictable, like driving a dark wooded road, headlights barely cutting through the fog. In many respects, it more calls to mind Francisco López’s processed field recordings than the real-time improvising of two musicians. Sanders blends in the best way he can: with radiating cymbals and rolls of toms, blunting attacks and stretching out sounds to create an expanse as far-flung as Dörner’s.

“Stonecipher II” has some more obvious moments of trumpet playing, but there’s still so much electronic manipulation that it’s hard to even imagine at what points the mouthpiece might be touched to Dörner’s lips. In a way, one of the underlying truths to this album, and to a lot of improvisatory practices these days, is that it really doesn’t matter. Like reading the grains of a stone, isolating or identifying each speck of sand and sediment detracts from the bigger reality: that this thing before you, this work, is something far greater and so, so far removed from the processes and materials that created it. As John Dewey notes in Art as Experience, the art isn’t the object or the method, it’s what the result of those things “does with and in experience.” That’s fundamentally where Stonecipher operates: outside of players and instruments and fact sheets and back stories. Just the work, the art, suspending itself in the listener’s ken as something big and noteworthy and peculiar.

In short: music worth paying attention to.


Can be purchased from instantjazz.com.

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Dave Douglas & Sō Percussion - Bad Mango (Greenleaf, 2011) ****

By Stef

Of all of today's musicians, Dave Douglas is one of the best promoters of his music, with up-to-date website, special offers, client databases, subscriber services and regular mailings. One of his brainchilds was the "digital only" releases of his Greenleaf Portable Series, destined of iTunes and other mobile devices. Quickly recorded albums in the traditional spirit of jazz, easy to consume maybe ... but the concept got traction and is now released in hard copy too ... the upside down world.

Anyway, the Greenleaf Portable Series has three albums, "Rare Metals" with an all-brass band, "Orange Afternoon", a more mainstream album also featuring Ravi Coltrane and Vijay Iyer, but the real treat in my ears is "Bad Mango", with Douglas on trumpet in great interaction with "Sō Percussion",consisting of the four master percussionists Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting and Eric Beach. The result is great. Very spontaneous, rhythmic (to be expected from a percussion quartet), yet also very melodious (to be expected from Douglas), ranging from melancholgy blues ("One Shot") to crazy adventures ("Time Leveler"), but the immediacy the fun and the explorative nature of the music make this so much more "jazz" than the other two, more polished albums. Great playing, real jazz!

 Listen and download from Greenleaf.

© stef

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